Russia Books

A good thriller with an eerie resemblance to the crash of TWA Flight 800. The author weaves many of the unresolved facts from the Flight 800 case into his story and makes the saying that "facts are some times stranger than fiction", much more believable.

Kuchma's Dictum is the mother of all conspiracy theories. A taut and compact thriller with a plot that lets the reader know the author really knows his stuff. Airplane buffs in particular will relish the accurate detail. The main character is well drawn, an ex-cop so down on his luck he is working as a security guard, who stumbles on to something big and who just won't let go until he finds out the truth. The plot is plausible and well worked out. It could be in the headines tomorrow.

Convincing, well-researched, elegant --- Abby Schrader presents an engaging work of history, challenging conventional notions of corporal punishment's evolution while plunging the reader deep into the Russia she examines. Forget beach reading and sink your teeth into this!

Prof. Schrader is widely considered to be as the most exciting rising star in Russian history today, and this book merely confirms that. Her treatment of the issues is thorough and reflects in depth and committed research. She makes the issues exciting, through her insights into the data. And there are great pictures.

I can't wait for the sequel!

First, many thanks to Tom. It was amazing to read the stories of my family in print. Finally, someone had the patience to sit down and put all of it down in one place. I cried as I read the stories retold by my great-aunts and uncles, my grandfather, and cousins. Not because they were sad, but because I was so happy to know that all of the stories of their love for each other and the family, hard work, struggles, and triumhps can never be forgotten now. I will always treasure this book just I have all of the people who contributed, and those that the stories were about.

Book review by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota

In a series of 45 stand-alone essays, some originally printed in other works, Mueller skillfully connects 21st-century readers to a time of pioneering on the North Dakota prairie. My stomach tightened as I recalled living many of his stories of hard work on the farm: making things yourself and doing without modern amenities, caring for animals and eating what you produced yourself, haying and harvesting, milking and attending a little one-room school. There are oddities in his stories, things that may have been unique to his family's experience, but most of his stories have a rough equivalent in other families' experience. Examples: The practice of witching to find graves that even determined the sex of the person buried. A white rock that was special. A woman who practiced brauche and healed his ringworm.

Books like this have proliferated--thank goodness--as many sit down to pass on the story of a way of life lived during days that have vanished. So you might ask, why would I want to read this book when I know (or have read about) others who have experienced a life similar to the one the author describes? Because Mueller projects an unusually powerful sense of family, of connection to his forebears and relatives, and to place. He listened carefully to oral histories passed by his family concerning the very earliest settlers of his family who came from the Russian steppe to the plains of North America. He also visited the site of the old home place and identified the old clay house and the other buildings where his pioneering forebears homesteaded. Mueller includes biographical sketches of family members and the local country doctor and describes a 1903 wedding dinner. He doesn't have "women's work" very well in focus, but he has proved to be a much better writer than he dreamt he could be when he started writing these essays, and he has made a fine contribution to the personal-reminiscence literature of the Germans from Russia.

Lear's Daughters is a book that must be read by every actor and theatre professional who is familiar with Stanislavski's "Acting System." Gauss takes her readers deep into the Moscow arts theatre's studios and adds life and personality to the stoic icons of the acting world. Gauss reveals that the system of acting that we have come to understand as natural was developed by many artists through hard work over many years.

Dr. Gauss' book is a detailed journey into the pet projects of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the three major studios of the Moscow Art Theatre. It turns what should be dull historical facts into an interesting story of the many people who worked to create these three studios. It is a "must read and re-read" for theatre buffs and historians alike.

This is the first book by Solovyev that I have read, and also the first by an Orthodox Sophiologist. It is intellectually thorough, honest, and complete. I am absolutely impressed with it. The author begins by acknowledging the failures of materialism, rationalism, capitalism and it's excessively individualist tendencies, and leads us step by step to the spiritual realm and how much we depend on it. He does not try to sever Christianity from it's roots in hellenistic philosophy, but integrates the two in a most beautiful and consistent way. I have to say that his arguments in favor of the Christian Religion are simply the most persuasive that I have ever heard, and he never resorts to the blind repetition of dogmatic assertions about how it is the one true faith, like so many other so-called mystics. Instead, he uses his education and wit to persuade the reader (he's so smooth that you don't even know that he is trying to persuade you, and maybe he isn't) that Christianity is actually the culmination of all of man's religious history which came before it. This is truly an outstanding read.

Reading Soloviev's plea to his fellow Russians at the end of the 19th century to draw out and develop their own culture independent of Western influences appears now as a cry unheeded which should have been. Looking at Russias history durning the last century up into the present it seems fairly obvious how little Russia has been able to take it's own course either by outside pressure from the West, pressure from within which desires it to be Westernized, or a combination of the two. Soloviev shows how the West has fallen to the three temptations which Christ faced and was able to stand up against and while doing so advancing. While Russia has not fallen totally to such temptations but has remained static. Soloviev unfolds a positive, divine following, course Russia can take that would contrast and help overcome the negative, divine neglecting, course taken by the West. Reading this gave me a new appreciation of what Russia holds in itself if it were allowed to flourish unhinderred and by extension how other cultures too could bring much more to humanity as a whole if they were helped to find their own way of life, that best suits their character, rather than having a "best" way of doing things.

If you want to know the true story of Lenin and how he build the Bolshevik party, there is no better book than Tony Cliffs biography. Cliff examines closely how Lenin became a marxist and his struggle to build a strong revolutionary party. By reading this book it is clear, that Lenin wasn't a ruthless dictator, but a very intelligent man dedicated to the struggle for the rights of the working class in all countries, and that the politics of Lenin had NOTHING to do with the later terror regime developed during the Stalin period. An excellent book.

This biography is much more than an interesting story. Tony Cliff wrote it as a strategic political contribution when the left sorely needed guidance.

The only volume of this that you're likely to find is the first one, _Building the Party_. (The second and third ones are out of print, and the fourth one might not even exist.) Still, the first volume, covering Lenin's activity from 1893 to 1914, is more than good enough. This era is often ignored by academic studies of the Russian Revolution, but it is vitally important for the socialists of today.

Cliff, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, wrote this biography in the late '70s during a downturn in class struggle. By analyzing Lenin's dynamic party-building, Cliff and his comrades were able to use the downturn to their advantage, building cadres and affiliated groups in many countries. As a result, Cliff's International Socialist tendency survived, and grew stronger, after the '80s and the fall of the Stalinism, and now exists in over 20 nations.

Tony Cliff died early in 2000, and the leaders of IS groups around the world credit his guidance -- especially this book -- for building such a powerful, influential tendency under difficult circumstances. Today's socialists should read this biography not only to learn about their past, but to prepare for the future.

I really enjoyed this series about immigrants from different countries. It was informative and interesting, and inspiring. The old immigrants endured much hardship to be here.It was of christian faith.

This book was enlightning about how the Christian Faith had to be hid. This wasn't that long ago. The older I get the more realistic the miracles and situations in this book show how God works to achieve his goal. I enjoyed this book and am l;ooking forward to the rest of the series.

This is the best book ever written about the Soviet Union - in fact, it is one of the very few which are even honest. The author, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii, demonstrates that the Soviet Union committed terrible crimes against humanity, including huge massacres, forced famines and slave labour. The atrocities began with the October Revolution in 1917 and continued with Stalin's genocides against national, religious & socio-economic groups, the mass purges in Eastern Europe and the silent deaths of millions in the Gulag during the '50s, '60s, & '70s. The book concludes with the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan.

If you only want to read one book on the Soviet regime, this is it. It shows that every Soviet dictator - from Lenin to Gorbachev - committed terrible atrocities against entire populations, including large-scale massacres, man-made terror-famines, and the destruction of millions in concentration camps. After discussing the historical record, the author collects and analyses thousands of estimates of the Soviet death toll, which he calculates at nearly 62 million. This book should be compulsory reading for anyone who cares about human rights.

I have read "Voina i Mir" in its original language several times, and every time I'd find something new and amazing.
The novel is grand and epic, moving and intimate, philosophical and romantic. For Tolstoy, a simple peasant Platon Karatayev is as interesting as Napoleon I or Russian Emperor, Alexander I. Historical figures share the space on the pages of his book with the fiction characters and all (hundreds of them) have their own unique faces, voices, and personalities. He finds something very human in almost every character. I loved the descriptions of palaces and balls, duels and huntings, massive battle scenes and love stories. I know greatness when I see it and "Voina i Mir" (War and Piece) is great literature.

I have read "Voina i Mir" several times in its original language, and every time I'd find something new and amazing.
The novel is grand and epic, moving and intimate, philosophical and romantic. For Tolstoy, a simple peasant Platon Karatayev is as interesting as French Emperor Napoleon I or Russian Emperor Alexander I. Historical figures share the space on the pages of his book with the fiction characters and all (hundreds of them) have their own unique faces, voices, personalities. He finds something very human in almost every character. I loved the descriptions of palaces and balls, duels and huntings, massive battle scenes and love stories. I know greatness when I see it and "War and Piece" is great literature.

This book is about far more than Russian land reform in the decade before the 1917 revolution. Judge Williams details that story, to be sure, exquisitely and clearly. But the larger question he examines is whether liberal democracy can be brought about from above, for which the efforts of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin offer unexpectedly useful answers. They do so because throughout his discussion, Williams employs the tools of modern law and economics, especially the work of Douglass C. North in institutional economics. The book is thus a sophisticated yet readable treatment of both its immediate and its larger subject, with wide-ranging applications to modern political transitions, including in Russia today.

This book offers an insightful description and well-reasoned analysis of Stolypin's land reforms. Those who know nothing about Stolypin's land reforms can get a good understanding of them solely from this book. Others more familiar with Russian history might gain from this book new economic understanding of important issues, such as the meaning of "land shortage" and the relationship between land prices and the land reform.

Stolypin's land reforms also offer some important insights into ongoing challenges of re-arranging economic rights. I discuss these issues in more detail elsewhere. This book provides a good case study for considering general issues concerning property rights and liberal democracy.