Larissa Salmina was a wild child of the USSR who rose to be Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage; Francis Haskell was a distinguished, deracinated Cambridge art historian. They met in... read more
Sociable, intriguing and entertaining: Princess Juliane-Henriette-Ulrike of Saxe-Coburg escaped her early, abusive marriage to the Grand Duke Konstantin to live in Germany and Switzerland. H... read more
How do you write music to serve the socialist state? Yet that is what a generation of Russian composers had to do. Some produced superb music; many more suffered terribly in the Gulag.
The Decembrists are often referred to in passing in other books on Russian history, as if they were not really serious. But they were important, and their story is fascinating and moving.
A compulsive political thriller that takes us deep into the Kremlin and the psychology of authoritarianism: at its heart is Putin's chief spin-doctor, the still centre of a delirious propaga... read more
Twenty-seven remarkable people, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Hannah Arendt, Gidon Kremer, Romain Gary, Mark Rothko, Arvo Pärt: their stories interwoven with the historical, ethnic and pol... read more
Nikolai Vavilov was the great Russian agronomist who dedicated his life to the improvement of cereal crops and created the world's largest seed bank at Pavlosk. During the Siege of Leningrad... read more
A carefully annotated, illustrated catalogue to the remarkable costumes and paraphernalia acquired in Siberia and Mongolia in the 1930s by two Danish travellers - Henning Haslund-Christensen... read more
The outlines of this diplomatic mission may have been written about before but what makes this book so enjoyable is the character of the British ambassador, Archie Clark Kerr, about whom his... read more
Chekhov's biographer and the premier translator from Georgian has been working on this for years (in between publishing projects). Its publication is a triumph.
Smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1982, this novel first appeared in English in 1987 and soon disappeared, to be resurrected thanks to Susan Sontag's enthusiasm for a 'scruffy-looking' cop... read more
A memoir of her multifarious travels, rich with culinary ideas - Russian railway pies, Sultanahmet in the snow, Polish cloudberries... Eden's latest book is imbued with her knowledge and lov... read more
A new collection of short stories by one of Russia's foremost contemporary writers, author of The Big Green Tent, Daniel Stein, Interpreter and others. There is remarkably little of her work... read more
After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies' support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus, the Far East and elsewher... read more