Five nonfiction titles that explain modern Russia

Charles Hecker has spent forty years travelling and working in the Soviet Union and Russia. He has worked as a journalist and a geopolitical risk consultant, and has lived in Miami, Moscow and London. A fluent Russian speaker, he holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Hecker's new book is Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia.

At Lit Hub he tagged five nonfiction titles that explain modern Russia, with a "focus on the Soviet and Russian periods, and the seismic transition between the two." One title on the list:

David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

Hedrick Smith’s The Russians—the landmark, 1976 best-seller that Americans once read to ponder the character of the Soviet citizen—is hard to find on bookshelves. David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is its encyclopedic, compelling, and entirely worthy heir. “This book, after all,” Remnick writes, “chronicles the last days of one of the cruelest regimes in human history.”

Once a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and now editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, Remnick was in Russia for the collapse of the Soviet Union. His reporting, insights and robust yet nuanced writing—a combination that won the book the Pulitzer Prize—reveals the depressing, corrosive rot of the Soviet construct followed by the ungoverned, denial-laced euphoria of the new Russian Federation.

Remnick wrote Lenin’s Tomb in 1993; I took this book with me when I moved to Moscow in 1994, and devoured it while my own reporter’s notebooks were still pristine. It has stayed with me ever since.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue