The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize

Russia is a lot in the news at the moment, but the Pushkin House Book Prize has been around for a while. For those who don’t know it, could you say a bit about the prize and what kind of books you, as judges, were looking for?

The Pushkin House Book Prize has been awarded annually since 2013 to celebrate the best nonfiction book written in relation to Russia. Indeed, the judges’ attention extends beyond Russia. Russia’s imperial legacies, for example, are very much on the agenda now. Given Russia’s imperial past and present, there are other countries in that region that are very much interlinked with Russia’s history as well as its present day.

So the prize is for the best nonfiction books in relation to Russia and its neighbourhood, I would say.

And are you looking for books that shed light on the present or not necessarily?

We’re looking for the ‘best’ books that were published. How do we assess that? Let’s start with the jury composition. Usually, the jury is composed of at least five people. They come from different backgrounds and disciplines: some have worked in politics, others are writers and poets. Some are political scientists, others are Slavists and professors of literature. There is a range of experts and professionals in the jury.

The way I see it, this diversity of the jury is the strength of the selection process. Everyone needs to evaluate for themselves—based on their hearts and minds—what their reaction to the book is. It’s about the resonance that each jury member might feel specifically. Everyone has to first make that decision for themselves.

Of all the books that are submitted for the prize, every member of the jury comes up with a list of five or six books that are dear to them. We see which of the books get the most votes and then we discuss them. If someone didn’t notice a specific book—then you have a chance to bring it to everyone’s attention and argue why this is an important book. Then we collectively come to the decision of what the shortlist should be.

So the prize is not necessarily about the present issues, but of course, we inhabit the same social and political space and respond to issues that we think are important today, whether they are historically grounded or contemporary politics-focused.

Let’s turn to the books on this year’s shortlist, which look fantastic. First up is Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire by Howard Amos, which takes us to a part of Russia near the border with Estonia. Can you tell me a bit about the book and why it’s important?

Howard Amos’s book is very heartfelt. He’s a journalist and he has written it with a keen eye for detail, but also for the breadth of coverage. The book brings together in a very holistic way the history and cultural markers of a specific region, Pskov, which used to be the beating heart of Russia. This is where Russia started out, so to speak. Even before the state was formed around Moscow, Pskov existed as a city and was one of the trading posts of the Hanseatic League.

Amos describes what’s happening there today, which is a very sad story of rural decline, of poverty and social degradation, of bones buried in the ground in a very orderless manner, of orphans living in various institutions that are in need of help—and that the author himself was involved with at certain times. So it’s a very intimate look at contemporary Pskov.

It’s psychologically very attuned and allows you to see it through the eyes of Howard Amos himself. He speaks to individuals, visits those villages and institutions, and engages in their daily life. He does it almost in a Buddhist fashion: he just observes what happens and doesn’t make judgments. We find out what’s happening there: the pain, the nostalgia, the greatness that people refer to in the past, the sacred values that individuals who live in the villages in those lands refer to when they talk about World War Two, for example. This observational acuteness brings out for the reader an understanding of why Russians might be supporting Putin, why they so senselessly support the war in Ukraine, and how the conditions in which they live, in a way, predispose them to feel or think in certain ways.

It’s a very nuanced portrayal of the enormous difficulties, the trauma, the everyday problems that people live with. The book looks at them as human beings, without making a judgment that they are either brainwashed or traumatized…Well, you can see they are traumatised, but you don’t put a psychological diagnosis on them. You just see them as human beings who have had difficult lives and look to their history and their political leaders as a potential foundation or a point of strength for them. It’s a very nuanced appreciation of a traumatized, impoverished part of Russia today.

It sounds amazing. What were you saying about buried bones?

There are 17 chapters in that book, with short, very accessibly written stories that provide more color and nuance to our understanding. There is a chapter called ‘rising bones’ and it tells the story of the exhumation of human remains left behind in the German military cemetery during the battles of World War Two. The remains still have their identity tags, which allows one to figure out whose bones they are. The German organization Volksbund has been working throughout Russia, including the Pskov region in particular, on reburying German soldiers so that they all have their individually marked graves.

For Russia, it’s also about money. The Germans pay the local authorities for constructing stadiums or sports arenas in these dug-out places. So you have issues around the sacred memory of war, but they are also intertwined with poverty, money, and development.

Let’s go to the next book, The Baton and the Cross by Lucy Ash, which looks at the Russian Orthodox Church over the last millennium. This one sounds fascinating too. What can you tell me about this book?

Lucy Ash is a journalist with a lot of knowledge and understanding of Russia. She brings her own personal experiences into this book, and that makes it very readable. She takes a very panoramic view of the relationship between the state and the Orthodox Church, between the political and the religious powers, starting from the 7th century. This is the time of Olga, the grandmother of Vladimir the Great. She was the first to be baptized, but Christianity was not yet accepted at that time. Vladimir was baptized and became an Orthodox Christian in 988.

The book focuses on a long, complex, and multilayered story about the power relationships and the mutual interdependencies between the tsars representing the earthly power, on the one hand, and the religious leaders deriving their symbolic power from connection to God, on the other.

One important line that emerges in the book is how many times the Orthodox Church was on the brink of extinction. The biggest story there is the events of the 20th century, under Stalin, when thousands of churches were destroyed and priests were killed or sent to the gulag. The continuing threat to the Church has been there through history, but somehow the Church and the religious leaders have always found ways to adjust, to come back, to be useful and become very closely integrated with the state.

The book also brings us to the present moment, when Ash looks at the link between Patriarch Kirill and Putin. In the 1990s, there wasn’t much of a link between the state and the Church, but in the 21st century, the whole foundation of Putinism became very much interlinked with religion and reliance on the Orthodox Church. That proximity and interdependence have grown and have been very much on display during the war in Ukraine. The war has been blessed by the Orthodox church, also in a very literal sense, with priests blessing soldiers, tanks, and other weapons.

But the historical canvas is more complicated. It shows the interdependencies, but also the church’s vulnerability to the political power. It’s a very important book for understanding that the contemporary Russian political regime builds itself on sacred and religious values and that makes it strong. The book also shows the social yearning for those values, for religion, for something sacred. Again, there is this appreciation of humanity and how complex human beings are. The book is drawing us away from a simplistic view of Russians.

The book shows Patriarch Kirill and the Orthodox Church as very materialistically driven. In the 1990s, the church used a lot of loopholes to become rich through trade, getting special export and import quotas for tobacco and other goods. You see the materialism and the manipulation. That brings us back to the first book, by Howard Amos, where you see these vulnerable human beings who are looking for something to hold on to, for values they can rely on. Ash shows how these values are manipulated and used in politics.

The book is very much focused on institutions: the church and the state, political power, and religion. But behind the story, there is a space for appreciating the importance of religious values in life and how they’re used by politicians to legitimize their rule.

So has there been a surge of people joining the Orthodox Church since the end of communism?

I wouldn’t say that. On the one hand, you have this strong recognition that ‘We’re Christians and there are certain values that are important for us.’ On the other hand, when sociologists study how often people go to church or practice religion in a systematic, regular way, the numbers are not very high.
It’s this identification and psychological appreciation of religion as part of your identity that’s very strong. It’s not only about Christian Russians, actually. In various parts of Russia, there are many Muslims. In the republics of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, for example, or in the Caucasus, you also see a strong role of religion in social life.

It has been happening over the past 20 or so years as a response to the disorientation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Russians are all going to church these days.’ They aren’t. Nonetheless, it’s important for their identity. They see themselves as Orthodox, and that is an important part of who they are.

Let’s move on to book number three, which is To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, a very Russian title, it has to be said. This is by Benjamin Nathans, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s about the Soviet dissidents and has won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize. Can you explain what’s so good about this book?

This book is a very important, groundbreaking study of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, not as a group of people with values that were pro-Western or liberal, but as a group of people who grew up as second-generation Soviet citizens and within that Soviet system, found the space and impulse to question the foundations of how that system worked in their time. They came up with very original strategies for confronting the issues they were not happy about.

So it’s about this homegrown civil rights movement. They didn’t rely on John Locke or the ideas of the founding fathers in the United States or the Glorious Revolution in the UK, and the ideological foundations of Western liberalism. They came from a belief in the system they lived in, and used a legalist approach to keep the Soviet leaders true to their word, the norms stated in the Soviet constitution, in the Soviet laws, etc. So if the constitution said that the government works for the people, and the people are part of decision-making, then they would put that up as a slogan and say, ‘Let’s make this true.’ And they would point out the places where it was not true.

The movement itself emerged in response to the trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, setting off a chain reaction that turned into this Soviet dissident movement. They had written satirical stories that didn’t criticize the Soviet regime directly, but the KGB decided to put them on trial for anti-Soviet propaganda. During these trials, information was very tightly controlled. People who supported the writers tried to advocate for transparency, saying, ‘Look at our constitution, look at our laws. People have the right to know what is happening and what they’re being tried for.’ But any type of transparency was viewed as dangerous for the system.

That strategy of holding the Soviet government accountable to the words that were inscribed in the Soviet laws and constitution was an important innovation that these Soviet citizens, who became known as dissidents, developed.

The book is based on meticulous archival work. Nathans enables a very different appreciation for the Soviet Union as an alternative system that existed in juxtaposition to the capitalist West. Things were developing from inside, but there was also interaction. The Soviet leaders cared about what the West thought of them and the USSR, what the media were saying about the Soviet regime and its relationships with its people. Any poking of the holes in the facade that the Soviet regime was trying to keep up vis-à-vis their domestic audience was taken in a very sensitive way by the regime.

So this group of dissidents came up with original ideas for how to confront the regime, but also engaged with the West, and the West helped them to put pressure on the Soviet government.

But they were not Western. That’s a very important point in this book. Frequently, dissidents were presented not necessarily as Western spies, but as not really belonging to Soviet society. What Nathans shows is that these were people who had been brought up, educated, and raised within the Soviet system. Some of them were mathematicians or highly educated individuals, often with a technical education. What distinguished them from the rest of the people in the Soviet Union was that in their family histories, they often had parents or grandparents who were either repressed, went to a gulag, or had other highly traumatic personal stories in their relationship with the Soviet regime.

So there were some elements in their personal identity that brought them to the place where they found themselves, where they questioned how the system operated and tried to find ways to change it, to criticize it, and to use whatever ideological and infrastructural means that they had to try to bring change.

Their strategy makes sense. Looking at China today, on paper, a communist constitution and laws can look very good.

Exactly. It was the same in the Soviet Union. On paper, the rights that the citizens had looked very good, and that’s what they tried to use. They said, ‘Look what is written here. Let’s be true to this.’

What’s very interesting is that Nathans recounts the conversations. He brings up in minute detail exchanges between some of these individuals, sometimes with the authorities in the KGB, and sometimes in schools. Sometimes there were reprimands for the positions taken by teachers, for example, and there was a back and forth. You see how the words that these dissidents uttered and the arguments they brought took the other side by surprise. There was nothing the authorities could answer because what they were saying was true according to the law. In those situations, the other side had to not exactly give up on formal legal issues, but basically say that politics trumps formality, and sometimes even that politics trumps the law.

This is the big issue: does politics trump the law? That was Lenin’s thinking: politics trumps any other logic and reasoning. The dissidents who had studied Lenin and Marx were pretty disappointed in Lenin. Nathans brings such incredible detail to the stories of how these individuals became who they were, how, through studying Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Marx and Engels, they took on themselves this mantle of interpreting what was supposed to be.

In a way, these individuals showed incredible civic responsibility for the fate of their country. They studied the foundational texts and, based on those, came to a certain appreciation, in the 1960s, of what was wrong in their country and how it should be changed. We sometimes talk about homo Sovieticus, the type of new Soviet individual expected to sacrifice themselves and dedicate their life to their motherland. This is what you have with these individuals. That’s what they did. That’s one of the interesting paradoxes that Nathans’s book allows the reader to unpack: they were the flesh and blood emerging from within the Soviet system.

You mention meticulous research, but the fact this book won a Pulitzer suggests it’s also very readable.

It is very readable. All the books that we have chosen for our shortlist are superbly written. In the first two, you have the personal stories of journalists integrated into the writing. In this book, you also have parts that are literally conversational, capturing dialogues and interrogations that took place on Lubyanka between the KGB agents and these dissidents. This is not jargony, heavily theoretical stuff. These are very accessible stories that help you understand what was happening.

Let’s go on to Patriot, a memoir by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (1976-2024). It was probably my favourite book of last year. Could you briefly say what it’s about, for anyone who hasn’t read it?

Towards the end of Patriot, Navalny asks what this book is about – for him, personally. Is it an autobiography or is it a monument?

It starts as an autobiography of his life: how he grew up, the various military towns he lived in, where he spent his summers in Ukraine, and what the best time he had was. He then goes through his political evolution in Russia, and then the most dramatic pages of the book and most transformative reading is when Navalny writes from prison. It’s his prison diaries. Then, that prison diary turns into his testament, the last words of a person who knows where this is going.

Of all the books, Patriot is an example of embodied knowledge that a reader can appreciate. While the autobiographical part of the book is from memory and reconstruction, the prison diaries bring the reader inside that reality. And the main thing that you appreciate as a result of that reading is the strength of the human spirit. By the end, you might even view Navalny as a Jesus Christ; there are similarities. Jesus Christ took the blame for everyone, he took up all human sins onto his own body. In a way, Navalny is doing the same from a Russian perspective. In order to change his country, he brings himself to the altar and sacrifices his body, but his spirit…I want to cry now…He sacrifices his body but his spirit is there, and his spirit doesn’t die.

You see the evolution of that spirit through the prison diary. The pain from the torture that he undergoes is very much on display and affects his writing. There are long silences. There is a changing narrative and towards the end it rises. When it’s his third year in prison and he’s taken to the Arctic as the last stage of his imprisonment and of his torture, you see the rise in that spirit. You could say the whole evolution of the book turns it into a monument to the strength of the human spirit. It is incredibly powerful.

It also speaks to the previous book, about the dissidents who were also homegrown, non-conformists who tried to better their country, who didn’t settle for the corruption, for the stagnation, for the hypocrisy, for the poverty, and who were trying to fight the system. Each and every one of them looked at themselves as individuals fighting the system. It wasn’t an organised opposition, it was the circumstances that brought them together.

It’s the same with Navalny, where that individual human spirit rises to an incredible degree. That also brings us back to Lucy Ash’s book, The Baton and the Cross. Orthodox belief has a mystical element. There is a lack of rationality, a strength of conviction and spirit that defines orthodoxy as a religion outside its institutionalized and politically implicated nature. You see individuals like Navalny growing out of that Slavic, orthodox, strong-spirited tradition, and it explains the whole story.

I do see different books on our shortlist speaking to each other and reinforcing each other. It’s a strong suggestion that you should read all the books, but they will all enrich you.

So Patriot, on the one hand, is sad to read, on the other hand, is transformative and illuminating, and gives hope about the strength that an individual can have.

What I also found interesting were the details of how he was functioning within the Russian political system, how he was fighting it. It’s so incredibly sad. When he’s recovering in Germany from being poisoned, you’re thinking, ‘Why are you going back to Russia? You’re going to be killed.’ At the same time,  he has a great sense of humor. He’s always making jokes.

Yes, till the very end.

The other incredible thing is his appreciation for his wife, Yulia Navalnaya. They stood on the same ground, which was not to focus on your immediate personal family needs, but on the public good. Navalny was sacrificing his wife and his family, but they’re all on the same page. So in prison, when he meets with her, he says, ‘It looks like I might not be able to get out of here.’ And she says, ‘Yes, it looks like it. So let’s continue and not make a drama out of it.’ It’s this non-dramatizing acceptance of the outcome for what they believe in. The book shows the strength that Yulia Navalnaya had and gave to her husband as well. We’re not just talking about Alexei Navalny here, we’re talking about two energies, two individuals coming together and providing each other with the strength that was required to undergo this torturous and sacrificial path.

Let’s turn to book number five. This is To Run the World by Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and it’s about the Cold War. Tell me more.

It’s an incredible book. I have a lot of respect for the research that went into it, but it’s also written in a very engaging way. It’s the only book where I actually laughed out loud. It’s a very serious book about foreign policy, but the way Sergey Radchenko wrote his narrative…I wouldn’t say it’s light, but again, there’s humor. It’s not the humour that you have with Navalny, where you go with him on his torturous path. In this book, you’re seeing the fate of the world through the eyes of Soviet, Chinese, and American leaders, and yet it’s written with humor and a lightness of touch that you really appreciate.

The big question that Radchenko is asking is, ‘What were the drivers and the motives behind Soviet foreign policy? What motivated these individuals?’ He had access to newer archives that allowed him to really plunge into the psychology of decision-making and thinking and attitudes and behavior. He also looks at the psychology of the Chinese and, to some extent, the Americans. But I think the strength of the book is really from his understanding of the Soviets.

His answer to the question is that for the Soviets, it was not ideology that was the driving force, but a strong yearning for recognition and prestige. The Soviet leaders wanted the legitimacy of the claims they had—based on their ideology and grand vision of communism and international revolution, etc.—to be recognized by others. They wanted the greatness that they had given to themselves because of their faith in their system and ideology. So it’s about a yearning for status. In that sense, the book is, again, foundational. It’s an idea that is very important.

I wouldn’t say that Sergey was the first one to write about it. There has been research done on specific moments in the history of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s foreign policy, that looks at the importance of recognition. But this book looks at the entire Cold War period from the last months of World War Two through to Putin and his arrival to power. I haven’t seen such a nuanced archival research into the main events over a long period of time, looking at what the psychological drivers and motives and interests of the leaders were. This was quite an incredible feat he was able to accomplish.

There’s a difference between seeking recognition and status and the title of the book, which is ‘to run the world.’ Did they want to run the world?

During the Cold War, there was a desire to be a superpower. It’s about running the world along with the other superpower, the United States. The book starts with Stalin and Churchill, who have this famous exchange and divide up the territories at the end of World War Two and put that down on paper. This is the attitude that continues.

Then, when you get to Brezhnev, it’s about the recognition of Soviet influence and the Soviet superpower status. It goes through clashes, when the Soviets and the Chinese go through conflict. There was rivalry when Mao berated Khrushchev for giving up on this, giving up on that. Mao tried to bring up the Chinese leadership and the Chinese Revolution as the leader of international communism. But then Brezhnev was able to catch up and reclaim that mantle.

So it’s about running the world not as one hegemon, but alongside the other hegemon, the United States, and the struggle for recognition in that position. It’s not about the Soviets running the world, but speaking to the Americans as equals and recognizing each other’s spheres of influence. We have our satellites and clients, and you have your satellites and clients, let’s divide the world up and we can be on good terms. So it’s to run the world along with another big power. You’re right, that’s an important nuance that should be noted.

We’ve reached the last book on this year’s shortlist, ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’ about the Tatars in Crimea. This is another one that looks completely fascinating. It’s by Donald Rayfield, a historian at Queen Mary University of London. 

I would frame Donald Rayfield’s Seditious and Sinister Tribe as an example of an important historical study that destabilizes our very West-centric vision of international relations and world history. There was another important book that came out a few years ago by Ayse Zarakol that did the same. It was called Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders.

We live with a very Western-oriented view of how the world operates and how international society evolved after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It’s about Western values, it’s very Eurocentric, there’s colonialism. This is all part of our vision of how the world operates.

If you read A Seditious and Sinister Tribe, all of a sudden you understand that there were other important imperial formations and political powers about which we have forgotten entirely, or which we cannot appreciate because we don’t know much of that history.

The book shows how the Crimean khanate, which existed between the 14th and 18th centuries, was an important geopolitical power that played a role in economic and political dynamics in the region, along with the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There was complex diplomacy between these powers. The Crimean khanate made decisions on the economic flows, on slavery, etc. For four centuries, it was an important political formation.

The book also looks at what happened after. In the 19th century, Russia’s imperial drive brought it to Central Asia. With Crimea, it started even earlier, in the 18th century, with Catherine the Great extending the Russian Empire as the Ottoman Empire declined. That led to the Crimean khanate being gobbled up. Then, in the 20th century, there were the Stalinist policies towards the Crimean Tatars. They were driven out of Crimea and sent into exile in 1944. The story then brings us to 2014 and the annexation of Crimea.

There is this historical timeline of a declining community, a nation that’s under pressure from the Russian imperial drive that continues up until today, you could say.

But most of the book is about the Crimean khanate as an important geopolitical actor over those four centuries. It gives the political context of what was there before, but also brings up questions of where we’re at now. How did we get here? What happens to nations over time? How long will Europe, America, and Britain be around? How long is this setup going to continue, and what will happen a couple of centuries into the future? The book shows the impermanence, the change, and the dynamics in global affairs, with the focus on the specific successions, politics, and economics of that part of the world and a political entity that we in Europe don’t know much about.

Thank you so much. What an amazing set of books. I might need to read all of them.

Absolutely, you have to read all of them! I hope I’ve done them all justice. They’re incredible books.

The winner of the 2025 Pushkin House Prize will be announced on June 19th, 2025, at 6.30 pm in London. If you’d like to attend the ceremony, you can buy tickets and read more details here.

Other events taking place at Pushkin House include:
5th June – Russia Starts Here – with Howard Amos & Tom Parfitt
10th June – To Run the World – with Sergey Radchenko and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova
13th June Patriot panel discussion Arch Tait & Stephen Dalziel, and Alexander Gavrilov, Lisa Birger and Polly Jones
16th June – To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause – with Benjamin Nathans and Martin Bright
18th June – ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’ – with Donald Rayfield and Ekaterina Schulmann