The companion to the Showtime documentary series, director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of traditional history books in this thoroughly researched and rigorously analyzed look at the dark side of...
In the West, politicians and journalists of all stripes have referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “thug”, a “tyrant”, a “murderer”, a “Communist”, a “Nazi”, the next “Hitler” and more. But amongst the Russian...
From the award-winning author of A People's Tragedy and Natasha's Dance, a landmark account of what private life was like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression
There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin's...
On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union's Red Army invaded the young nation-state of Finland, in the full expectation of routing the small, ill-equipped Finnish army and annexing the former Russian territory by the end of the year. But Finland held...
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that...
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs—a magisterial world history unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families
Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along...
A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia—and molded the future path of one of America’s pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents
1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called “the year of the thaw”—a...
Simon Sebag Montefiore was born in 1965 and read history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. Catherine the Great & Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court...
Gregori Rasputin is probably one of the best known, but least understood of the key figures in the events which ultimately led to the downfall of the Russian Tsars some 90 years ago. His political role as the power behind the throne is as much...