Books to read traveling through the former USSR
Discover the best books to read while traveling through the former USSR. Explore captivating stories, histories, and memoirs that bring the Soviet era to life on your journey.

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Snow Wolf
by Glenn Meade
It is 1953. Joseph Stalin is teetering on the edge of insanity, and is about to plunge the world into nuclear chaos. Only one man and one woman can penetrate the Iron Curtain and stop this madman before it's too late. But someone inside the Kremlin knows they exist. And as the KGB's deadliest manhunter pursues these two CIA-hired assassins, another duel unfolds. Martin's Press.

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The Tristan Betrayal
by Robert Ludlum
In the bestselling tradition of "The Scarlatti Inheritance" and "The Rheineman Exchange," comes a compelling thriller in which one man's actions can change the course of history.

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From Russia with Love
by Ian Fleming
Name: Bond, James. Height: 183 cm; weight: 76 kg; slim build; eyes: blue; hair: black; scar down right cheek and on left shoulder; all-around athlete; expert pistol shot, boxer, knife-thrower; does not use disguises; languages: French and German; smokes heavily (Nb: special cigarettes with three gold bands); vices: drink, but not to excess, and women. Every major foreign government organization has a file on British secret agent James Bond. Now, Russia's lethal Smersh organization has targeted him for elimination. Smersh has the perfect bait in the irresistible Tatiana Romanova, who lures 007 to Istanbul promising the top-secret Spektor cipher machine. But when Bond walks willingly into the trap, a game of cross and double-cross ensues, with Bond both the stakes and the prize...


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The Cardinal of the Kremlin
by Tom Clancy
As the Star Wars race between the Soviet Union and United States continues to escalate, Colonel Mikkail Filtov, America's agent in the Kremlin, is about to be betrayed, and only Jack Ryan can save Filtov--and world peace. Reissue.

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Archangel
by Robert Harris
Fluke Kelso was once a scholar of promise, but like so many in the highly competitive world of academia, he's never delivered. But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story to tell. No one but the desperate Kelso would believe the tale, for what Rapava describes is a sort of Holy Grail among researchers: an actual diary left by Joseph Stalin himself. Such an artifact, if it's genuine -- and if Kelso can survive the fascist Vladimir Mamantov, who wants it for his own agenda -- would be the coup of a lifetime for the discredited researcher. Before Kelso can learn the location of the diary, Rapava disappears, and Kelso's search for the former bodyguard leads him to the man's daughter, a whore selling herself in the new Moscow of drugs, corruption, and the Russian mafia. With an unscrupulous American journalist hot on their heels, a major of the new KGB close behind, and the shadowy Mamantov following them all, the two follow a trail that leads from Moscow's seedy underbelly to the industrial city of Archangel, where Russia once built her fleets of submarines, to a remote camp on the edge of the Siberian nothingness, and finally to a shocking conclusion that bites like the wind blowing off the tundra. What Kelso sees as the coup of his career might turn out to be the catalyst for an actual coup in Russia. There is a legacy behind the diary, a legacy of evil and death, and Fluke Kelso is unwittingly about to unleash it on the world.

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Red Square
by Martin Cruz Smith
"Sharply, evocatively written and elaborately plotted...It should find as many friends as did GORKY PARK." THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Back from exile, Arkady Reko returns to find that his country, his Moscow, even his job, are nearly dead. Not so his enemies. Hounded by the Russian mafia, chased by ruthless minions of the newly rich and powerful, and tempted by his great love, Arkady can only hope for escape. Fate, however, has other ideas.... A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A LITERARY GUILD MAIN SELECTION

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The Russia House
by John Le Carré
John le Carre 's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him unprecedented worldwide acclaim. At a small British trade fair in Moscow, a message of global importance is made up of three very fragile human links: a Soviet physicist (code name Bluebird) burdened with a secret knowledge; a beautiful young Russian woman to whom the papers are entrusted; and Barley Blair, a bewildered English publisher pressed into service by British Intelligence to ferret out the source of the document. A magnificent story of love, betrayal, and courage, The Russia House catches history in the act.
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The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.

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The Harvest of Sorrow
by Robert Conquest
Chronicles the events of 1929 to 1933 in the Ukraine when Stalin's Soviet Communist Party killed or deported millions of peasants; abolished privately held land and forced the remaining peasantry into "collective" farms; and inflicted impossible grain quotas on the peasants that resulted in mass starvation.

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The Great Terror
by Robert Conquest
The definitive work on Stalin's purges, The Great Terror was universally hailed when it first appeared in 1968. In the last few years, with the advent of glastnost, an avalanche of new material has been made available. Now Conquest has mined this wealth of new information to write a substantially new edition of his classic work.
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