Reading List
Anna Reid
Journalist and Historian
Anna Reid is an English journalist and historian of Eastern Europe. She studied law at Oxford and Russian history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and was Ukraine correspondent for The Economist from 1993 to 1995.
Her books are Borderland (1997), on the history of Ukraine, The Shaman’s Coat (2002), a native history of Siberia, Leningrad (2011), and A Nasty Little War (2023), on the Western intervention in the Russian Civil War. Leningrad drew on newly available diaries of ordinary citizens to tell the story of the siege from 1941 to 1944, and was praised as the first full account of it written this century.
Conversations with Stalin
by Milovan Djilas
“Together with Hitler’s Table Talk, (if I can sneak in a sixth title), it’s a reminder that both of were not only psychopaths, but the most god-awful bores. Djilas describes Stalin’s senility and gluttony, crude jokes and inane drinking games. Hitler’s Table Talk is a collection of rants to cronies, taken down by secretaries during mealtimes at his various wartime headquarters.” — via Interview, December 2011
Less Than One
by Joseph Brodsky
“Brodsky lived through the first part of the siege as a baby, in a one-room flat on the Liteiny, right in the centre of town. He brilliantly describes the atmosphere of the postwar city: the bombed-out buildings – ‘haggard and hollow-eyed’ – and the feeling of emptiness, of crowding ghosts. He’s good, as well, on how pinched and harsh life continued to be well after the war.” — via Interview, December 2011
Reflections on the Russian Soul
A Memoir
by Dmitry S. Likhachev
“A scholar of medieval literature at Leningrad University, his life [from 1906 to 1999] spanned the birth and death of Russian Communism. In his twenties, he was one of the first generation of Gulag prisoners – on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, where the Gulag was trialled. And in his eighties, during glasnost, he became a leading pro-democracy activist. His memoir brilliantly takes in the whole period.” — via Interview, December 2011
A Writer At War
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945
by Vasily Grossman
“I prefer this book even to [his novel] Life and Fate, which was recently dramatised on Radio 4. It’s just so immediate; it takes you right there. The editors, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, managed to persuade Grossman’s family to give them access to these notebooks, and it’s the first time they’ve been published. They’re so human and open, and Grossman is such an involved, interesting man.” — via Interview, December 2011
Russia at War
by Alexander Werth
“He had been brought up in St Petersburg and emigrated with his family to Britain soon after the revolution [of 1917]. So not only was he an excellent writer, but unlike most of the foreign press corps had the enormous advantage of being bilingual. Part history and part memoir, his book is shrewd, vivid and even funny. Published in 1964, it’s still one of the best general histories of the war in Russia.” — via Interview, December 2011