Those Crazy Cosmonauts

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On Oct. 12, 1964, three smallish men, shrunk still more by a strict diet, squeezed into an aluminum sphere 8 feet in diameter. Earlier in the year, Nikita Khrushchev learned that the Americans were planning to send the first two-man capsule into orbit, and he wanted a Soviet trio in space ahead of them. The red team had neither a three-man craft nor a rocket powerful enough to shoot such a craft into space. The idea that they could quickly build both was ridiculous, but not so ridiculous as thinking that the Soviet leader’s demand could be ignored. So this particular sphere, a Vostok tailored for one (smallish) man, had been all but emptied out, given the minimum necessary refitting and relabeled Voskhod 1. The crew, according to author John Strausbaugh, had to do without bulky space suits and helmets and wore woolen leisure suits instead.

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Imperial Tender

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When reading Ekaterina Pravilova’s original, fascinating and meticulously researched “The Ruble” it is a good idea to keep in mind its subtitle: “A Political History.” For Ms. Pravilova’s multi-layered account of the evolution of the paper ruble from its inception in the mid-18th century until the post-revolutionary reforms in the early 1920s goes beyond the merely monetary. “The biography of the ruble,” explains Ms. Pravilova, “is a history of the Russian state, written in the language of money.” Regardless of the type of political system in place, she writes, “money does not simply reflect an existing (or imagined) social and political order but creates it; it is not a consequence or an attribute but an integral and constitutive part of any regime.” Ms. Pravilova, a professor of history at Princeton, shows that the ruble has been, above all, a symbol and an instrument of centralized, autocratic and imperial power.

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The Border of Borders

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In 2019, writer and historian Timothy Phillips embarked on a 3,000-mile trek along the route of Europe’s postwar dividing line—almost a third was on foot. The trip began in Norway’s far north and ended where Turkey and Azerbaijan meet, and in his engrossing “Retracing the Iron Curtain,” Mr. Phillips uses that journey to tell the story of this brutal “border of borders,” which in the early days after World War II reached much further than is typically recalled.

And so Mr. Phillips shows up in Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic, which was still being “liberated” by the Soviets when Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain….

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On the Ground in Ukraine

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Walking home after dinner in Kyiv on Feb. 23, British journalist Luke Harding answers his phone: The Russian attack, he is told, is expected within hours. “Invasion” is his account of the war that ensued. Gripping and often moving, the book is primarily journalistic but goes beyond mere reportage as Mr. Harding draws on his knowledge of the region and a background that includes serving as head of the Guardian’s Moscow bureau.

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Facing Impossible Odds

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“It is hard to pin down,” notes Halik Kochanski toward the end of her enormous, but eminently readable, history of resistance to German occupation during World War II, “why certain people chose the path of resistance . . . . [T]he resisters themselves often give unsatisfactory responses: ‘one had to do something’ or ‘one just did what one could.’ ”

Perhaps that is because the experience was, in retrospect, so strange, so out of time and place. Ms. Kochanski, a British historian, quotes Jean Cassou, a resistance leader in Toulouse who remembered this “as a unique period . . . impossible to relate to or explain, almost a dream. We see . . . an unknown and unknowable version of ourselves, the kind of people no one can ever find again, who existed only in relation to unique and terrible conditions, to things that have since disappeared, to ghosts, or to the dead.”

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Legends Of the Black Sea

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When the Argonauts—so the story goes—sailed toward the Black Sea, they had to deal with giants, harpies and murderous women. When, in April 2018, Jens Mühling, a German journalist and a writer, arrives on the Black Sea coast during the early stages of the journey he so vividly describes in “Troubled Water,” he ends up drinking—a river of alcohol flows through this book—with a Russian (Oleg, naturally) and a Crimean Tatar (Elvis, naturally) in the courtyard of a rundown fishing cooperative on the western tip of Russia’s Taman Peninsula. A mile away, a newly built bridge awaits its formal opening. It connects the peninsula with Russian-occupied Crimea: “We screwed up our eyes, shelled Black Sea shrimps, and observed the world’s largest country in the act of growing.”

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The Staff of Life

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It was hard to read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s original and intriguing “Oceans of Grain” without thinking of Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”: “The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.” Karl Marx looked at history and found class. Mr. Nelson tends to find wheat. Thus, in the 19th century, he writes, “the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire all [had] more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.”

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Surviving The Time Of Wolves

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“Eight Days in May,” a gripping, immaculately researched retelling of the Nazi Götterdämmerung, is the story of an intermission, a phase, as the German author Erich Kästner wrote in his diary, between the “no longer” and “not yet.” But during this intermission the action rarely paused. Written by Volker Ullrich, a German journalist and historian perhaps best known for his impressive two-volume biography of Hitler, this book is structured as the day-by-day chronicle implied by its title. That said, Mr. Ullrich also looks further backward and forward in time to add the context that a study confined to eight days alone could not provide.

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"Too Busy Saving the World"

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To label Kati Marton’s biography of Angela Merkel a hagiography would not be fair—not entirely. That said, when she writes of the chancellor being “too busy saving the world” to have much time for strolling in the woods, the expression may be less of a rhetorical flourish than it should. “The Chancellor” is an impressively researched but, in many respects, devotional work—the reflection of a worshipful establishment consensus that will eventually seem absurd.

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Cold War Cosmonaut

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Readers of Stephen Walker’s fine new account of how Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet air-force major (he was promoted from lieutenant while circling the Earth), became the first man in space will discover quite a bit about Gagarin the man, but a great deal more about the program that put him into orbit 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961.

Vasco da Gama, Gagarin was not. For all his skill, toughness, unflappability and courage, he was no explorer. In a way, he was merely the most important of all the fauna that the Soviets shot into space. The first astronauts had relatively little control over their capsules; the first cosmonauts had far less.

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