Rodric Braithwaite – författare

Rodric Braithwaite was British ambassador to Moscow during the critical years of perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failed coup of August 1991, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin. With his long experience of Russia, on good personal terms with Mikhail Gorbachev, he was in a privileged position close to the center of Russia’s changing relationship with the West.This frank and engrossing book gives an intimate account of momentous change and the people who drove it. As the Soviet Empire fell apart a demoralized army crept home from Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and the outlying parts of the Soviet Union itself. Against the opposition of the generals, Gorbachev and his allies struggled to modernize and democratize a system that had already reached the point of terminal decay. The apex of the drama came in August 1991 when a gang of generals, politicians, and secret policemen sought—by storming Moscow’s White House—to reverse the course of history.

Bestselling author, former British diplomat and expert on Russia Rodric Braithwaite's gripping account of the intense rivalry between Russia and the WestIn 1945, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and warfare was never the same again. Armageddon and Paranoia relates how the power of the atom was harnessed to produce weapons capable of destroying human civilisation and considers what this has done to the world.There are few villains in this story: on both sides of the Iron Curtain, dedicated scientists cracked the secrets of nature, dutiful military men planned out possible manoeuvres and politicians wrestled with potentially intolerable decisions. Patriotic citizens acquiesced to the idea that their country needed the ultimate means of defence. Some tried to grapple with the unanswerable question: what end could possibly be served by such fearsome means? Those who protested went unheard. None of them wanted to start a nuclear war, but all of them were paranoid about what the other side might do. The danger of annihilation by accident or misjudgement has not been entirely absent since.Rodric Braithwaite, author of bestsellers Moscow 1941 and Afgantsy, paints a vivid and detailed portrait of this intense period in history. Its implications are terrifyingly relevant today, as ignorant and thoughtless talk about nuclear war begins to spread once more.

'Wise and thorough' Spectator'Brisk and readable ... very valuable' Financial Times'He is an engaging guide ... and writes with the same flair demonstrated in his previous bestseller Afgantsy' Sunday Telegraph'A scholarly yet highly readable gallop through the last 1000 years of Russian history ... To understand this tormented nation, you can do no better than read this illuminating portrait' Jonathan DimblebyWith its attack on Ukraine, Russia's future seems almost as uncertain as its past. The largest country in the world - with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons - has been known over the past thousand years as Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Thirty years ago it was reinvented as the Russian Federation.Russia is not an enigma but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and certainly complicated. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They too omit episodes of national disgrace in favour of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality.Expert and former ambassador Rodric Braithwaite unpicks fact from fiction to discover what lies at the root of the Russian story, more relevant to the rest of the world now than ever before.

Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, told by a former British AmbassadorTwenty-five years ago, when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan after a gruelling nine-year occupation, they left a legacy obscured by distortion and distrust. Fuelled by Cold War propaganda and the myths of the nineteenth-century Great Game, in many ways it remains so.The USSR entered the country in 1979 as part of efforts to quash growing anti-Soviet feeling in Kabul. What followed was a particularly brutal and bloody episode in world history - and one that is often credited as setting the stage for the Taliban's takeover in 1996. Basing his account on Russian sources and interviews, Rodric Braithwaite shows the conflict through the eyes of the Russians who fought it - politicians, officers, soldiers, advisers and journalists - moving seamlessly from the high politics of the Kremlin to lonely Russian conscripts in isolated mountain outposts.This is a powerful and sweeping history of the Soviets in Afghanistan, told with the unique insights of a former Ambassador to Moscow.