Shortly before my first business trip to Nigeria, I asked a group of colleagues—all learned West Africa analysts—to recommend a few books that would familiarize me with the powerhouse African nation.
Every one of them recommended works of fiction.
This provoked a bit of head-scratching: I was expecting a selection of historical tracts and political screeds. In the end, my colleagues were wiser than I thought: First, the works, including the landmark Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, were gorgeously written. Second, even at half-way through the list, I thought I was learning as much about Nigerians as I was about Nigeria, a goal historical tracts and political screeds typically fail to reach.
Today, understanding Russia is more important than ever, as impossible as that task may be. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has passed its third anniversary, but US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin look to be re-entering bromance mode. Talks of a ceasefire in Ukraine and a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow are in full swing. At a time like is, it would serve all of us well to try to know the Russian people and their history a bit better.
Those who choose to familiarize themselves with Russia are spoiled for choice on all fronts: fiction, nonfiction, books in Russian, books in translation. This makes careful selection all the more important, especially because Russia is a politically charged place. A lot of books about Russia read as if title was chosen first, and the text selected later, to back-fill an argument.
Timing is also important. Like many countries, modern Russia arrived at its current state via an historical continuum punctuated by catastrophic convulsion. Wars, revolutions, busted ideologies, attempted coups, and the centuries-long grind of conquest and defeat all etched their imprint on the Russia we see now.
To be practical about my own book recommendations, it’s best to focus on the Soviet and Russian periods, and the seismic transition between the two. And we will stick resolutely to non-fiction.
*
Joshua Yaffa, Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia
How did a Chechen human rights activist morph into a supporter of a murderous warlord? How did a television producer with blockbuster ambitions become the figurehead of Russia’s state propaganda machine?
In Joshua Yaffa’s detailed and exquisitely written book the reader learns about modern-day Russia by meeting, chapter after chapter, a series of individuals who have made life-altering compromises to survive Putin’s repressive autocracy. Yaffa’s subjects range from figures of national prominence to provincial parish priests. Without being preachy or judgmental, the book describes and then dissects the power of a political system that allows no meaningful resistance.
Between Two Fires‘ subject is Russia and Russians, but its lessons are universal. Curious followers of current events often ask how people survive in authoritarian regimes. Yaffa’s book offers an important exploration of the creeping erosion of ambition, principle, and will that is part survival tactic and part surrender.
Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
“The future was not where we thought it would be,” writes Nobel laureate and Belarusian exile Svetlana Alexievich in her epic oral history of the wasteland left in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Secondhand Time is a heavy lift, but lavishly rewards the persistent reader. The book’s harrowing personas, its relentless cadence and its encyclopedic structure elevate it above a simple oral history.
More than anything else, Secondhand Time depicts a landscape of turbulent desolation both profound and quotidian. To the West, the demise of the Soviet Union was a triumphant victory and the end of the Cold War. For Soviets, it was the implosion of a universal belief system whose pieces could never be reassembled or replaced.
The voices in Secondhand Time are nothing less than haunting.
Owen Matthews, Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War
Stalin’s Children, by award-winning British author Owen Matthews, first brings alive for the reader the searing deprivation of Stalinism and war and their destructive forces on an earlier generation of his family. Matthews then tells the 1960’s era story of his parents—a British father and a Russian mother—seeking to create their own, new family, against the monolithic opposition of the Soviet Union and through the black-out fabric of the Iron Curtain.
Matthews effortlessly weaves together strands of history, biography, and memoir into a story that is both grand and intimate, in writing that is hard to finish unmoved. If you find it difficult to cast your mind back to, or want for the first time to understand, what the Soviet Union was and what it did to its millions of inhabitants—all very real people with desires and needs—this book will take you there
Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution
Climb aboard an oligarch’s jet and float above a country whose most prized assets were sold for a song. Sit inside the room in Davos—capitalism’s highest altar—where one of the world’s greatest swindles was devised. Sup at one of Russia’s most exclusive dinner tables, where fierce business rivalries were discussed, defused and designed into spheres of influence in Russia’s emerging political and economic landscape.
Chrystia Freeland’s Sale of the Century—written when she was a Moscow-based journalistic superstar for The Financial Times—is the story of how 1990s Russia mislaid the cornerstones of a new nation. Boris Yeltsin’s failed stewardship of Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism birthed a country that epically failed its citizens, except for the equivalent of Russia’s 0.0001%.
That rarefied layer kept—and enhanced—its spoils by financing Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign in exchange for the keys to the economy, and they never looked back. Until Putin came to town. Freeland, until recently deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada, unflinchingly chronicled the free-for-all that was Russia’s early days. Experience that maniacal decade with her.
David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
Hedrick Smith’s The Russians—the landmark, 1976 best-seller that Americans once read to ponder the character of the Soviet citizen—is hard to find on bookshelves. David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is its encyclopedic, compelling, and entirely worthy heir. “This book, after all,” Remnick writes, “chronicles the last days of one of the cruelest regimes in human history.”
Once a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and now editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, Remnick was in Russia for the collapse of the Soviet Union. His reporting, insights and robust yet nuanced writing—a combination that won the book the Pulitzer Prize—reveals the depressing, corrosive rot of the Soviet construct followed by the ungoverned, denial-laced euphoria of the new Russian Federation.
Remnick wrote Lenin’s Tomb in 1993; I took this book with me when I moved to Moscow in 1994, and devoured it while my own reporter’s notebooks were still pristine. It has stayed with me ever since.
______________________________
Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia by Charles Hecker is available via Oxford University Press.
