Soviet Communism

The first in Ken Follett's breathtaking Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants is a captivating tale that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. A World in Chaos 1911, a thirteen-year-old boy, Billy...

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged. Mark Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical...

A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Economist LONGLISTED for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2026 'This book reads like a spy novel' FINANICAL TIMES 'Entertaining and vivid' OBSERVER...

From renowned foreign policy expert Angela Stent comes a dissection of how Putin created a paranoid and polarized world—and increased Russia's status on the global stage. "Putin's World is the definitive guide to understanding the tangled history of post-Cold War Russia and its place in the...

Bloomsbury presents Red Dawn Over China by Frank Dikötter, read by Daniel York Loh. A FINANCIAL TIMES HIGHLIGHT FOR 2026 'The most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed From renowned, prize-winning historian...

Western interpretations of the Cold War--both realist and neoconservative--have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the 20th century.

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

Brought to you by Penguin. An extraordinarily atmospheric and powerful history of the world's largest country and its decline and fall. With Stalin's death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place, but one which became more predictable for its citizens and one which...

A brilliant investigative narrative: How six average Soviet men rose to the pinnacle of Russia's battered economy. David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for

The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals.

The State and Revolution (1917), by Vladimir Lenin, describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin began the composition of an early draft of State and Revolution while in exile in Switzerland in 1916, under the title "Marxism on the State". "Soviets", legislative bodies of workers and peasants were the de facto governments of Petrograd and many smaller cities.

'History is made up of myths,' writes the renowned Russian dissident journalist Mikhail Zygar. 'Alas, our myths led us to the fascism of 2022. It is time to expose them.' Drawing from his perilous career investigating the frontiers of the Russian empire, Zygar reveals how 350 years of propaganda...

Bloomsbury presents A Present Past by Sergei Lebedev, read by Bert Seymour. “Ghosts are not born by themselves. They are born of a silent conscience. They are as real as the ignored knowledge of crimes and the refusal to accept real responsibility. They are the distorted voice of the dead...

Abridged edition. Winter of the World is the second novel in Ken Follett's uniquely ambitious Century trilogy. On its own or read in sequence with Fall of Giants and Edge of Eternity, this is a spellbinding epic of global conflict and personal drama. A Battle of Ideals It is 1933 and, at...

America is in a new Cold War with Russia even more dangerous than the one the world barely survived in the 20th century. All of this is exacerbated by Washington’s war-like demonizing of the Kremlin leadership and by Russiagate’s unprecedented allegations. US mainstream media accounts are highly selective and seriously misleading. American “disinformation”, not only Russian, is a growing peril.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. Bringing together the military mights of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United Nations States, the Korean War raged for three years from 1950 to 1953. Not only the result of a carving of Korean...