Russia Books

The Classic Film Scripts series is a must for any serious videophile. These books separate the video into its basic constituencies and allow one to understand what the subliminal shots are supposed to portray. Even the background sounds are described.

The contents include A history by Andrew Sinclair, An introduction by Sergei Eisenstein, credits, cast and the actual screenplay. There are plenty of still photos. The film is still available so you will want to read this first.

More than just a reference you will become intrigued as you are reading.

Bazhanov is the most anti-communist writer and the only one who really was inside in the top of Bolshevik government understanding the whole nonsense of the system. We can't trust him in every word, especially about his escape from USSR, but as a good storyteller he tries his best to open for us a real picture of evil time.

This book and the other 3 in the series show insight of the world of the ghetto in Russia. The hard times and difficult life of Jews in the town are diminished as the warmth, emotions and humor of daily events are told.

Marion Countess Donhoff is a member of an aristocratic East Prussian family, an accomplished writer and, for many years, a member of the editorial staff of DIE ZEIT. She rode several hundred miles west from her ancestral home at Friedrichstein through freezing weather and deep snow to escape the Red Army as it moved west across her homeland.

Where is her homeland? Try looking for East Prussia on a map sometime. You won't find it. You won't even find Friedrichstein. All the place names were changed and all the territory taken from German hands. No German signs or placenames survive in what was once a prosperous kingdom almost seven centuries old at the time of its desctruction in 1945. Grave markers were pulled up and used for paving stones as the Poles and Russians eradicated the last vestiges of German language, culture and property.

Grafin von Donhoff's account of those times doesn't dwell on her own losses, or sufferings, which were considerable. All the men in her family either fell on the Eastern Front serving a Fuhrer they'd come to despise, or were executed for joining the July 20, 1944, plot which nearly assassinated Hitler at Rastenburg, Hitler's East Prussian Headquarters.

Instead, she draws a portrait of her childhood Kingdom before it was crushed. The book includes some great maps and photographs. Considering the important role East Prussia played in Europe's history, it is surprising how little is available today on its history. Countess Donhoff's classic book remedies that.

If you are interested in European history, you'll enjoy this book. In my opinion, it's a classic.

Amazing insight to the soviet era government that can only be offered by russian citizens!

The author of this book, Count Paul Vasili, was actually Princess Catherine Radziwill, who knew her subjects quite well. However, documents made available since the book was published, have clarified some points and proven Radziwill wrong on a few others. All in all, the book gives a pretty good contemporaneous account of life in "royal Russia" under the last three Romanov czars, and Radziwill's commentary makes for very interesting reading for anyone interested in the subject of the Romanov dynasty and how it came to an end. Radziwill does her very best to present an evenly balanced portrait of her subject; her occasional biases make perfect sense if one understands the sources she had for her information, and her grasp of politics of the times is, for a woman who was not involved in the government of the nation, quite remarkable.

So our first day in Moscow we lost our dictionary and our big travel guide and had to resort to this little thing I had picked up. It was full of everything we needed and got us through 2 weeks of trolling around Moscow and St. Pete on student budgets.

The train maps were extremely useful. I was constantly pulling this thing out of my back pocket to find out what exit we needed to take. The city maps are pretty good too.

All the suggestions were great and pretty easy to find. Thanks to this book, I was finally able to see a Russian circus with dancing bears and bears driving motorcycles with dogs on the back, which is really the only thing anybody ever wants to do over there.

The vocabulary section is kinda useful, but you may have to resort to just showing them the words. If you're ordering food, I reccommend the shotgun approach we took: just point to stuff on the menu. It'll all work out in the end.

I wouldn't say that this should be your only resource for preparing your trip, but it's definitely the only thing you'll need on you while you're actually walking around the country. That and your passport. Those Russian cops are crooks.

This was written by great grandpa who died just last week. And I never read it until now. And I love it. It helped close up the feeling of regret I had for not asking him sooner.
I love it!!

This wonderful cookbook by Sonja Uvezian ("The Cuisine of Armenia" and "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen") is a true gem. It focuses on the food of the Caucasus Mountains and the former Soviet Republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Even today, after the publication of books by Paula Wolfert and Darra Goldstein, the cuisine of this area is relatively unknown in the United States. That's a shame, because it's truly wonderful, alternately hearty and light, and always full of flavor. The Middle Eastern influences are there, but the combination of ingredients is uniquely Caucasian.
Uvezian does a very good job conveying the pleasures of this cuisine. One of the good things about the cookbook is that she often provides alternative ingredients or ways of spicing a dish. I've cooked a number of recipes from this book, and my one of my all-time favorite chicken recipes, a plain roast chicken with a knock-out walnut sauce, comes from here. Her lamb and fruit stews are good too.

This book was republished in 1976 as "Cooking from the Caucasus." If you see a copy under either title in a used book store, snap it up. You won't regret it.

Property rights sounds like a boring subject, but if you're interested in imperial Russia, this is a must read. The exploration of this seemingly narrow issue by Farrow opens up to a host of important and often surprising and novel observations and insights.