Russia

Compassion from the Kremlin often proved as short-lived as its critics. In Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, Mark B. Smith finds that terror was a feature rather than a bug.

The Decembrist revolt of 1825 saw Russia’s nobility attempt to depose tsar Nicholas I. Dismissed as romantic idealists, they were driven by a bold vision for the future of the country.

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how Soviet civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.

In the chaos unleashed by the October Revolution, Mikhail Bulgakov found a past become fragmented and confused, and history the domain of madmen and devils.

In The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 Vladislav Zubok argues that circumstance rather than ideology shaped the clash between communism and capitalism.

Russia’s entry into the global economy was met with glee by international firms in the early 1990s. The exodus has been just as sudden.

In listening to the war’s loudest voices, Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare by Gregory Carleton drowns out the diversity of opinion.

Solomon Shereshevsky died on 1 May 1958. He dreamt of being a hero but achieved greatness of another kind.