New Book ‘The Return of Russia’: Podcasts and Live Events
MY NEW BOOK, The Return of Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin is published in the US and the UK on January 27 as a hardback and eBook. I will be doing live events in the UK in the coming weeks, including at the...
Out Now: The BBC And The Challenge of Reporting from Cold War Moscow
I have written a chapter for this new book, Conflict Resolution and the Cold War: Media Encounters Across the Iron Curtain published on 22nd January. My contribution is called, The next most important British personage in Moscow? The BBC and Soviet Union during the early decades of the Cold...
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,...
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...
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...
Reporting on The Putsch to Save Soviet Power: Moscow, August 19, 1991
To mark the anniversary of the attempted coup in Moscow on August 19, 1991, I am sharing an extract from Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin that covers those days that decided the fate of the dying Soviet Union. DECLARING THAT GORBACHEV had resigned for health...
Alexander Werth Reporting from Stalingrad in World War II–Conclusion
This is the second and final part of my article on Alexander Werth’s reporting from the Soviet Union during World War II. You can read the first part here, and the whole article on the website of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television where it was first...
Book Review: ‘How Finland Survived Stalin’ by Kimmo Rentola
I have not posted on here for some weeks because research for my next book, on Russia and The West since the end of the Cold War, has been my priority. I have, though, done some journalism, a review of How Finland Survived Stalin (yale.edu). I have published the...