Best Books to Read About Russia During WWII

The impacts of World War Two on Russia is a perspective not often highlighted, yet it is an important aspect to understand in context of the military actions and human cost of this devastating time period. This book list includes the best historical fiction books about Russia, and the best nonfiction books about Russia during WWII. From the Russian Gulags and work camps to the invasion of Leningrad by Germany, the full scope of Russia’s involvement is covered in this list of 15 best books to read about Russia.

Related: Best Historical Fiction Books About the Holocaust & Best WWII Nonfiction Books About the European Theater

Historical Fiction Books About WWII in Russia

Cilka’s Journey by Healther Morris

Healther Morris, the same author as The Tattooist of Auschwitz, came across Cilka’s story as she was researching and writing the Tattooists story. Based on a true story of a girl who was only 16 when she was deported to Auschwitz, this book follows Cilka as she is charged with being a collaborator and sent to the Gulags with a sentence of 15 years hard labor after the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz. This novel expands on life in the Gulags and how women worked together to care for each other and find a way to bring hope and joy to the darkest of places.

The Huntress: A Novel by Kate Quinn

The Huntress is a story about a war-hardened journalist who ends up teaming up with a female Russian bomber pilot in search of a Nazi war criminal who’s evaded authorities in the years after the war. It’s as much about the hunt for woman that haunts them both as it is about what it was like to be a Russian woman in the first women-only bomber squad during World War II. This is a well written, interesting read that will keep you captivated from start to finish.

Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

Two women in modern day Alaska are trying to cope with their estranged mother’s failing health. They never knew much of their mother’s past, or the life she lived in Russia. As they sit by their mother’s bedside, a terrifying, haunting story of Leningrad in 1941 comes to light after 60 years of only living in their mother’s memories. On a journey then to uncover the truth, the women will have the their long-held beliefs shaken about their mother and why she couldn’t love them the way they wished she could. This is a spellbinding book, beautifully written, and a narrative of what the war cost so many families, even long after it ended.

The Girl with the Silver Star: A Novel by Rachel Zolotov

When bombs decimate their city of Minsk, Raisa and her family are forced to run through the night to take cover. The rest of the book is a tense, moving story of one family’s experience of parting ways, facing starvation and death and having to move through 2500 miles in Russia in WWII. Based on an incredible true story, this book gives us an in-depth look at what war-torn Soviet Union was like, and the brave women who did everything to overcome.

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Fifteen-year-old Lina is a Lithuanian girl living an ordinary life until Soviet officers invade her home and separate her from her father. Lina, her mother and her brother are then forced onto a crowded train in horrible conditions and sent to a Siberian work camp, where they struggle to just survive. Lina, at great risk to herself and her family, begins documenting the events she goes through and witnesses by drawing them. As her own act of resistance, she imbeds clues in her drawings of their location and secretly passes them along. This is a gripping book that gives a detailed narration of life in Russian work camps and the families that were imprisoned there.

The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons

Two sisters are living in a cramped apartment in Russia in this coming of age story when Hitler’s army attacks Leningrad. Suddenly these two women are thrust into war and all that comes with it. Falling in love with a young man in the Red Army only complicates matters, and shows us how love and hope give us the strength to overcome. It’s a quick read that builds in intensity with the backdrop of war, and gives readers a look into what trying to survive in Russia during WWII was really like.

Nonfiction Books About Russia

Leningrad by Anna Reid

This book is a narrative that chronicles personal accounts of the people who lived through one of the darkest times in modern history. With statistics like 750,000 people dead, this book on the Siege of Leningrad is more than just sobering statistics and instead it’s a vivid depiction of what took place told by those who endured. Very well written and well researched, it’s a necessary literary work for anyone seeking to understand Russian events and experiences of WWII.

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

The Russian Gulag was an enormous system of concentration camps that imprisoned and terrorized all types of political, religious and ethic groups. Millions of people were forced into Soviet Gulags and into a life of brutality, cruelness and often death. This masterful work of research recreates what life was like in the camps for those that stepped off the train into them, and ties the Gulags into the overarching history of war, communism and the history of the Soviet Union.

Stalin: Waiting For Hitler by Stephen Kotkin

In this expertly written biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Kotkin, gives the biography of Stalin in an approachable, readable book that details how one man and the way he ran his dictatorship transformed Russia. This history explains collectivization, the Great Terror, to the worst war the world has ever seen, all from the vantage point of Stalin.

When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler by David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House

This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the vast scope of the USSR’s reign of terror in Eastern Europe. This is a very in depth, a well-researched and well-documented account of battles won and battles lost by Germany and Russia, and the true devastation they created.

This book is also featured on our list of WWII Books About Estonia & Latvia

What are you favorite books to learn about Russia during WWII? Leave them in the comments so other history buffs can give them a read, too!

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