January 04, 2026

An Author by Any Other Name...


An Author by Any Other Name...
Yes, there can be too many. The Russian Life files.

A recent report by the BBC's Russian service revealed that Russian publishing giant AST has been using ghostwriters to churn out books for years – to ill effects.

Ghostwriters who produce for AST write prodigiously: some write as many as 20 books a year. But while ghostwriting is widespread around the world, and while AST claims that it meticulously checks the facts contained in its books, readers have begun to notice a spate of errors.

Notably, AST publishes a series called "The Complete History of a Country," where ghostwriter Sergei Nachaev covers the history of different countries. The authors are purported to be residents and scholars of these countries, with names like Azadi Hussein (author of the Iran entry) and Lehman Herschel (Israel). In reality, Nachaev has written them all.

As a result the Russian perspective has shone through via obscure conspiracies. The book on India, for example, mentions "a highly developed civilization [that] existed on the country's territory, which perished in a clash with extraterrestrial aliens" from "nuclear weapons."

We're going to need to see the sources on that one.

Perhaps most interesting is the book on the United States, written by one Sage Tippot (a name about as plausible to American ears as Art Vandelay). According to the BBC, the portrayal of the U.S. in the book is not explicitly erroneous, and, once the book gets to the twentieth century, it glosses over any Soviet aggression during the Cold War, painting the United States as an single-minded aggressor plotting for world domination. This is closely in line with the popular Russian telling of the period. In addition, of the two epigraphs at the start of the book, one appears to be sourced from Wikipedia.

The BBC speculated that the rise in low-quality books is caused by non-bibliophiles getting editorial jobs and clamoring for high levels of production. For our part, we book-lovers at Russian Life only endorse history books written by non-ghostwriters.

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