Five nonfiction books that explain modern Russia

Charles Hecker has spent forty years travelling and working in the Soviet Union and Russia. He has worked as a journalist and a geopolitical risk consultant, and has lived in Miami, Moscow and London. A fluent Russian speaker, he holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Hecker's new book is Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia.

At Lit Hub he tagged five nonfiction titles that explain modern Russia, with a "focus on the Soviet and Russian periods, and the seismic transition between the two." One title on the list:

Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution

Climb aboard an oligarch’s jet and float above a country whose most prized assets were sold for a song. Sit inside the room in Davos—capitalism’s highest altar—where one of the world’s greatest swindles was devised. Sup at one of Russia’s most exclusive dinner tables, where fierce business rivalries were discussed, defused and designed into spheres of influence in Russia’s emerging political and economic landscape.

Chrystia Freeland’s Sale of the Century—written when she was a Moscow-based journalistic superstar for The Financial Times—is the story of how 1990s Russia mislaid the cornerstones of a new nation. Boris Yeltsin’s failed stewardship of Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism birthed a country that epically failed its citizens, except for the equivalent of Russia’s 0.0001%.

That rarefied layer kept—and enhanced—its spoils by financing Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign in exchange for the keys to the economy, and they never looked back. Until Putin came to town. Freeland, until recently deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada, unflinchingly chronicled the free-for-all that was Russia’s early days. Experience that maniacal decade with her.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue