Five of the best books about Russia and Ukraine

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a double-starred

First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999.

Figes is an award-winning author of ten books on Russian and European history, including The Story of Russia.

At the Guardian he tagged "five books have done as much as any to shape my understanding of the complex region," including:

Mikhail Bulgakov: The White Guard

Bulgakov was another Russian writer from Ukraine. He was born in Kyiv, where this novel is set in 1918, during the first year of the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks have taken power in Russia; the White Guards,
their enemies, have fled to Ukraine, where they hope to rally the Cossacks. And although Ukraine has declared its independence, it remains at the mercy of the German occupying troops, while Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital.

The story centres on the Turbin family, remnants of the monarchist intelligentsia, whose world collapses in the chaos and confusion of the fighting around Kyiv, ending with the Soviet invasion of Ukraine. Published in 1925, the novel was dramatised as The Days of the Turbins. Stalin loved the play and saw it many times. He viewed it as a parable about a class and way of life destined for destruction by Russian might.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue