• The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire by Howard Amos
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate by Donald Rayfield

The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova

The Pushkin House Book Prize is awarded annually for a nonfiction book that encourages “public understanding and intelligent debate about Russia.” Political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the six fantastic books shortlisted in 2025, illuminating different parts of Russia’s politics and history — from the memoir of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024, to a history of the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in propping up political regimes from the Middle Ages to the present.

  • The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize - Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews
  • The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize - Russia's War by Jade McGlynn
  • The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize - Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia by Natasha Lance Rogoff
  • The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize - Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg by Olga Petri
  • The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize - Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR by Tricia Starks
  • The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize - Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling by Ryan Tucker Jones

The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Ekaterina Schulmann

Since its invasion of Ukraine last year, Russia has been much in the news, with many of us struggling to better understand its politics, history, society and culture. Fortunately, we have the Pushkin House Book Prize, which every year celebrates the best nonfiction written about Russia and available in English. Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the books that made the 2023 shortlist.

  • The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize - The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev & Stephen Dalziel (translator)
  • The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize - Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth
  • The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize - Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown
  • The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize - Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov by Brian Boeck
  • The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize - This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Joan Neuberger
  • The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize - An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy

Every year since 2013 the Russian Book Prize run by Pushkin House, a UK charity, has carried out the important task  of drawing attention to books that “encourage public understanding and intelligent debate about the Russian-speaking world.” Here, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the books that made the 2020 shortlist.