Audiobooks narrated by Rich Miller

Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia

When the hammer and sickle came down in late 1991, Russia's feverish new market opened for business. From banking to breweries, sectors emerged out of nowhere, in a country that had never had a functioning economy. For the next three turbulent decades, a wild, proto-capitalist free-for-all transformed Russian society. Then, in 2022, Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The market started to collapse; Western firms fled Moscow's skyscrapers. No country this large had ever transformed itself as dizzyingly as 1990s Russia—now, just as dramatically, it was over. The intervening decades had seen phenomenal successes and crushing failures; the creation and destruction of enormous fortunes. How did it all happen? Zero Sum brings to life the complex, vivid color of one of the greatest experiments in the history of global commerce. What have businesses learnt—or failed to learn—from this adventure, both about Russia and about dynamics between countries and companies in the face of relentless change?

Charles Hecker (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction

Russia is rarely out of the news. Yet Russian politics can be difficult to understand. It is powerfully shaped by large, impersonal forces such as geography, and Russia's place in the international political and economic system. At the same time, Russia's formal political institutions, such as the Constitution and electoral procedures, are relatively weak and manipulable compared to those of stable, established democracies. Under these circumstances, powerful leaders represent a source of potential dynamism and change. This Very Short Introduction provides a guide to understanding Russian Politics that goes beyond the headlines, offering a vivid account of the key forces driving Russian politics. It places Russia in a global context while explaining its internal political development. Several major themes run through the book, including the primacy of the state over society, the role of the so-called 'West,' which has represented a source of inspiration, of threat, and of competition for generations of Russians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet collapse brought about dramatic change across multiple spheres, from the nature of the political and economic system to the country's borders and who counted as a citizen. To this day, Russia is still working its way through the consequences of these transformations.

Brian D. Taylor (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Leading to Thrive: Mastering Strategies for Sustainable Success in Business and Life

Good news for today’s business leaders. And tomorrow’s… Success in both your business and personal lives is possible. You don’t have to choose one over the other. Leading to Thrive shows you how. Klaus Kleinfeld draws on decades of global business experience from large scale to startups across a wide range of industries. He reveals how to win both the Outer Game of business success and the Inner Game of personal fulfillment. Leading to Thrive charts a transformative path of preserving and recovering your energy, achieving balance, and finding true purpose and meaning. It then goes into showing how to build an inspiring vision, create competitive advantages, and develop world-class teams. Filled with real-world advice from one of the world’s most experienced business practitioners, Leading to Thrive is a must-read for every business leader aiming for sustained success in business and in life.

Klaus Kleinfeld (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance

The United States is in the midst of a new cold war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and America is losing. That claim, at the core of Countering China's Great Game challenges the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom about U.S.-China relations. Officials in Washington are reacting to the CCP and playing defense. Like America's efforts to contain the Soviet Union in the twentieth-century Cold War, the United States needs a strategic vision to overcome the CCP. Sobolik offers a plan for American victory over the CCP and presents a roadmap to sabotage the crux of the CCP's foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is not an economic venture. It is a geopolitical gambit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping's 'project of the century' has entered its second phase: leveraging yesterday's investments for today's political and military ends. Xi will never do away with the BRI because it is strengthening Beijing's strategic position from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands to Africa and Latin America. The BRI is the apotheosis of the CCP's grand strategy. America needs a blueprint to take it down. Sobolik provides this blueprint by identifying the BRI's core weakness: imperial overstretch. Sobolik's work offers policymakers a plan to go on the offense and win America's new cold war.

Michael Scott Sobolik (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Baikonur Man: Space, Science, American Ambition, and Russian Chaos at the Cold War’s End

Against the backdrop of the late Cold War, a tiny American start-up company forged a secret deal to place American scientific payloads aboard the Soviet space station MIR. Born out of sheer desperation after the Challenger explosion and grounding of the United States space shuttle program, the agreement was negotiated and approved behind the backs of NASA and Congress, with the help of United States government officials inside the Commerce and Defense departments. On a cold gray morning in February 1988, the company founder met with three graduate students and their professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put his plans into action. Baikonur Man, written by one of those students, recounts the subsequent five-year saga of how science, comradery, hardship, drama, and occasional lunacy led to the first American experiments and payloads to fly on Russian rockets.

Barry L. Stoddard (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

A History of Russia: 9th Edition

Now extensively revised in this ninth edition, A History of Russia covers the entire span of the country's history, from ancient times to the post-communist present. Keeping with the hallmark of the text, Riasanovsky and Steinberg examine all aspects of Russia's history—political, international, military, economic, social, and cultural—with a commitment to objectivity, fairness, and balance, and to reflecting recent research and new trends in scholarly interpretation. In the ninth edition, this includes expanded attention to the experiences of ordinary men and women and to imperial expansion and diversity. Extensively revised and with a more streamlined organization, A History of Russia, Ninth Edition, includes recent developments in Ukraine and Russia's near abroad in the Putin era.

Mark D. Steinberg, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

To the Success of our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents— from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

Benjamin Nathans (Author), Rich Miller, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

In Search of the Romanovs: A Family’s Quest to Solve One of History’s Most Brutal Crimes

In 1918 a famed general of the Russian White Army battled through the Red Army to save Emperor Nicholas II-but he arrived too late. The Romanovs had already been murdered. In this thrilling true-life detective story, we follow Anna, the general's courageous young daughter, who fled across the continent and boarded a ship with her husband to escape the bloodshed. Beneath her bunk was a box, and in this box lay grisly evidence of what had become of Russia's royal family, the Romanovs. Generations later, Anna's grandson Peter Sarandinaki set out to finish his great-grandfather's mission to find the Romanovs' remains, enlisting searchers and scientists to finally piece together the answers to some of history's most perplexing questions: What really happened to Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, and their children? And what about the tsar's brother, Mikhail, who simply disappeared? A riveting and deeply personal story, In Search of the Romanovs reveals hidden truths in the legends about the murder and disappearance of Russia's most famous royal family.

Peter Sarandinaki (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages. Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode thousands of intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. Analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg's espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide the most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage in the early Cold War years.

Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes (Author), Brian P. Craig, Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Word Is Not a Sparrow: A Benefit Anthology for Ukraine Relief

Artists in Ukraine have lost their livelihoods. The Ukraine Audiobook Relief Project was launched to support artists in Ukraine whose lives are threatened because of war. It is a fundamental aspect of war to suppress story, language, and culture. Moved by this crisis of culture, members of PANA (the Professional Audiobook Narrators Association) created this audiobook to raise money for Ukrainian relief. Joined by writers and musicians, we have volunteered our work to show our support for artists living through war. The profits from the sale of this audiobook will provide financial support to the Artists at Risk Connection in Ukraine through PEN America, a non-profit organization that endeavors to safeguard the right to artistic freedom of expression and ensure that artists and cultural professionals everywhere can live and work without fear. We urge you to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine by supporting its artists. The folk wisdom of Ukraine includes this expression: “A word is not a sparrow … once it flies out, you won’t catch it.' A Word Is Not A Sparrow is a diverse anthology of stories set amid Russian repression through the centuries; personal narrator testimony about the impact in America of immigrant grandparents from Ukraine and elsewhere; powerful fables and allegories that deliver universal messages about displacement, migration, and human connection; and classic Cossack folk tales that are a touchstone of Ukrainian culture. Listen as we let these words fly out around the world. Narrated by PANA member volunteers Barry Abrams, Jennifer Jill Araya, Dave Arlington, Rosemary Benson, Anna Crowe, Claudia Dunn, Andrea Emmes, Gary Furlong, Rebecca Gallagher, Caroline Hewitt, Susan Iannucci, Elizabeth Jasicki, Tom Jordan, Jennifer March, Janet Metzger, Rich Miller, Erin Moon, Sara Morsey, Traci Odom, Sheri Saginor and Tiffany Williams. Music by Michael Nazaretz & the Samovar Russian Folk Ensemble, Jeff Crompton, Roger French, and Kenny Raskin. Writers include Barry Abrams, Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, Andrea Emmes and Karen Bogle, Vladislav Davidzon, Christopher Dewees, Thaisa Frank, Teresa Johnson, Alla Kudzieva, Taras Shevchenko, and Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch.

Alla Kudzieva, Andrea Emmes, Barry Abrams, Christopher Dewees, Karen Bogle, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, Taras Shevchenko, Teresa Johnson, Thaisa Frank, Vladislav Davidzon (Author), Anna Crowe, Caroline Hewitt, Claudia Dunn, Dave Arlington, Elizabeth Jasicki, Erin Moon, Gary Furlong, Janet Metzger, Jennifer Jill Araya, Jennifer March, Rebecca Gallagher, Rich Miller, Rosemary Benson, Sara Morsey, Sheri Saginor, Susan Iannucci, Tiffany Williams, Tom Jordan, Traci Odom (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Soviet Century

This classic Soviet Union history traces the USSR from 1917, to its fall, offering 'a master class in understanding the structures and intricate workings of the Soviet system' (Ian Kershaw, historian and Hitler biographer). Today, the Soviet Union remains the most extraordinary but tragic attempt to create a society beyond capitalism. Yet its history was one that for a long time proved impossible to write. In The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin follows this history in all its complexity, guiding us through the inner workings of a system which is still barely understood. In the process, he overturns widely held beliefs about the USSR's leaders, the State-Party system, and the powerful Soviet bureaucracy. Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

Moshe Lewin (Author), Rich Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Ruthless Fae King

My enemy claimed me as his own. I must return to Palgia-to the place that was once my prison. The Kingdom of Palgia is fractured, divided, and broken. It's up to me to bring the light back to the country overrun with darkness. Erol was once the ruthless captor who kept me imprisoned. He is set to become the King of Palgia, and I'm expected to cater to his every whim. It doesn't matter that I can't stop thinking about him and imagining what his lips would feel like against mine. I can't trust a morally gray male with so much blood on his hands. The future king better prepare for a fight. My choices are my own, and I will never choose him. Contains mature themes.

Vera Rivers (Author), Rich Miller, Stephanie Savannah (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Rich Miller