Russia and the Caucasus
A selection of books on Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia
Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus
Oliver Bullough Bullough
In this book the author takes the reader through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Turkey and the Middle East, tracking down the nations dispersed by the brutal wars Russia fought to add these mountains to her empire. Bullough then journeys through the North Caucasus itself, telling the stories of the land and its peoples. Many of the events he uncovers have never been described in English, while some have never been written about in any language.
'Let Our Fame be Great' recounts the struggle and survival of peoples who have been mostly forgotten for two hundred years. Their fame is not great, but truly it deserves to be.
Allen Lane 2010
ISBN 9781846141416
Hbk £25.00
Red Plenty
Francis Spufford
The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. "Red Plenty" is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Faber and Faber 2010
ISBN 9780571225231
Hbk £16.99
Putin's Oil: The Yukos Affair and the Struggle for Russia
Martin Sixsmith
Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC Moscow Correspondent, investigates Vladimir Putin's war for control of Russia's vast oil reserves, in particular Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil firm, Yukos. "Putin's Oil" investigates the complex world of Kremlin politics, including conspiracies and conspiracy theories, allegations that Roman Abramovitch plotted with Putin to destroy Khodorkovsky, suspicions of betrayal and double agents in the Kremlin and in Yukos, murder charges against Khodorkovsky's partners, and the KGB defector who claims they were carried out by Kremlin agents. After the mysterious death in a helicopter crash of the Englishman who had taken over Yukos, the company's war against the Kremlin is now being waged by a troika of mild mannered Britons, pursued by Interpol arrest warrants and Moscow's fury. Khodorkovsky remains in a penal camp in far Eastern Siberia. Martin Sixsmith, former BBC Moscow Correspondent, has gained unprecedented access to many of the players in the drama. The resulting book is both a thriller and an analysis of the defining moments of Putin's presidency and their ongoing impact in Russian and world politics.
Continuum 2010
ISBN 9781441199683
Hbk £16.99
Journey Into The Mind's Eye
Lesley Blanch
Lesley Blanch was four when the mysterious Traveller first blew into her nursery, swathed in Siberian furs and full of the fairytales of Russia. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her love-lorn and in the grips of a passionate obsession. The search to recapture the love of her life, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to Siberia and beyond, journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye.
Eland 1968, 2005
ISBN 9780907871545
Pbk £12.99
Moscow: A Literary and Cultural History
Caroline Brooke
From its origins as a twelfth-century hilltop fortress or kremlin at
the confluence of two rivers, Moscow has grown to become a vast city of
over eleven million inhabitants. After suffering the ignominy of losing
its capital city status in the early eighteenth century under Peter the
Great and invasion by the French in 1812, Moscow later became the
centre of the communist world. Following the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, it has been busy emulating the wildest capitalist
excesses of Las Vegas with colourful results. Muscovites have given
their city many names: Holy Moscow for its status as a major centre of
the Orthodox Church; Moscow of the Taverns, famed for its hospitality
and carousing; Calico Moscow with the dominant textiles trade; the "big
village" with its growing population of peasant migrants; the "Red
Moscow" of the Soviet period. Today, these many different influences
have left layer upon layer of contradictory symbols - Orthodox,
tsarist, Soviet and capitalist - which impregnate the very fabric of
the city.
Part of the excellent Cities of the Imagination series.
Signal 2006
ISBN 9781904955221
Pbk £12.00
Master and Margarita, The
Mikhail Bulgakov
As is often the case with literary works which were in danger of being suppressed by a tyrannical political regime - Bulgakov was not allowed to be a writer under Stalin - this novel fizzes with vitality and bawdiness. There is a great deal going on in this novel, but at the center is Pontius Pilate, the cruel Procurator of Judea, and parallel to this and in the present the irresistible and irrepressible character of Woland, the devil incarnate. Also, at the heart of the action, is a love story. The imagery is gargantuan and halucinagenic, and much of the physical detail is not for the faint hearted. It is quite incredible to think that this was written at the end of the 1930s, and this is just some of the evidence, if any were needed, that Bulgakov was a timeless and unique genius. There is a lovely introduction from Will Self.
Vintage 2004
(Originally publihsed by The Harvill Press and Harper and Row in 1967)
ISBN 9780099540946
£7.99
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Orlando Figes
The story of the lives of ordinary people in Stalin's Russia: a world where everyone was afraid to talk and a society spoke in whispers, whether to protect friends and family - or to betray them.
This book gives a voice to these silent survivors for the first time.
Penguin 2007
ISBN 9780141013510
Pbk £10.99
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
Orlando Figes
Vast in scope, based on exhaustive original research, and written with passion, narrative skill and human sympathy, A People's Tragedy is the definitive account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation.
Pimlico - Random House 1997
ISBN 9780712673273
Pbk £18.00
Imperium
Ryszard Kapuscinski
The story of an empire - the constellation of states that was submerged under a single identity for most of the twentieth century - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This is Kapuscinski's vivid, compelling and personal report on the life and death of the Soviet superpower, from the entrance of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, through his journey across desolate Siberia and the republics of Central Asia in the 1950s and 60s, to his wanderings over the vast Soviet lands - from Poland to the Pacific, the Arctic Circle to Afghanistan - in the years of the USSR's decline and final disintegration in 1991.
Granta 1994, 2007
ISBN 9781862076901
Pbk £8.99
Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in a Deep Heartland
Susan Richards
Since the 1990s
several, now classic books, have been published exploring the country's modern
complexities. Lost and Found in
I B Tauris & Co Ltd 2009
ISBN 1848850239
Hbk £17.99
