This revealing selection of highly classified material provides a fascinating inside look at the workings and the thinking of the KGB. The informative commentary by Christopher Andrew is based on joint analysis of the documents with Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel who had been working as a double agent for British intelligence.

Corruption, fake news, and the "informational autocracy" sustaining Putin in power After fading into the background for many years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia suddenly has emerged as a new threat—at least in the minds of many Westerners. But Western assumptions about Russia, and in particular about political decision-making in Russia, tend to be out of date or just plain wrong. Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin since 2000, Russia is neither a somewhat reduced version of the Soviet Union nor a classic police state. Corruption is prevalent at all levels of government and business, but Russia's leaders pursue broader and more complex goals than one would expect in a typical kleptocracy, such as those in many developing countries. Nor does Russia fit the standard political science model of a "competitive authoritarian" regime; its parliament, political parties, and other political bodies are neither fakes to fool the West nor forums for bargaining among the elites. The result of a two-year collaboration between top Russian experts and Western political scholars, Autocracy explores the complex roles of Russia's presidency, security services, parliament, media and other actors. The authors argue that Putin has created an “informational autocracy,” which relies more on media manipulation than on the comprehensive repression of traditional dictatorships. The fake news, hackers, and trolls that featured in Russia’s foreign policy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election are also favored tools of Putin’s domestic regime—along with internet restrictions, state television, and copious in-house surveys. While these tactics have been successful in the short run, the regime that depends on them already shows signs of age: over-centralization, a narrowing of information flows, and a reliance on informal fixers to bypass the bureaucracy. The regime's challenge will be to continue to block social modernization without undermining the leadership’s own capabilities.

A fascinating discussion of Russian English as a World English variety and its function in politics, business and culture.

This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence is the only volume that lays out how Russian and Soviet intelligence works and how its operations have impacted Russian history. It covers Russian intelligence from the imperial period to the present focusing in greatest detail on Cold War espionage cases and the Putin-era intelligence community. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on espionage techniques, categories of agents, crucial operations spies, defectors, moles, and double and triple agents. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Russian Intelligence.

Leonardo da Pisa, perhaps better known as Fibonacci (ca. 1170 – ca. 1240), selected the most useful parts of Greco-Arabic geometry for the book known as De Practica Geometrie. This translation offers a reconstruction of De Practica Geometrie as the author judges Fibonacci wrote it, thereby correcting inaccuracies found in numerous modern histories. It is a high quality translation with supplemental text to explain text that has been more freely translated. A bibliography of primary and secondary resources follows the translation, completed by an index of names and special words.

This volume accounts for the motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. It investigates the processes involved in the penetration of English vocabulary into new environments and the extent of their integration into twelve languages representing several language families, including Icelandic, Dutch, French, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Persian, Japanese, Taiwan Chinese, and several languages spoken in southern India. Some of these languages are studied here in the context of borrowing for the first time ever. All in all, this volume suggests that the English lexical 'invasion', as it is often referred to, is a natural and inevitable process. It is driven by psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-historical factors, of which the primary determinants of variability are associated with ethnic and linguistic diversity.