10 Best Russian & Former Soviet Union Books
Russian & Former Soviet Union is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top Russian & Former Soviet Union audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 10 Russian & Former Soviet Union audiobooks below.
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Putin
- By: Philip Short
- Narrator: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 29 hours 33 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: July 26, 2022
- Language: English
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4.39(143 ratings)
4.39(143 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0044.99 USD“In a deep, resonant voice, Jonathan Keeble gives a splendid narration of this long and well-researched biography of Vladimir Putin.”- AudioFile MagazineThis program is read by award-winning actor Jonathan Keeble.The first comprehensive,“In a deep, resonant voice, Jonathan Keeble gives a splendid narration of this long and well-researched biography of Vladimir Putin.”- AudioFile Magazine
This program is read by award-winning actor Jonathan Keeble.
The first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last sixty yearsVladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story.
Unflinching, hard-hitting, and objective, Philip Short’s biography gives us the whole tale, up to the present day. To the fullest extent anyone has yet been able, Short cracks open the strongman’s thick carapace to reveal the man underneath those bare-chested horseback rides. In this deeply researched account, listeners meet the Putin who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right beforehand, and who learned English in order to be able to talk to George W. Bush.
Vladimir Putin is wreaking havoc in Europe, threatening global peace and stability and exposing his fellow citizens to devastating economic countermeasures. Yet puzzlingly many Russians continue to support him. This audiobook is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the many facets of the man behind the mask that Putin wears on the world stage.
Putin will be the last word for years to come.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.
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The Story of Russia
- By: Orlando Figes
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 12 hours 38 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.3(448 ratings)
4.3(448 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDFrom “the great storyteller of Russian history” comes a brilliantly colored account of the myths that have shaped and reshaped Russia’s identity and politics from its founding Who were the Rus, the ancient tribe from which theFrom “the great storyteller of Russian history” comes a brilliantly colored account of the myths that have shaped and reshaped Russia’s identity and politics from its founding
Who were the Rus, the ancient tribe from which the Russians trace their origins? Were they Baltic Slavs, hailing from within the territory that would become Russia? Or were they Vikings from Scandinavia, who came in from the outside to organize chaotic warring groups? Russians initially embraced the former theory, following a surge in nationalist sentiment, but autocrats, including Catherine the Great, came to trumpet the latter, which supported the notion that the Russian people are incapable of self-governance. Both sides were using history to create myths, narratives of national identity that could be deployed for their own political ends.
The Story of Russia is about how the Russians defined themselves–and repeatedly reinvented such definitions along the way. Moving from Russia’s agrarian beginnings in the first millennium to subsequent periods of monarchy, totalitarianism, and perestroika, all the way up to Vladimir Putin and his use of myths of Russian history to bolster his regime, celebrated historian Orlando Figes examines the ideas that have guided the country’s actions: the need for autocracy to rule Russia’s vast land; the veneration of the “Holy Tsar” and the cult of the leader; the belief in an essentially Russian collectivist spirit; and the oscillation between Russia’s European and Eurasian character.
With beautiful writing and alluring perspectives, The Story of Russia is as much about the myths and ideologies that have shaped Russian history–about the ways the Russians have interpreted their past–as it is about the events, institutions, social groups, and leaders that have made that history. And as modern Russia retreats from Europe, this authoritative account of Russia’s past might well elucidate its future.
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From Russia with Blood
- By: Heidi Blake
- Narrator: Marisa Calin
- Length: 10 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 19, 2019
- Language: English
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4.3(1115 ratings)
4.3(1115 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDThe untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad: “A compelling rendering of Putin’s frightening extensions of power into Europe and the United States” (Associated Press). They thought... Read moreThe untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad: “A compelling rendering of Putin’s frightening extensions of power into Europe and the United States” (Associated Press).
They thought they had found a safe haven in the green hills of England. They were wrong. One by one, the Russian oligarchs, dissidents, and gangsters who fled to Britain after Vladimir Putin came to power dropped dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, their British lawyers and fixers met similarly grisly ends. Yet, one by one, the British authorities shut down every investigation — and carried on courting the Kremlin.
The spies in the riverside headquarters of MI6 looked on with horror as the scope of the Kremlin’s global killing campaign became all too clear. And, across the Atlantic, American intelligence officials watched with mounting alarm as the bodies piled up, concerned that the tide of death could spread to the United States. Those fears intensified when a one-time Kremlin henchman was found bludgeoned to death in a Washington, D.C. penthouse. But it wasn’t until Putin’s assassins unleashed a deadly chemical weapon on the streets of Britain, endangering hundreds of members of the public in a failed attempt to slay the double agent Sergei Skripal, that Western governments were finally forced to admit that the killing had spun out of control.
Unflinchingly documenting the growing web of death on British and American soil, Heidi Blake bravely exposes the Kremlin’s assassination campaign as part of Putin’s ruthless pursuit of global dominance — and reveals why Western governments have failed to stop the bloodshed. The unforgettable story that emerges whisks us from London’s high-end night clubs to Miami’s million-dollar hideouts ultimately renders a bone-chilling portrait of money, betrayal, and murder, written with the pace and propulsive power of a thriller.
Based on a vast trove of unpublished documents, bags of discarded police evidence, and interviews with hundreds of insiders, this heart-stopping international investigation uncovers one of the most important — and terrifying — geopolitical stories of our time. -
Putin’s People
- By: Catherine Belton
- Narrator: Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
- Length: 18 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 23, 2020
- Language: English
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4.19(3865 ratings)
4.19(3865 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0032.99 USD“This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades.” –Peter Frankopan, Financial“This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades.” –Peter Frankopan, Financial Times
Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it?
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin’s reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory expose of the KGB’s revanche–a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.
Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach–and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match–Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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The Lost Pianos of Siberia
- By: Sophy Roberts
- Narrator: Catherine Bailey
- Length: 9 hours 9 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: September 10, 2020
- Language: English
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3.99(891 ratings)
3.99(891 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDSiberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos–grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenthSiberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.
Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos–grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.
How these pianos traveled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is a testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia is largely a story of music in this fascinating place, following Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of different instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful–and peppered with pianos.
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Putinomics
- By: Chris Miller
- Narrator: Traber Burns
- Length: 8 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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3.96(211 ratings)
3.96(211 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0016.95 USDWhen Vladimir Putin first took power in 1999, he was a little-known figure ruling a country that was reeling from a decade and a half of crisis. In the years since, he has reestablished Russia as a great power. How did he do it? What principles haveWhen Vladimir Putin first took power in 1999, he was a little-known figure ruling a country that was reeling from a decade and a half of crisis. In the years since, he has reestablished Russia as a great power. How did he do it? What principles have guided Putin’s economic policies? What patterns can be discerned? In this new analysis of Putin’s Russia, Chris Miller examines its economic policy and the tools Russia’s elite have used to achieve its goals. Miller argues that despite Russia’s corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin’s economic strategy has been surprisingly successful.
Explaining the economic policies that underwrote Putin’s two-decades-long rule, Miller shows how, at every juncture, Putinomics has served Putin’s needs by guaranteeing economic stability and supporting his accumulation of power. Even in the face of Western financial sanctions and low oil prices, Putin has never been more relevant on the world stage.
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Putin’s Playbook
- By: Rebekah Koffler
- Narrator: Joyce Sternton
- Length: 13 hours 9 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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3.95(157 ratings)
3.95(157 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDPoliticians and pundits on both sides of the aisle have accused Russia of interfering with our elections and our intelligence agencies. But the war Russia is waging against America is very different from anything you have heard in the press, asPoliticians and pundits on both sides of the aisle have accused Russia of interfering with our elections and our intelligence agencies. But the war Russia is waging against America is very different from anything you have heard in the press, as Russian-born US intelligence expert Rebekah Koffler reveals.
In Putin’s Playbook, Koffler details how Vladimir Putin is orchestrating a wide-ranging, multifaceted campaign to retake his country’s role as a super-power and to defeat America in the process. Koffler explains the Putin-ordered five-point master plan to defeat America, which includes spies, satellite killers, bombers, lasers, undersea cable cutters, cyber trolls, nuclear missiles, assassinations, and special techniques that Russia uses to distort Americans’ perceptions of reality. Koffler also reveals how Moscow plans to turn our strengths–such as our open, democratic society, the technology that pervades every sphere of our lives, and our aversion to war casualties–into vulnerabilities.
Koffler explores the military components of Russia’s strategy, including its powerful arsenal of conventional and nuclear weapons and the advanced new weaponry unveiled the day after the 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit. She details why Moscow views America’s dependency on satellite technology for military operations as our country’s “Achilles’ heel” and alerts readers to the newly erected National Center for State Defense, a wartime structure. Finally, there is a discussion of why Moscow violated the US-Russian Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The picture is clear, warns Koffler: Putin is mobilizing his country for the “inevitable” war.
Koffler reminds us it’s imperative that the full extent of the Russian threat be revealed, both to those who are increasingly concerned and those who are just beginning to feel uneasy about foreign interference in, and manipulation of, our daily lives. The “warning system,” as Dan Coats, director of National Intelligence, declared, is “blinking red.”
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Checkpoint Charlie
- By: Iain MacGregor
- Narrator: Dugald Bruce Lockhart
- Length: 10 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
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3.94(468 ratings)
3.94(468 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDA “constantly captivating…well-researched and often moving” (The Wall Street Journal) history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the USSR duringA “constantly captivating…well-researched and often moving” (The Wall Street Journal) history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the USSR during the Cold War.
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In the early 1960s, East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least five thousand people attempt to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it.
In 1989, the East German leadership buckled in the face of a civil revolt that culminated in half a million East Berliners demanding an end to the ban on free movement. The world’s media flocked to capture the moment which, perhaps more than any other, signaled the end of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie had been the epicenter of global conflict for nearly three decades.
Now, “in capturing the essence of the old Cold War [MacGregor] may just have helped us to understand a bit more about the new one” (The Times, London)–the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the world throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and USSR, highlighting such important global figures as Eisenhower, Stalin, JFK, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedung, Nixon, Reagan, and other politicians of the period. He also includes never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; children who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost loved ones trying to escape over it; military policemen and soldiers who guarded the checkpoints; CIA, MI6, and Stasi operatives who oversaw operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie. -
When the World Stopped to Listen
- By: Stuart Isacoff
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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3.83(60 ratings)
3.83(60 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDApril of 1958–the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged:April of 1958–the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit.
This is the story of what unfolded that spring–for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome. It is a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most remarkable events in musical history, filled with political intrigue and personal struggle as artists strove for self-expression and governments jockeyed for prestige. And, at the core of it all: the value of artistic achievement, the supremacy of the heart, and the transcendent freedom that can be found, through music, even in the darkest moments of human history.
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Trump/Russia
- By: Seth Hettena
- Narrator: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 8 hours 30 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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3.71(243 ratings)
3.71(243 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDIs the forty-fifth president of the United States under the control of a foreign power? Award-winning Associated Press reporter Seth Hettena untangles the story of Donald Trump’s long involvement with Russia in damning detail–includingIs the forty-fifth president of the United States under the control of a foreign power? Award-winning Associated Press reporter Seth Hettena untangles the story of Donald Trump’s long involvement with Russia in damning detail–including new reporting never before published.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the relationship between members of Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives continues, there is growing evidence that Trump has spent decades cultivating ties to corrupt Russians and the post-Soviet state.
In Trump / Russia: A Definitive History, Seth Hettena chronicles the many years Trump has spent wooing Russian money and power. From the collapse of his casino empire–which left Trump desperate for cash–and his first contacts with Russian deal-makers and financiers, on up to the White House, Hettena reveals the myriad of shady people, convoluted dealings, and strange events that suggest how indebted to Russia our forty-fifth president might be.
Using deeply researched reporting, along with newly uncovered information, court documents, and exclusive interviews with investigators and FBI agents, Hettena provides an expansive and essential primer to the Trump/Russia scandal, leaving no stone unturned.
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- Previous 11 Best Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Political Science Books
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Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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