Modernization from the Other Shore by David Engerman – American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development – is an interesting book, written nicely which might appeal to a wider range of people and not just people in academia. I think the book would have…
USSR by Walter Duranty is boring. This is particularly intriguing considering how readable his other books are. He was wrong about the soviet union and lied and lied and lied. But, nevertheless, his books were interesting to read, his articles were engaging. This one though…
Angels in Stalin’s Paradise by James William Crowl – Western reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1937, a case study of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty – is a fascinating book. It was published in 1982 and there are a few inaccuracies, but not particularly…
The Kremlin and the People by Walter Duranty is another book I read for my studies. It is a short 1942 book on Stalin, the Kremlin, the Purges, and Kirov’s murder. Because it was published in 1942, the fact that the book is mostly about…
I Write as I Please by Walter Duranty is a memoir of a British-American journalist who worked from moscow for over a decade, in the interwar period. Because it was firstly published in 1935 I included it in the history section of the blog –…
Communism and Hunger by Andrea Graziosi (editor) – The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective – is a book based on presentations given at a conference from 2014. Each author presented a paper on a different topic, on Holodomor, on the Chinese…
The Red Trade Menace by H R Knickerbocker was published in 1931 and it contains the 24 articles he wrote as a series for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. These articles are about the first 5-year plan of the ussr. Thus, this…
The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis – From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s russia – is a book any American should read. It might sound a bit much, but it’s not. This book is about US as much as it…
Not worthy by Lubomyr Luciuk – Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize and the New York Times – is a book published twenty years ago. It was edited by Lubomyr Luciuk, the Director of Research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who called for the stripping…
Internal colonization by Aleksandr Ėtkind – russia’s imperial experience – is a great book which might appeal to both academics and the ones who are interested in russia’s cultural history. This book was recommended to me by my supervisor and it is indeed very useful…
The Moscow correspondents by Whitman Bassow was a book I wanted to read for my studies. It is quite short and it was published in 1988, at the time when the soviet union still existed. Bassow was an American journalist in moscow and in this…
It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway by David Satter – Russia and the Communist Past – was another book I read for my studies. This is such a lovely book and the author is a journalist, so the style is…
Killer in the Kremlin by John Sweeney – The Explosive Account of Putin’s Reign of Terror – is very different from the We Need to Talk About Putin by Mark Galeotti I reviewed recently. That one has looking at Putin’s imagine in the west. The…
Dancing for Stalin by Christina Ezrahi – A True Story of Extraordinary Courage and Survival in the Soviet Gulag – was a book I was very keen to read. The book is about Nina Anisimova, born in 1909 in St Petersburg, who was a classical…
Female innovators who changed our world by Emma Shimizu is a good book, I enjoyed reading it. It is about women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). There are 46 women presented, mainly from US, but there are some Brits, Europeans, and a few…
The cholera years by Charles Rosenberg – the United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 – is a book I read for my studies and I’m so happy I had to. First of all, I wasn’t aware that cholera was such a problem in US…