Want to fully understand financial history? Then study Russia at the Library of Mistakes

The latest blog from our librarian Dr Helen Williams

Not all our books are on financial history. For anyone wanting to find out more about the history and background to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Library has a number of books to choose from for example Arkady Ostrovsky’s Invention of Russia: from Gorbachev’s freedom to Putin’s war (2015). For those who want to know more about Ukraine itself, we have Serhii Plokhy’s history as well as books on the disaster at Chernobyl.

We have relatively little on pre-Revolutionary Russia or the USSR itself. We do have Mikhail Gorbachev’s own book on Perestroika, Boris Yeltsin’s Midnight diaries, and a book on ‘Russian reform’ by Yeltsin’s finance minister, Yegor Gaidar. In the 1990s the policy was referred to as ‘shock therapy’ and caused financial turmoil and hardship in Russia.

There’s wider coverage of the changes since that time: there’s titles such as Kremlin capitalism, Privatizing Russia and How Russia became a market economy. We have some books on Russian oligarchs and on the circle around Vladimir Putin, including Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People. There are also earlier assessments of Putin himself, such as Ben Judah’s book from 2013, Fragile empire: how Russia fell in and out of love with Putin. A recent generous donation from Stewart Investors included Andrew Jack’s book from 2004, Inside Putin’s Russia, and a history of Russian retail from medieval time until almost the present day.