From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving...

Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also...

Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture.
The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of klubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was...

FINALIST, 2016 National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust category)

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Holocaust in Croatia recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has...

This book traces transformations in German views of Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, leading up to the disastrous German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Casteel shows how Russia figured in the imperial visions and utopian desires of a variety of Germans, including scholars, journalists, travel writers, government and military officials, as well as nationalist activists. He illuminates the ambiguous position that Russia occupied in Germans' global imaginary as both an imperial rival and an object of German power. During the interwar years in particular, Russia, now...

In 1937, the Soviet Union mounted a national celebration commemorating the centenary of poet Alexander Pushkin's death. Though already a beloved national literary figure, the scale and feverish pitch of the Pushkin festival was unprecedented. Greetings, Pushkin presents the first in-depth study of this historic event and follows its manifestations in art, literature, popular culture, education, and politics, while also examining its philosophical underpinnings.
Jonathan Brooks Platt looks deeply into the motivations behind the Soviet glorification of a long-dead poet--seemingly at...

Vasily Sleptsov was a Russian social activist and writer during the politically charged 1860s, known as the era of great reforms, and marked by Alexander II s emancipation of the serfs and the relaxation lifting of censorship. Popular in his day, Sleptsov s contemporaries Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov praised his writing:, with Chekhov once remarkeding, Sleptsov taught me, better than most, to understand the Russian intelligent, and my own self as well.
The novella Hard Times is considered Sleptsov s most important work. It focused popular attention on the radical...

Following the 1992 breakup of Yugoslavia, the region descended into a series of bloody conflicts marked by intense ethnic and religious hatreds. Kosovo emerged at the epicenter of these disputes and the site of innumerable human rights violations, as Serbia, united with Montenegro at the time, sought to remove the Albanian presence. Kosovo (roughly ninety percent Albanian) declared independence in 2008, and although it is recognized by over one hundred UN member states, it is still not recognized by Serbia.
This volume brings together scholars of Serbian, Albanian, Christian, and Muslim...

In this innovative study of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, Eagle Glassheim examines the transformation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland from the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century.
Prior to their expulsion in 1945, ethnic Germans had inhabited the Sudeten borderlands for hundreds of years, with deeply rooted local cultures and close, if sometimes tense, ties with Bohemia's Czech majority. Cynically, if largely willingly, harnessed by Hitler in 1938 to his pursuit of a Greater Germany, the Sudetenland's three million Germans became the...

In eighteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, bread was a dietary staple--truly grain was the staff of economic, social, and political life. Early on Tsar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg to export goods from Russia's vast but remote interior and by doing so to drive Russia's growth and prosperity. But the new city also had to be fed with grain brought over great distances from those same interior provinces. In this compelling account, Robert E. Jones chronicles how the unparalleled effort put into the building of a wide infrastructure to support the provisioning of the newly...