Marvin Kalb’s Imperial Gamble reflects the very nature of Russia—its sense of geopolitical grandiosity, mixing illusion with conviction and reality. Kalb brilliantly weaves Russian history into Vladimir Putin’s policies; he astutely merges national psychology and Kremlin politics. Following the great tradition of Marquis De Custine’s1839 masterpiece, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, Kalb creates a comprehensive picture of an often-schizophrenic nation. Similar to Custine’s description of the 19th century Russian empire, Kalb writes of the contemporary East-West divisions in Russia—and Ukraine. Using history skillfully, as a surgeon would his scalpel, Kalb contextualizes the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and explains that although Putin’s “gamble in Crimea (and it was a gamble) was reckless, even dangerous,” from a historical standpoint his actions were not out of line with the other vozhdi, Russian and Soviet leaders throughout centuries. The question, of course, is where do we go from here. To get an answer one simply must read Marvin Kalb’s magnificent book.
—Nina L. Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs, New School University; author of The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind

An important contextualization of the Ukraine crisis from a writer who has profiled every Russian leader since Khrushchev. Understanding Putin’s conception of Russian history will be critical to resolving the ongoing dispute over Crimea.
—Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State

Tweets, blogs and partisan cable blather are ill-suited to the serious business of analyzing the unraveling of U.S.-Russian relations. If, indeed, we are on the brink of a new cold war, how did we get there?
Vladimir Putin is not a nice man and the military takeover of Crimea was a brazen act of aggression; but Putin’s actions in Ukraine did not happen in a vacuum. What’s needed is context and a sure-footed navigator. Marvin Kalb is both the historian and journalist to guide us, and his brilliant new book,Imperial Gamble, is the lucid, clear-eyed road map to explain the evolution from Peter the Great to Putin the Unpredictable.
Kalb’s fluency in Russian language and his professional lifetime as a diplomatic correspondent have combined to produce a tough-minded analysis that gives equal weight to Russia’s historic claims to Ukraine, and U.S. miscalculations in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Not even Marvin Kalb can explain how to get out of the Ukrainian quagmire, but he does one fine job of explaining how we got into it.
—Ted Koppel, Journalist

Imperial Gamble represents the distilled wisdom of a scholar-journalist who has observed fifty years of international politics from close-up as well as up-high - through the eye of a reporter and the analytic lens of a trained historian. Drawing on thousand years of East-West rivalry over the Ukraine, this gripping narrative explains Russia's lunge into the Crimea and the South-East. Casting a critical and yet discerning eye on Putin, Kalb sees a drama of clashing interests where so many others have seen only the revival of Russian imperialism. Required reading for anybody who wants to understand a contest that will torment East-West relations for years to come. Keep it in hand as you listen to the excited chatter of the media.
—Josef Joffe, Fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution at Stanford