New Releases

At the height of World War II the people of Leningrad endured a bitter 900-day siege. Prit Buttar tells the story of how the siege was finally broken. The Red Army had suffered multiple setbacks in the preceding two years but achieved a partial success by breaking the blockage in early 1943. However, this was followed by further failed attempts to lift the siege completely. This compelling history uses original Russian source material to vividly describe the deprivations visited upon those trapped. But it also details the tactical successes and strategic failures of both sides.

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an escalation of the Russo-Ukraine conflict that began eight years earlier. But Russia’s recent rise on the world’s stage began long before that historic date. In Hubris, Jonathan Haslam, one of the world’s greatest experts on Russian foreign policy and espionage, examines one of the most intractable issues of our time.

In 1913, Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra led the nation in celebrating three hundred years of Romanov rule in Russia. Four years later, it was all over. Tsar Nicholas always considered himself to be unlucky, but he compounded his genuine misfortunes by making catastrophic calculations in defiance of at least three of the best chief ministers any sovereign has ever had – Sergei Witte, Pyotr Stolypin and Vladimir Kokovtsov. His biggest mistake of all was to mobilize the Russian army on the German border in 1914, thus provoking Germany into a declaration of war. After three years of ...