Should We Fear Russia?

Further Reading

There is a small library of literature on present-day Russia and its foreign policy. Much of it is devoted to the person of Vladimir Putin. Quite a few books are obviously polemical, and many are superficial. I will supply the reader with a reasonably short list of titles, which, I should add, with just one exception, depict the difficult relationship between Russia, on the one hand, and the United States and Europe, on the other, from a Western standpoint.

Serious works on the issue of relations between Russia and the West include Georgetown University Professor Angela Stent’s treatise on the US–Russian relations, The Limits of Partnership: US–Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), which appeared on the eve of the Ukraine crisis, and Columbia University Professor Emeritus Robert Legvold’s Return to Cold War (Polity, 2016).

Specifically on this seminal crisis, I would recommend Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, by Lehigh University’s Rajan Menon and my Carnegie colleague Eugene Rumer (MIT Press, 2015); Kent University Professor Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (I. B. Tauris, 2015); British researcher Andrew Wilson’s Ukraine Crisis: What it Means for the West; and veteran journalist and Brookings scholar Marvin Kalb’s Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

On the wider issue of Moscow’s foreign policy, I would recommend Andrei P. Tsygankov’s Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (4th edn, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Jeff Mankoff’s Russian Foreign Policy: the Return of Great Power Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). Another notable recent contribution to the body of research is Nicolas Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh’s Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors (Sage, 2014).

Great background reading is Dominic Lieven’s Empire:The Russian Empire and its Rivals (Yale University Press, 2001); Walter Laqueur’s Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West (Thomas Dunne, 2015); and Charles Clover’s Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2016).