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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended In 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a decorated Soviet officer who made a small, private joke about Stalin in a letter. The state opened it, read it, and treated it as a crime. Within weeks he was arrested, stripped of rank, and fed into the camps, where he served eight years in the Gulag . The camps were designed to teach one lesson: say nothing, remember nothing, become nothing. His novel’s unflinching realism reflects these lived experiences. The novel was an unprecedented event in Soviet literary history, boldly exposing Stalin’s crimes. It explains that One Day was allowed to be published in 1962 because Khrushchev’s de‑Stalinization briefly eased censorship. Khrushchev’s approval made the book a political and literary sensation worldwide, though it was soon banned again—ironically helping Solzhenitsyn win the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature ...

Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West  - Catherine Belton Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West by Catherine Belton | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People  is less a conventional political biography and more a forensic examination of how money, power, and state institutions fused to produce modern Russia under Vladimir Putin. For readers seeking to understand Putin not just as a man, but as a system, this book is essential reading—even if it leaves you uneasy about where responsibility truly lies.  Origins: Perestroika, Collapse, and the Intelligence State Belton begins the narrative in the early 1990s, just before the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia lagged far behind the West technologically, while Dresden - where Putin served as a KGB officer- had become a hub for smuggling and covert intelligence networks.  During Perestroika , KGB closely monitored the Soviet Union’s...