Books by Howard Amos
“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.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Political Scientist
Interviews where books by Howard Amos were recommended
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1
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire
by Howard Amos -
2
The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin
by Lucy Ash -
3
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
by Benjamin Nathans -
4
Patriot: A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel -
5
To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power
by Sergey Radchenko -
6
‘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 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.
