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...
At The Frontline Club in London: 25 Years of Putin
Russian soldiers in Grozny. Chechnya, March 2000. © James Rodgers Are you in London on March 26? If so, please join us at the Frontline Club for a discussion marking 25 years since Vladimir Putin was first elected president of Russia.On 26 March 2000, I was reporting for the...
By Train Through Former Battlefields In A Newly Troubled Europe
War memorial at the Gare de L’Est, Paris. This post is an extract of my latest article in The New European. It’s published in the current issue, and reflects on a train journey through some of Europe’s former war zones at a time of fears for the future of...
Trump’s Ukraine Offer Gives Putin The Place He Wants in History
The White House, Washington DC, July 2024 © James Rodgers This piece was first published on the website of The Conversation on February 18, 2025. You can read that version here. The meeting in Saudi Arabia between senior delegations from the United States and Russia could be the first...
War and Memory in the Middle East, and West London
FOR TWO WINTERS I LIVED IN GAZA, 2003 and 2004. It was the time of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israel. It was cold. Gaza did not get much rain, but winter was wet: and the houses were made to lose heat, not retain it. For a...