Reviews of five interesting new books for Russophiles: Former People, Nevsky, St. Petersburg Noir, Wooden Churches and Russian Film Posters.

Fifty years ago this October, the world walked to the brink of nuclear holocaust, looked over the edge, and stepped back. This is the account of one actor in that frightful drama, someone who dared to take a stand and may just have ended up saving the planet.

The assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, was used as the pretext for the launching of the Red Terror, a wave of repression and killing aimed at wiping out the Bolsheviks' opponents, real and imagined.

On the world's worst nuclear disaster prior to Chernobyl, when, in 1957, nuclear waste exploded at the Mayak plant in Ozyorsk. The damage has yet to be fully recognized or accepted.

It gave birth to the greatest novel ever written, brought down Napoleon, reshaped Europe, led to the end of serfdom, the invention of terrorism, and, eventually, the end of tsarism. It was tremendous folly, horrific hubris and astounding heroism. And it happened 200 years ago this fall. We turn to people who lived through the War of 1812 for their first person accounts.

Their lives unfolded in parallel, as their nations were immersed in rebellion and reform. Some 150 years ago, each freed their country’s enslaved masses, and each ended up paying with their life.

A look back at the re-taking of Moscow from the Poles 300 years ago, by a couple of unlikely heroes.

The arrive of telephones in Moscow in 1882 fundamentally changed the way citizens interacted with one another.

In 1972, Richard Nixon became the first sitting president to visit the Soviet Union. Another decade of Brezhnevian decline was to follow...

A pathbreaking scientific investigator of Slavic linguistics, Sreznevsky nonetheless helped fan the flames of nationalism and pan-Slavism.

Pariahs Germany and Soviet Russia make a pact in 1922 that sets the stage for decades of suffering.

Every language has words for which it is known the world over. Troika is one such word in Russian, and this equine configuration was critical to the history of Russian letters. And by that we don’t mean literature.