Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today's most contentious and consequential international relationships As President Barack Obama's adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States' policy known as "reset" that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries And then, as US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of US-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president From the first days of McFaul's ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family. 506 pages, illustrations, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 600 pages, in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. In this substantial work, Berberova, a renowned writer who left her homeland along with many compatriots in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, chronicles the travails she encounters in poverty-stricken Russia, poverty-stricken Berlin, and poverty-stricken Paris, where she lived from 1925-1950.
Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with minor wear. Selected and translated by Olga Davydoff Dax. Color illustrations by the author throughout. Mariamna Davydoff, the Russian lady who wrote and illustrated this memoir of her life before the Revolution, was born in 1871 into a large, aristocratic family whose ancestors can he traced back to the eleventh century. After fleeing Russia in 1919, she eventually settled in Brittany with a sister and there reproduced, from memory, albums of detailed text and watcrcolors that had been abandoned in Russia and were later destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The result is a unique, first-hand account of a way of life that we have previously known almost exclusively through the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, and a few other writers of the late nineteenth century.
Hardcover. Philadelphia, The Winchell Co., 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 297 pages, b&w illustrations, in a bright dust jacket. Clean. Helene Iswolsky, daughter of a Russian diplomat, grew up in Japan, Denmark, Russia, and France. In 1911, her father became Russian ambassador to France. She returned to Russia for her debut in 1914, to be presented to the Tsarina Alexandra. While there she attended the wedding of Prince Felix Yusupov, who was to murder Rasputin three years later. After the Tsar was overthrown, her father retired to Biarritz and died there in 1919, leaving unpaid debts. The author took up translating and writing. She had a religious awakening and became a Catholic. A sojourn in a Benedictine monastery left her changed, but she decided not to make the cloister her life. The author knew many notable people in the Paris area, especially writers, poets, critics, philosophers of the "new wave," Christian humanists, and Russian emigres. She attended the Sunday afternoon gatherings of Jacques Maritain and Nicholas Berdiaev, and worked on Emmanuel Mounier's journal "Esprit." When the Nazis occupied France, she escaped to America with her mother. Here she founded an ecumenical movement called "The Third Hour" and taught Russian at Fordham University and other schools. She was a close friend of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Scarce.
Hardcover. NY, Dodd Mead, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 84 pages with index. B&w photos. Ex-lib with minimal signs, light reside to rear endpapers. Beryl Grey was the first Western ballerina to dance in Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre and she tells of her experiences on tour. Clean internally.