Audiobooks to Understand the Russia-Ukraine War

On Tyranny: Expanded Audio Edition

Updated with Twenty New Lessons from Russia's War on Ukraine

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Timothy Snyder
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

The #1 New York Times bestseller, now in an expanded audiobook edition that includes detailed historical context for the democracy-threatening Ukrainian conflict and a call to action for modern times.

This edition includes the bestselling original essay collection On Tyranny, read by the author.

In this exclusive audiobook edition, which... Read more

Red Famine

Stalin's War on Ukraine

By: Anne Applebaum
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 17 hours 45 minutes

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain, a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes—the consequences of which still resonate today

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian... Read more

Putin's People

How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

By: Catherine Belton
Narrated by: Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
Length: 18 hours 12 minutes

"This riveting, immaculately researched book is arguably the best single volume written about Putin, the people around him and perhaps even about contemporary Russia itself in the past three decades." —Peter Frankopan, Financial Times

Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent... Read more

Moneyland

The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

By: Oliver Bullough
Narrated by: Oliver Bullough
Length: 9 hours 47 minutes

"If you want to know why international crooks and their eminently respectable financial advisors walk tall and only the little people pay taxes, this is the ideal book for you. Every politician and moneyman on the planet should read it, but they won't because it's actually about them." —John le Carré, author of A Legacy of Spies

This program is... Read more

Bloodlands

Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
Length: 19 hours 13 minutes

“A comprehensive work of scholarship documenting the nightmarish history of the 'bloodlands' that stretch from Poland to St. Petersburg and then southwest to where Ukraine runs into the Black Sea. In these areas the policies of Stalin and Hitler resulted in the deaths of 14 million people. Snyder asks -- how could so many human lives be brought... Read more

In Wartime

Stories from Ukraine

By: Tim Judah
Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
Length: 9 hours 19 minutes

Making his way from the Polish border in the west, through the capital city and the heart of the 2014 revolution, to the eastern frontline near the Russian border, seasoned war reporter Tim Judah brings a rare glimpse of the reality behind the headlines. Along the way he talks to the people living through the conflict—mothers, soldiers,... Read more

The Road to Unfreedom

Russia, Europe, America

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Timothy Snyder
Length: 10 hours 9 minutes

“Perhaps you read Snyder's bracing pamphlet, On Tyranny (or the Facebook post it was based on)—from its title, I had imagined this new, much larger book as an expansion of those ideas, but, while it's written in the same level-headed-but-urgent tone (which Snyder's voice for the audiobook perfectly represents), it's doing something related but... Read more

Ukraine

What Everyone Needs to Know

By: Serhy Yekelchyk
Narrated by: Joel Richards
Length: 8 hours 8 minutes

Ukraine's sudden prominence in American politics has compounded an already-widespread misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the nation. In the American media, Ukraine has come to signify an inherently corrupt place, rather than a real country struggling in the face of great challenges. Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know addresses... Read more

Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War

A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity

By: Mychailo Wynnyckyj
Narrated by: David Stifel
Length: 16 hours 24 minutes

In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil... Read more

The Man Without a Face

The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

By: Masha Gessen
Narrated by: Masha Gessen
Length: 10 hours 24 minutes

National Book Award winner Masha Gessen's biography of a ruthless man's ascent to near-absolute power.

“In a country where journalists critical of the government have a way of meeting untimely deaths, Gessen has shown remarkable courage in researching and writing this unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.” —The Wall Street... Read more

All the Kremlin's Men

Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin

By: Mikhail Zygar
Narrated by: Dan Woren
Length: 16 hours 12 minutes

An extraordinary behind-the-scenes portrait of the court of Vladimir Putin, the oligarchs that surround it, and the many moods of modern Russia that reads like a "real House of Cards"(Lev Lurie).

All the Kremlin's Men is a gripping narrative of an accidental king and a court out of control. Based on an unprecedented series of interviews with... Read more

A Short History of Russia

How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin

By: Mark Galeotti
Narrated by: Mark Galeotti
Length: 4 hours 50 minutes

A Library Journal 2020 Title to Watch

"Terrific - and an amazing achievement to cover so much ground in such a short and wonderfully readable book." -Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Silk Roads
 
Russia’s epic and dramatic story told in an accessible, lively and short form, using the country's fascinating history to illuminate its... Read more

This Is Not Propaganda

Adventures in the War Against Reality

By: Peter Pomerantsev
Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
Length: 7 hours 29 minutes

Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times).
When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war.

We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft... Read more

Between Two Fires

Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia

By: Joshua Yaffa
Narrated by: Fred Sanders
Length: 14 hours 57 minutes

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “Unforgettable . . . a book about Putin’s Russia that is unlike any other.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain

From a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, a groundbreaking portrait of modern Russia and the inner struggles of the people who sustain Vladimir Putin’s... Read more

From Russia with Blood

The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West

By: Heidi Blake
Narrated by: Marisa Calin
Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

The untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad: “A compelling rendering of Putin’s frightening extensions of power into Europe and the United States” (Associated Press). 

They thought they had found a safe haven in the green hills of England. They were wrong. One by one, the Russian oligarchs,... Read more

Midnight in Chernobyl

The Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

By: Adam Higginbotham
Narrated by: Jacques Roy
Length: 13 hours 55 minutes

One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!

A New York Times Best Book of the Year
A Time Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner
One of NPR’s Best Books of 2019

Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power... Read more

The Compatriots

The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad

By: Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan
Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
Length: 10 hours 24 minutes

The authors of The Red Web examine the shifting role of Russian expatriates throughout history, and their complicated, unbreakable relationship with the mother country--be it antagonistic or far too chummy.

The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the... Read more

Red Notice

A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice

By: Bill Browder
Narrated by: Adam Grupper
Length: 14 hours 7 minutes

November 2009. An emaciated young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, is led to a freezing isolation cell in a Moscow prison, handcuffed to a bed rail, and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes paid to the state by one... Read more

Chernobyl

The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

By: Serhii Plokhy
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
Length: 14 hours 51 minutes

A Chernobyl survivor and the New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe "mercilessly chronicles the absurdities of the Soviet system" in this "vividly empathetic" account of the worst nuclear accident in history (Wall Street Journal).

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the... Read more

Manual for Survival

A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

By: Kate Brown
Narrated by: Christina Delaine
Length: 12 hours 53 minutes

Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.

So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health—which,... Read more