Also of interest ... for Russophiles

Snowdrops

by A.D. Miller

(Doubleday, $25)

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The title of A.D. Miller’s debut novel is “Moscow slang” for “a corpse concealed by snow, revealed when the thaw comes,” said John O’Connell in the London Guardian. Miller, a former Russia correspondent for The Economist, has written a well-paced and energetic crime story about an expat lawyer who capitulates to Moscow’s seedier side. Though the book “adds little to what we already know about Putin’s Russia,” it excels as a tale of “decadence, greed, and betrayal.”

The Return

by Daniel Treisman

(Free Press, $30)

“Making sense of Russia’s complicated political and economic life is not easy,” said Philip Seib in The Dallas Morning News. UCLA political scientist Daniel Treisman’s “detailed examination” of Russia’s shifting landscape since the days of Mikhail Gorbachev will go a long way toward helping interested readers achieve that goal. Though Treisman is often “too generous in his judgments of Russia’s progress,” this book’s “comprehensiveness and clarity” make it invaluable.

Molotov’s Magic Lantern

by Rachel Polonsky

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27)

Rachel Polonsky’s Russian travelogue begins with her time spent living at 3 Romanov Lane in Moscow, said The New Yorker. The apartment building had been home to several important political figures, including Vyacheslav Molotov, “Stalin’s brutal second.” Molotov’s library, still housed at No. 3, serves as inspiration for Polonsky’s travels. “The result is a nuanced appreciation of Russian culture, especially for the intellectual treasures destroyed in the wake of the Revolution.”

When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone

by Gal Beckerman

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30)

“If you think the Cold War is dead as the backdrop for any decent espionage story,” Gal Beckerman’s new nonfiction book offers evidence to the contrary, said Thane Rosenbaum in the Los Angeles Times. Beckerman argues that Russian Jews, by refusing to accept official efforts to suppress their religious freedoms, played a significant part in the collapse of the Soviet empire. Ushering us from “dank Moscow apartments” to the “ominous Soviet Star Chambers,” the book “reads like a thriller.”