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The ultimate untold story of Russia’s spetsnaz: the elite secret warriors who execute the Kremlin’s most dangerous missions, from Cold War battlegrounds to the streets of Ukraine.

Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers.

In the closing months of WW1, with the world exhausted and depleted by a long a brutal war, fifteen nations cobbled together an army of nearly 200,000 men and embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. The Intervention in Russia's civil war was spearheaded by Britain, her colonial forces and allies. It was designed to stop the Bolsheviks in their tracks, reinstate conservative regimes in the Russian Empire and ensure that Germany did not fill the power vacuum which the Russian Revolution had created.

The national identity has been forged in the furnace of war. From the medieval kingdom of Rus battling against a Scandinavian princes and Mongol emperors, to its own empire-building conflicts in 19th-century Asia, to the formative wars of the 20th century which saw Russia pitch from Tsarist empire to communist state and defender against Nazism, all these conflicts stained the lands of Russia red with blood. A weak post-Cold War Russia then turned to Putin, who created a new mood for martial triumphalism which led directly to the Ukrainian war.

‘Riveting, tragic tale’ New Yorker ‘Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion’ Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya – the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An “absorbing” (Los Angeles Times) biography of one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in Russian history—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs “[A] compelling portrait not...

Крах династии Романовых—один из самых трагичных моментов прошлого столетия. Отречение Николая II от престола повлекло за собой череду событий, которые изменили не только судьбу целой страны, но и политическую карту Восточного полушария. Ослабление власти императора, укрепление революционного движения, приход к власти большевиков—принято считать, что эти события были неизбежны. Но это не так. Не судьба обрекла Романовых на гибель—это было следствием плохого руководства и слепой веры в самодержавие.

Политика Бориса Ельцина в середине и конце 1990-х годов формировалась под влиянием Семьи — узкого круга людей, который влиял на все ключевые решения в стране. В этот круг вошел и журналист Валентин Юмашев. Как это произошло и какие решения он помогал принимать президенту? На излете ельцинского правления Семья привела к власти Владимира Путина. Как сложилась судьба Юмашева и других близких Ельцину людей в путинское правление? И есть ли у Путина своя «семья» — неформальное сообщество людей, определяющих политику страны?

О самых громких уголовных делах советской эпохи. Многие материалы ранее не публиковались и были впервые выданы из архивов лично автору. Благодаря доступу к этим документам и общению с очевидцами Еве Меркачёвой удалось восстановить картины судебных процессов над последним казненным в СССР—маньяком Фишером, над единственным расстрелянным в советское время ребенком Аркадием Нейландом, над палачом Антониной Макаровой по прозвищу Тонька-пулеметчица, над Бертой Бородкиной, накрывавшей столы самому Леониду Брежневу—единственной приговоренной к высшей мере по экономической статье.

The renowned fantasy and science fiction writer China Mieville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history. In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?

Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union’s most formidable spy.

Eleven compelling BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramas telling the stories of the Russian tsars. Broadcast to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this extraordinary drama cycle by Mike Walker comprises 11 ambitious plays spanning over 400 years, exploring the lives of Russia’s key rulers from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin. 

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused such intensities of fierce admiration and reactionary fear as Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. His extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on the revolutionary consciousness. Yet there was once a danger that his life and influence would be relegated to the footnotes of history. Published over the course of ten years, beginning in 1954, Deutscher's magisterial three-volume biography turned back the tide of Stalin's propaganda, and has since been praised by everyone from Tony Blair to Graham Greene.

Power struggles have a constant presence in Martin Sixsmith's story of Russia. Collected here in 50 episodes, he chronicles the Mongol hordes invading in the 13th century, through the iron autocratic fists of successive tsars, to the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia's re-emergence as a superpower. Sixsmith brings his first-hand experience of reporting from Russia in the 1980s and 90s to his narrative, witnessing the critical moment when the Soviet Union lost its grip on power.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.

In this new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides a deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow.

Random House presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold, written and read by Tim Moore. 'Bill Bryson on two wheels' Independent Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a...

It is June 1936. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) has finally been granted a visa for asylum in Norway, having been banned first from living in Paris, and then the whole of France. With him comes the draft of The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, which is completed and sent to the publishers on the 4th of August. The book, published by Faber in 1937, is considered to be Trotsky’s major work on Stalinism. 

At 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August 2000, two massive explosions roared through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, pride of the Northern Fleet and the largest attack submarine in the world, was hurtling towards the ocean floor. In Kursk (originally published as A Time to Die), award-winning journalist Robert Moore vividly re-creates this disaster minute by minute. 

Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western listeners can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment.