Our Dear Friends in Moscow: A Story of Russia And A Warning to the West
This post reviews Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (Public Affairs, 2025) RIGHT FROM THE DAWN OF THIS CENTURY, in the early days of their careers as journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan saw where power was...
New Books Network Podcast on ‘Assignment Moscow’
On 18 August, I spoke to Paul Starobin for his ‘America and Beyond’ podcast (part of the New Books Network). Paul and I spoke for almost an hour about Assignment Moscow, and more. We talked about the experiences of foreign correspondents in Russia during Russia’s revolutionary year of 1917,...
The Story My Journalist Friend From Gaza Never Wanted to Write: Their Family Is Starving
Rafah, southern Gaza, October 2003. Photo © James Rodgers THE PICTURE ABOVE is from Gaza. It was taken more than 20 years ago. The world’s shame at what is happening there now will last much longer than that. There are still small ways in which we can help. This...
Simple And Moving: In Ukraine, A Story of Deaths, Not Degrees
CHANGING KREMLIN POLICY SHAPED MY EDUCATION. In the fall of 1984, I went to university in England to study Modern Languages: Russian and French. The Cold War was in its most terrifying stage since the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. The United States and Soviet Union were engaged in...
New publication ‘The Cold War’ from History Today
Illustration from the History Today website HISTORY TODAY magazine, where I am a member of the editorial advisory board, has just published a special edition, ‘The Cold War’. In the words of the editors, the special edition is, ‘a selection of articles taken from the archive of a magazine...
New Book: ‘The Return of Russia’ out January 2026
MY NEXT BOOK, The Return of Russia: from Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin, will be published by Yale University Press in January 2026. It is the result of four years’ work in the sense that I first proposed the idea in January 2022, the month...
Spying on the West: The Illegals by Shaun Walker–Review
A Soviet-era crest showing Vladimir Lenin, Volgograd, Russia, March 2019 © James Rodgers This latest post is an extract from my review of Shaun Walker’s The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West. The review appears in the current issue of History Today. Shaun...
In West London, Remembering Red Square: War Then and Now
This latest post is an extract from a piece I wrote for The New European about a memorial near my home in west London to people killed in a missile strike during the Second World War, on my memories of watching military parades on Red Square, and how those...
‘The World of the Cold War’ by Vladislav Zubok–book review
A section of the Berlin Wall, February 2023 © James Rodgers IN HIS IMPRESSIVE NEW HISTORY of this ‘confrontation–the greatest that the world has seen so far’, Vladislav Zubok shows us a leader in the Kremlin who ‘assumed he could act like the Russian tsars had done in the...
Grozny 2000: the Start of Putin’s 25 Years of War
This post is an extract from an article published earlier this week by The New European . I wrote it to mark the 25th anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s first victory in a Russian presidential election. The day of the vote, I was reporting for the BBC from Grozny, a...