Books by Owen Matthews
Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine
by Owen Matthews
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Pushkin House Prize, for the best nonfiction book about Russia
“This is a remarkable book. Owen Matthews is a very experienced journalist with a quarter of a century history of working as the Moscow correspondent of various world media. He’s well-known to the Russia-watching community and he has written a number of books. In my personal opinion, this book has the best possible title: Overreach. It’s one of those cases where a word is spot on. It symbolizes the whole complex thing in just one word…You have a nice little plan which you’re sure will succeed. You have done the same thing before, and it went fine. Then you do it again, but on a larger scale, and everything collapses around your ears. You have overplayed your hand.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize
Ekaterina Schulmann, Political Scientist
“The author, Owen Matthews, deals with the biography of Sorge in ways others haven’t. He goes to the sources; he goes to the archives. It’s a contribution in that sense. But it’s also one of the first books—along with Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor—in the genre of serious research but popularly written biographies of Russian spies. The majority of what is written about them is written in Russia, and now with Putin in power for close to 20 years, this is a very popular genre. It presents the Soviet intelligence agents as heroes. Owen Matthews’s work is much more balanced. It has bigger questions, about the character of the person, about the political landscape, about the choices that he made, about the state using intelligence but ignoring the information that came from it. That’s the kind of approach you don’t find in 99.9% of the books about the Soviet spies. In that sense, it’s an important book.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize
Serhii Plokhy, Historian
Interviews where books by Owen Matthews were recommended
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1
The Return of the Russian Leviathan
by Sergei Medvedev & Stephen Dalziel (translator) -
2
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
by Bathsheba Demuth -
3
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
by Kate Brown -
4
Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
by Brian Boeck -
5
This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia
by Joan Neuberger -
6
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
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.
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1
Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine
by Owen Matthews -
2
Russia's War
by Jade McGlynn -
3
Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
by Natasha Lance Rogoff -
4
Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg
by Olga Petri -
5
Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR
by Tricia Starks -
6
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
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.