The Soviet writer bore witness to the horrors of Russia’s World War Two and the Shoah — and deserves a place in literary history, says scholar Maxim D Shrayer. He recommends the best books by and about Vasily Grossman.

The Russian revolution was the beginning of the modern age, says award-winning author Roland Chambers. He tells us what Solzhenitsyn imagined Lenin was like, and about the children’s author who led a double life as a spy in Bolshevik Russia.

In Russia, it’s often fallen to writers to challenge conventions and speak the truth, says the translator and biographer Rosamund Bartlett. She makes a personal selection of some of the most exhilarating Russian short fiction.

Glorified by Russia, glossed over by the West, the siege of Leningrad is rarely seen for what it was – a tragic story of tremendous suffering and death. The author of a new book on the subject tells us what really happened there

Vladimir Putin has crafted a careful narrative about his rise to power and rescuing of Russia. The trouble, says author and academic Simon Pirani, is it isn’t true

Esteemed historian of the Soviet Union recommends five books on Communism, from novels and personal narratives to theoretical works.

The Dean of University College, Oxford, and specialist in late 20th-century Russian literature explores different writings on Solzhenitsyn — from Marxist critiques, to the politburo files, his life in the West and more.

Former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith chooses five great works on Russia’s doomed democracies

Acknowledged expert on the unresolved conflicts of the South Caucasus selects five books that encapsulate the fragility of the region and the impact of the desperate scramble for the spoils of the Soviet Union

Former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year discusses books that tell the story of Russia in the last century — from Soviet science fiction set in capitalist wastelands to Khrushchev as raconteur

Bilingual author and translator with his pick of the five must-reads by – and about – Nabokov. Says a revisionist biography of the writer is due, which comes to terms with the Jewish influence on his work

Author and former Reuters correspondent in Moscow chooses books on the Caucasus and says the only language Russia understands is unconditional surrender, whether they are ruled by the Tsars, the Communists or Putin

The author and academic talks about KGB tricks to get American victims of the Great Depression in Russia to take Soviet citizenship. ‘They had to hand over their American passports temporarily and never saw them again’

Eminent historian on pre-Soviet Russia with unique access to the Moscow archives says Dostoevsky’s Demons is about Russia’s future. ‘It’s about what has happened, and what’s going to happen … You smell it and taste it’

Rated by the British Library as among the top ten foreign poets based in London, Nigar Hasan-Zadeh discusses a range of books—from love stories, to poetry, to oil field reporting—to boost our insight into Azerbaijan.

Robert Service, Professor of Russian Studies at Oxford, when forced to choose between Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, says Stalin was definitely the worst of the lot. He takes a look at the dynamics of totalitarian Russia, gleaning insights from Thucydides to Orwell.

From Eisenstein to Tarkovsky, film scholar Ian Christie looks at the titans of Russian cinema and draws attention to the pre-Revolutionary Siberian gold merchant’s daughter who opened a cinema purely for the upper classes.

Dr Stephen Lucas is a partner in the banking group of an international law firm, Linklaters LLP and a student of Soviet law. He recommends books on communist legislation in the former USSR

Best-selling Australian author Thomas Keneally explains that the Cold War biographies couldn’t afford to say that Stalin was attractive, or that Lenin was magnetic, but they were, because otherwise people wouldn’t have followed them. He picks some great introductions to Russia.

Award winning reporter and novelist says there are no superlatives too superlative for Anna Politkovskaya, who, after three books and innumerable investigative reporting trips to Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow