Russian History thru Nonfiction and fiction and films
Explore Russian history through a curated list of must-read nonfiction books, captivating fiction novels, and compelling films. Dive into the past with these essential works on Tsars, revolutions, and Soviet eras.
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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 author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Provides accounts of on everything form the three great 'Moscow Trials' to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of thew first edition, it is remarkable how many of the most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence." --
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Kolyma Tales
by Varlam Shalamov
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Moscow-Stalingrad, 1941-1942
by Alexander Vassilevsky
In the winter of 1941, 78 choice Nazi divisions, 1,700 tanks and over 1,000 planes were drawn up near Moscow to carry out Operation Typhoon. The Germans had come so close to Moscow that German could be heard on the radio on any wave length, and the very air was polluted by enemy breath. Leningrad, the second largest ctiy in the Soviet Union, was besieged, and the noose of the enemy blockade had tightened round it. The Wehrmacht commanders were planning the capture of Stalingrad on the Volga, the country's main route for grain and oil supplies. It was in those days and months, in the early period of the Great Patriotic War, that Hitler's army which was then at the zenith of its power suffered its first serious defeat. About half a million German soldiers and officers were killed in the battle for Moscow alone. The offensive launched by the Red Army in December, 1941 recaptured enemy-occupied territory with a pre-war population of approximately 5,000,000. Leningrad held out, and soon the whole world was to hear of the heroic battle of Stalingrad. This book tells about the battle for Moscow and Stalingrad, and other major events in the first period of the Great Patriotic War. The articles and stories are by Marshals Zhukov, Vassilevsky and Rokossovky, and by such well-known authors as Alexander Fadeyev, Konstantin Simonov, Vassily Grossman and Alexander Bek.
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Forever Flowing
by VasiliÄ Semenovich Grossman
The novel tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to Russia after thirty years in the Gulag. After short and unsatisfying visits to familiar places and persons in Moscow and Leningrad, the hero settles in a southern provincial town where he briefly establishes a new life with a war widow. Ivan Grigoryevich eventually returns to his boyhood home on the Black Sea, where he is finally able to come to terms with the inhumanity of the new Russian regime.
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Journey Into the Whirlwind
by Evgeniiď¸ a︡ Ginzburg
"Witness and victim of Stalin's reign of terror, a courageous woman tells the full story of her harrowing eighteen-year odyssey through Russia's prisons and labor camps"--Cover.
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The Karamazov Brothers
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's last novel, The Karamazov Brothers is a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. Full of memorable characters and their eloquent voices, and reverberating with deeply felt ideas, the power and impetus of the novel is fully realized in this new translation.
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War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the best-selling, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, comes a brilliant, engaging, and eminently readable translation of Leo Tolstoy’s master epic. • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature. Pevear and Volokhonsky have brought us this classic novel in a translation remarkable for its fidelity to Tolstoy’s style and cadence and for its energetic, accessible prose.
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Moscow to the End of the Line
by Venedikt Erofeev
In this classic of Russian humor and social commentary, a fired cable fitter goes on a binge and hopes a train to Petushki (where his "most beloved of trollops" awaits). On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.
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A People's Tragedy
by Orlando Figes
Covers Russian history from the end of the nineteenth century to the death of Lenin, and explores how Russian pre-revolution social forces were violently erased and replaced
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East of the Sun
by Benson Bobrick
The history of the vast expanse of land that became the dreaded symbol of Soviet terror details Siberia's great events with portraits of the men and women who created or were crushed by them
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Ivan's War
by Catherine Merridale
Drawing on previously closed archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Red Army rank and file.
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Russia's War
by Richard Overy
RUSSIA'S WAR is the epic account of the greatest military encounter in human history. In a vivid, often shocking narrative, Richard Overy describes the astounding events of 1941-45 in which the Soviet Union, after initial catastrophes, destroyed Hitler's Third Reich and shaped European history for the next half Century.
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Stalingrad
by Antony Beevor
The Battle of Stalingrad was not only the psychological turning point of World War II: it also changed the face of modern warfare. From Antony Beevor, the internationally bestselling author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five-month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost; then, in an astonishing reversal, encircled and trapped their Nazi enemy. This battle for the ruins of a city cost more than a million lives. Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides, fighting in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has itnerviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable. Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle.
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Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.
