Martin Sixsmith Books in Order

Drawing on his experience reporting from Moscow, Sixsmith recounts the attempted Soviet coup of August 1991. An eyewitness narrative and examination of its background trace events that challenged Gorbachev's authority and accelerated the breakdown of the Soviet system.

A government campaigns to restore public morality under an ambitious minister, while the prime minister faces damaging allegations. Efforts to control the story send an official to Cambridge, exposing the gap between political virtue and the machinery protecting power.

Young Zhenya Gorevich tries to believe in the communist promise within the shifting realities of Soviet life. As official certainty clashes with negotiable truths and a repeatedly revised past, embracing the supposed utopia becomes an increasingly difficult personal struggle.

Sixsmith investigates Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning in London, tracing the former security officer's life and the conflicts surrounding his exile. Competing theories of the killing lead into a wider struggle between the Kremlin and its powerful opponents.

Separated from her young son through an Irish convent's adoption arrangements, Philomena Lee searches for him for decades. Sixsmith traces both lives across the Atlantic, revealing how secrecy and institutional barriers frustrated their attempts to find each other.

An investigation of the Yukos affair examines the struggle between the Kremlin and oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Interviews and competing accounts illuminate the political, commercial, and personal forces involved in the battle over Russia's energy wealth.

Tracing a thousand years of Russian history, Sixsmith examines the connections between political power, cultural achievement, and national mythology. Literature, music, and art join accounts of conflict and transformation in an effort to explain the country's distinctive historical path.

A British woman's search for the truth about her father's death takes her to Pakistan, where the official account of suicide does not satisfy her. Accompanied by Sixsmith, she confronts threats and unsettling questions about family, identity, and belonging.

Ambitious poet Sergei Yesenin pursues fame and love amid the upheaval of revolutionary Russia. His relationships with artists and political figures shape a turbulent career, while the hunger for recognition threatens both his fragile happiness and those closest to him.

This history approaches the Cold War through the fears and psychological pressures shaping its leaders and populations. Archival accounts of major figures and ordinary lives reveal how suspicion, anxiety, and the struggle for influence sustained the conflict.

Former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky examines Russia's political trajectory through his own experience of wealth, imprisonment, and exile. Written with Sixsmith, the book considers Kremlin power, relations with the West, and possibilities for a different political future.