The Russia House

In Moscow, highly classified military documents have been leaked. If they make it into the wrong hands, the consequences could be cataclysmic. Barley Blair, a bewildered, drink-marinated English publisher, becomes the unlikely recipient of the smuggled documents. Blair is hardly to the taste of the spymasters, yet he has to be used. John le Carré catches history in the act and gives us a magnificent thriller, a love story, an ethical puzzle, and a chilling portrayal of the Cold War. As the Iron Curtain begins to rust and crumble, Blair is left to sound a battle cry that may fall on deaf ears.

It is the third summer of Perestroika. Barley Blair, London publisher, receives a smuggled document from Moscow. It contains technical information of overwhelming importance. But is it genuine? Is the author genuine? A plant? A madman?

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

In Inside Out, author Glenn Williamson explains the award-winning development of St. Petersburg's first modern Class A office/retail center by a multinational team of Americans, Russians, Brits, Turks, and Finns. Inside Out provides a fascinating memoir of his experiences working as a developer in Russia in the 1990s while balancing a home life with a new baby son. With unique and astute anecdotes, it offers insights into Russia, its people, and its culture. Inside Out, funny and serious, sincere and sarcastic, narrates the anatomy of a real estate deal. Now, at a time when America and Russia consider ways to reset their relations, Williamson's story shows how actual players on all sides of a complex business and personal adventure looked for, and ultimately found, a common language.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A rich and revealing account of the turbulent relationship between the U.S. and Russia during the first post-Cold War years. . . . Essential for any understanding of this critical and even dangerous period.”—Elizabeth Drew “A fascinating memoir of a weirdly unpredictable world.”—The New York Review of Books In the eight years Bill Clinton was president, as Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, each one more horrifying than the last, Clinton and his foreign-policy team found they faced no greater task than helping to keep Russia stable and at peace with herself and her neighbors. Strobe Talbott’s mesmerizing account of this struggle reveals what a close-run thing this was, and how much the relationship between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin has been defined by the work of Bill Clinton. Written with a novelistic richness and energy, The Russia Hand is the first great book about war and peace in the post-Cold War world. It is also the one book anyone needs to understand Russia’s fateful transformation and future possibilities after ten years as a democracy.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.”—The Washington Post House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House. It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence. To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991—that it merely evolved, with Trump’s apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump’s sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia’s phoenix like rise from the ashes of the post–Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower. Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. This essential book is crucial to understanding the real powers at play in the shadows of today’s world. The appearance of key figures in this book—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater to name a few—ring with haunting significance in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report and as others continue to close in on the truth.

In Housing the New Russia, Jane R. Zavisca examines Russia’s attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of home ownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. The vision of an American-style market guided housing policy over the next two decades. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants, creating a nation of homeowners overnight. New financial institutions, modeled on the American mortgage system, laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages—and reverse the declining birth rate, another major concern—by subsidizing loans for young families. Imported housing institutions, however, failed to resonate with local conceptions of ownership, property, and rights. Most Russians reject mortgages, which they call "debt bondage," as an unjust "overpayment" for a good they consider to be a basic right. Instead of stimulating homeownership, privatization, combined with high prices and limited credit, created a system of "property without markets." Frustrated aspirations and unjustified inequality led most Russians to call for a government-controlled housing market. Under the Soviet system, residents retained lifelong tenancy rights, perceiving the apartments they inhabited as their own. In the wake of privatization, young Russians can no longer count on the state to provide their house, nor can they afford to buy a home with wages, forcing many to live with extended family well into adulthood. Zavisca shows that the contradictions of housing policy are a significant factor in Russia’s falling birth rates and the apparent failure of its pronatalist policies. These consequences further stack the deck against the likelihood that an affordable housing market will take off in the near future.

Two young lovers treat themselves to a once-in-a-lifetime holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. He's an austere tutor at Oxford. She's a sparky rising London barrister. Their native Britain is floundering in debt. On the second day of their holiday they encounter a rich, charismatic 50-something Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula, wears a diamondencrusted Rolex watch, has a tattoo on the knuckle of his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis. What else Dima wants is the engine that drives John le Carré's majestic, thrilling, tragic, funny, and utterly engrossing new novel of greed and corruption, from the arctic hells of the gulag archipelago to a billionaire's yacht anchored off the Adriatic Coast; to the Men's Final of the French Open tennis championships at the Roland Garros stadium; to two murky Swiss bankers dubbed Peter and the Wolf; and finally and fatally to a Swiss alpine resort nestling in the shadow of the north face of the Eiger and the story's terrifying end.