Vera, Rasputin and Putin: People and Power in Russia

Miranda Seymour’s book I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess, tells the astonishing story of a pioneering woman surgeon in imperial Russia who worked in battlefields and ordered Rasputin out of her operating theatre. In The Return of Russia, historian James Rodgers examines its recent relationship with the West, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day. They talk to Michael Pugh (Riding Through War and Peace), who left his job in Moscow to ride through rural Russia on horseback.