A category of persons best defined by what they were not, the raznochintsy--people of various ranks or people of diverse origins--inhabited the shifting social territory between nobles and serfs in preindustrial Russia. Neither merchants nor clergy nor military servicemen, they may have been by occupation administrative clerks, teachers, artists, retired soldiers, or street vendors. In official society, they were outsiders. In this first major study of the raznochintsy, Wirtschafter draws on a rich array of archival, legal, administrative, and public sources to show how this important but...

Despite the horrors of punishment in a society so different from Western ideologies, the Russian government hugely modernized its correctional system toward the end of imperial rule. This study traces the development of the penal system from the Great Reforms to the Main Prison Administration.

Stalinist policy toward Jews is assessed for the first time in this groundbreaking book.
Sifting through thousands of recently declassified documents in the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB, Kostyrchenko reveals in dispassionate documentary fashion the suppression of free expression of Jewish life, the forced assimilation of Soviet Jews, and the purging of Jews from official positions. The Soviet Jews fought valiantly against fascism in World War II, and the Soviet Union battled to end the Holocaust. Yet Soviet Jews found that a most ominous page in...