"In 1999, the "Family" surrounding Boris Yeltsin went looking for a successor to the ailing and increasingly unpopular president. Vladimir Putin, with very little governmental or administrative experience--he'd been deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, and briefly, director of the secret police--nevertheless seemed the perfect choice: a "faceless" creature whom Yeltsin and his cronies could mold in their own image. Russia and an infatuated West were determined...

The first edition of The New Cold War was published to great critical acclaim. Edward Lucas has established himself as a top expert in the field, appearing on numerous programs, including Lou Dobbs, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, CNN, and NPR.
Since The New Cold War was first published in February 2008, Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, and reforms have fizzled. In this revised and

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"It is impossible to think of Russia today without considering Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world and dominates Western media coverage of Russia to an extraordinary extent. What kind of country has emerged from Russia's post-Soviet transformations, and where might it go in future? Russia without Putin culminates in an arresting analysis of the country's foreign policy--identifying...

Vladimir Putin is making all sorts of headlines right now--unfortunately it seems to be mostly bad press. Learn about Putin's early life, how he became one of Russia's strongest presidents, and what has made him so controversial in current politics. Primary sources with accompanying questions, multiple prompts, timeline, index, and glossary also included. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Core Library is an imprint...

A political freedom fighter who paid the ultimate price for his convictions recounts his political career, the many attempts on his life and the lives of the people closest to him and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.

"The stunning story of Russia's slide back into a dictatorship--and how the West is now paying the price for allowing it to happen, "--Amazon.com.

From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has travelled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir Putin's friends, foes, and colleagues, government officials, business tycoons, mobsters, and ordinary Russian citizens. 'Fragile Empire' is the fruit of Judah's thorough research: a probing assessment of Putin's rise to power and what it has meant for Russia...

"America under Donald Trump. Russia under Vladimir Putin. Many have ridiculed them. None have done so with such scathing wit as Mikhail Iossel. From a youth spent in the USSR to a life remade in the USA, Iossel shares the brunt of this experience on Facebook, where thousands follow his blistering posts on Trump's America and Putin's Russia, and his lyrical, eerily timely reflections on life under totalitarianism. Notes from Cyberground brings together...

"Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnic group, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it has been subject to invasion by outsiders, from Vikings to Mongols, from Napoleon's French to Hitler's Germans. In order to forge an identity, it has mythologized its past to unite its people and to signal strength to outsiders. In a Short history of Russia, Mark Galeotti explores the history of this fascinating,...

Entering the shady world of what he calls "violent entrepreneurship," Vadim Volkov explores the economic uses of violence and coercion in Russia in the 1990s. Violence has played, he shows, a crucial role in creating the institutions of a new market economy. The core of his work is competition among so-called violence-managing agencies-criminal groups, private security services, private protection companies, and informal protective agencies associated...