Pushkin House Book Prize 2025: Shortlist Summaries
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire
by Howard Amos
On Russia’s European borderlands, people live their lives among the ruins of successive empires. Pskov, an old Slavic land of forgotten stories and faded waysides, has weathered the tides of history. Once a thriving nexus of trade and cultural exchange, today it is one of the poorest and most rapidly depopulating places in Russia. Returning to this overlooked region on the edge of Russia, Howard Amos creates a lyrical portrait of Russia where it meets NATO and the EU – a place of frontiers and boundaries that reveal unfamiliar and uncomfortable truths. In a country where history has been erased, manipulated and marginalised, the voices Howard Amos spotlights are a powerful antidote against forgetting. From the last inhabitants of a dying village, to the long-term residents of a psychiatric hospital and a museum curator fighting local opposition to chronicle Pskov’s forgotten Jewish heritage, Russia Starts Here uncovers compelling stories that are shaped by violence, tragedy and loss.
Howard Amos is a writer and journalist. Raised in London, he spent a year living in Russia’s Pskov Region before working for almost a decade as a correspondent in Moscow. He left Russia in the days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and, based out of Armenia, did a year-long stint as editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times in exile. He now lives in Edinburgh.
Published by Bloomsbury Continuum
The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin
by Lucy Ash
For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills – from the Mongol yoke to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, from Soviet atheism to the chaotic 1990s. Now again, it is at the right hand of power, sanctifying Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The Baton and the Cross reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population. Combining historical research with vivid present-day reportage, The Baton and the Cross explores the impact the Church is having on millions of lives – from the tower blocks of big cities to far-flung villages in Siberia. Delving into the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, Lucy Ash shows how these forces have formed an unholy alliance with Orthodoxy in the dystopia of twenty-first century Russia.
Lucy Ash is an award-winning presenter of radio and TV documentaries. An expert on Russia and the former Soviet region, she was first sent to Moscow by the BBC in 1990 and has been covering the region's social, political, and cultural issues ever since.
Published by Icon Books
Patriot
by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, begins as a lighthearted story. Navalny cracks jokes, reminisces about old stories, and recalls in detail episodes from his childhood. Intricately recreating the atmosphere of the final years of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Russia in the early 1990s, the book at first has the feel of a work of autobiographical fiction. Navalny began writing the book in August 2020, in recovery after his unsuccessful poisoning with novichok. Patriot captures the growth of Navalny’s nationwide support, his arrests and harassment, meeting his wife Yulia, and his reasons for returning to Russia in January of 2021– despite the inevitability of his imprisonment. Patriot ends with Navalny’s prison diaries, written from the prison colony in Siberia in which he died, becoming Navalny’s final letter to the world, and a rousing call to continue his work.
Alexei Navalny was a Russian opposition leader, lawyer, and anti-corruption activist. His many international honours included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize.
Arch Tait has a PhD in Russian literature from Cambridge. He began translating in 1986, and has translated 40 books by leading Russian-speaking authors of fiction and non-fiction.
Stephen Dalziel is a Russia specialist. He worked for many years as Russian Affairs Analyst at BBC World Service, and later was Executive Director of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce.
Published by The Bodley Head
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
by Benjamin Nathans
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause provides a gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR – and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, the book reveals how dissidents used Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state; demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. In response, Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile – and transformed them into martyred heroes. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the story of the men and women who became dissidents, and shows how they spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past – a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia, and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.
Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights.
Published by Princeton University Press
To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power
by Sergey Radchenko
In this panoramic history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides a deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory, to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinkmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow's claims to greatness. Perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape our world.
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies.
Published by Cambridge University Press
‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate
by Donald Rayfield
The Crimean Tatars – Turkic-speaking native peoples of Crimea – established a powerful Khanate in the 1440s, which remained in power until 1783. In ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’, the first history in English for over 100 years, Donald Rayfield gives a historical portrait, showing that this misunderstood and much-feared nation was in fact a flourishing state with a vibrant literary culture, religious tolerance, a sophisticated constitution and a prosperous economy. Rayfield’s book describes the establishment of the Khanate, its reign and eventual fall, concluding with a vivid portrayal of the Tatars’ ruthless suppression – first by Russia, then the Soviet Union – and the most recent invasion under Vladimir Putin.
Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of numerous books about Russian and Georgian literature, about Joseph Stalin and his secret police, and has translated numerous works of Georgian, Russian and Uzbek poetry and prose.
Published by Reaktion Books