About Us

Liberty Publishing House is a boutique New York publisher with the mission of providing quality books by leading American and Russian authors. In 1984, anticipating a new era of politics in the Soviet Union, I founded a new kind of publishing house that would remedy the shortage of information and knowledge for Russian readers who, for over seven decades, were denied free access to books by the Soviet totalitarian regime.  Twenty six years later, with over 300 titles in Russian, English, Georgian, Ukrainian and Hebrew, I can state with assurance that Liberty has met its readership beyond expectations. Today, Liberty Publishing House continues to be the leading American publisher of challenging and quality books in the Russian language. Liberty has published the works of renowned Russian writers including Vassily Aksyonov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Edward Radzinsky, Edward Topol, Gavriil Popov, Arkady Vaksberg, Anatoly Karpov, Vitaly Korotich and many more.  Among Liberty’s American authors are Tom Clancy, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, George H.W. Bush, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ray Cline and  H.M. Roberts (Robert's Rules of Order).  Liberty Publishing House continues to uphold the tradition of publishing intelligent and serious books in a wide range of topics thus providing Russian readers, scholars and professionals with the highest quality works on Russian history, politics and literature.

Major events in the chronicles of Liberty Publishing House:

1985: Liberty publishes "Breaking with Moscow” the dramatic story of defection by the highest-ranking Soviet functionary Arkady Shevchenko, Under-Secretary General of the United Nation and the right-hand of Gromyko, the Foreign Minister of the USSR. The revelations of Shevchenko are shocking and the book became the center of attention among the Soviet officials, diplomats, and laymen.

1985: Liberty Publishing House publishes in Russian one of the most popular American techno-thrillers "The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy which describes the defection of a Soviet secret submarine captain to United States. In the movie version of it, Sean Connery, the venerable hero symbol of the West, James Bond, lends his image playing the captain of the "Red October”. This shift symbolized the beginning of the end of the classical "Cold War”.

1989: Liberty exhibits and debuts over 30 titles of forbidden and controversial books at the Moscow International Book Fair. Three of the authors had been sent to death. Thousands of Russian readers flock to see, touch and obtain Liberty Publishing's books for one-night of reading the forbidden books. The all-mighty and frightening curtain of the Soviet censorship was forever torn.

1990: The University of Saratov publishes "Tamizdat — From Condemnation to a Dialogue” a book devoted to analyzing the books on Russian histry published by Liberty Publishing House. The first chapter, "Russian History in the Publication of Liberty Publishing House” by Prof.: V.V. Pugachev (Editor) and Prof. V.A. Dines (Deputy Editor) was the first harbinger publication in the Soviet Union that showed the effects and fruits of Glasnost in a Soviet University.

1990: During the International Moscow Book Fair, October 1989, Ilya Levkov succeeded in convincing A. Grekov, Editor-in-Chief of Politizdat (the guardian of the Communist party's ideological purity) to include two chapters from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book Liberty published and exhibited at this fair: "The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century” in the annual publication "Quintessential".
 
The material was authorized for print within two months. It appeared in the "Quintessential”, Philosophical Almanac, 1990, pp.255-277. The first print was 100,000. It was a symbolical watershed for the weakened Communist Party and Politizdat, which for the first time ever decided to publish a necrology about the forthcoming the death of Communism.

1991: Liberty published the original " Russian Yellow Pages” c omposed and edited by Ilya Levkov . The book consisted of more than just listings, but served as an annual guide to the Russian speaking community in the United States. The book garnered interest from the U.S. Department of Commerce for distribution in Moscow, and the Olympic Committee distributed it to all Russian-speaking athletes at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

1992: Anticipating the forthcoming battle over the type of future post-Soviet regime in Russia (Parliamentary or Presidential), Liberty publishes the "Robert’s Rules of Order” – the procedural code of conducting an orderly meeting. Liberty's guide was ordered by Ruslan Khasbulatov, the Speaker of the Russian Duma, the Ukrainian Rada, the Georgian parliament and the city councils of St. Petersburg, Odessa and Kiev. This book contributed enormously to the development of democracy and parliamentary procedure in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia.

1994: Liberty Publishing launched its website on the Internet, becoming the first Russian language publisher with its own site.

1998: Liberty publishes "The Selling of the Soviet Empire” by Alfred Kokh, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of planning and implementing national privatization. Kokh executed this plan for over 500,000 industrial and commercial entities. To this day, it remains the only first-hand source account of the process that irreversibly turned Russia from its communist path.

2002: Liberty publishes "Russia: Terror from Within” by a then-unknown former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. Together with Yuri Felshtinsky, Litvinenko presented documentary evidence that it was the Russian secret services who carried out the bombings of residential houses in Russia in 1999. In 2006, Litvinenko was mysteriously poisoned in London.

2007: Liberty publishes "The Unpoisoned Word”, a collection of letters and articles written by Alexander Litvinenko in the last year of his life.

2008: Liberty uncovers and publishes the long lost works of the leading Russian-Jewish poet Semyon Frug: "The Broken Tablets - The Complete Collection". The tome was almost lost to the world, having last been published in 1895, with very few remaining copies in the world.

2010: Liberty publishes "My West Bank - Diary of an Israeli Commando”, by Alon Gook. This book was, and remains,  the first book about Israeli commandos written by a contemporary Russian émigré.

2010: Liberty Publishing publishes the memoirs of Alexander Shatravka: "Escape from Paradise”, which describes how the author fled the Soviet Union through Finland together with his brother and two friends. Caught in Finland, Shatravka was sent to a Soviet Gulag of psychological institutions that harbored hundreds of thousands of other prisoners that were clinically defined as crazy and abnormal because of their refusal to submit to the political demands of the communist regime. Shatravka resurrects those anonymous prisoners, lending them names, and describing in minute details the horrors that took place at such institutions.

2011: Liberty publishes the English edition of "Russia Demystified: In Search of Modern Russia" – by the prominent Russian historian Elgiz Pozdnyakov. Despite that thousands of scholars have thoroughly studied the history and politics of Russia, it remains a topic shrouded in mystery; Professor Pozdnyakov's book contributed greatly to its demystification.