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The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess

The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura

Trotsky in Fiction

10 books — 1 voter

Central European Avant-Gardes by Timothy O. Benson

Constructivism Reading List

37 books — 2 voters

Siege of Leningrad

16 books — 17 voters

Source*Forged Armor by Paul J. Bartusiak

Best Russian Espionage Books (fiction)

40 books — 15 voters

The Genius Under the Table by Eugene Yelchin

Children's Books About Soviet Jewry

14 books — 3 voters

Baboushka and the Three Kings by Ruth Robbins

The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Alexander Pushkin

The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship by Arthur Ransome

Tour of Russia

92 books — 23 voters

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Books to Celebrate Black History Month (and Read All Year-Round)

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Quotes Tagged “Soviet”

“ I left the door open for Aliyev. I thought, he won't let Russia back in. Remember, Soviet Russia had crushed him and thrown him out. ...more ”
― Ebulfez Elchibey

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“ [T]he Afghan war was the folly of the crowd of senile old men who were in charge in the late U.S.S.R. And they were, literally, senile. By 1979 the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee resembled our very own Geriatric Park. According to official figures, over the ten years of the war, we lost 15,000 people. According to a study of officers of the General Staff, the total was 26,000. Nobody has any idea how many Afghans were killed; the estimates vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The overwhelmin [T]he Afghan war was the folly of the crowd of senile old men who were in charge in the late U.S.S.R. And they were, literally, senile. By 1979 the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee resembled our very own Geriatric Park. According to official figures, over the ten years of the war, we lost 15,000 people. According to a study of officers of the General Staff, the total was 26,000. Nobody has any idea how many Afghans were killed; the estimates vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The overwhelming majority were civilians. More than 5 million people became refugees. The war sucked huge financial resources out of a U.S.S.R. that was rapidly becoming impoverished. At the same time it undermined morale both in the army and in the country at large. General Secretary Brezhnev and his generals who dreamed all this up wanted to play geopolitical games in pursuit of superiority over the United States, but in the end they only inflicted a mortal wound on their own nation. The Afghan war was momentous not only for us but for the rest of the world as well. We are experiencing its direct consequences to this day. To a significant extent, current Islamic extremism grew out of it. Responding to the criminal stupidity of the Soviet leaders, the U.S. government behaved no less stupidly by doing its utmost to turn a war of the Afghan mujahideen against the U.S.S.R. into an Islamic jihad. Back then, in the 1980s, volunteers from all over the Middle East flocked to the region, and the war changed from being a confrontation between socialism and capitalism, as the Soviet Union insisted it was, into a holy war against infidels. Only the notion that people who had taken up arms in defense of their religion could be switched off by a political decision, that you could say, "Okay, guys, that's enough. We've won, let's all go home," was disastrously mistaken. It was not enough for people who had risen up under the green banners of Islam simply to drive out the Soviet troops. The slogans that had inspired them were something they really believed in. Having driven out the U.S.S.R., they demanded the transformation of Afghanistan into a country governed under sharia law. Osama bin Laden, to whom the Americans had donated money and weapons, was already mutating into their enemy, because the two sides' aims were diverging. The United States was losing interest and no longer wished to finance jihad. For a religious fanatic, however, those who are not with us are against us. It was in Afghanistan, where they had gone to wage a holy war, that the leaders of the Islamic State like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became who they were. That war is continuing even today. ...more ”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

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