In this volume, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, using a breadth of source material including Soviet archives and the local press, present recent thinking and research on Soviet history. New Directions in Soviet History opens with a provocative review of Gorbachev and Soviet history by Pierre Broue. This is followed by papers on the changing nature of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Jeffrey Brooks explores how public identities were constructed in the party press, Denise Youngblood looks at the role of the cinema and James van Gelderen examines tensions within the arts between...

Soviet history has seldom been of such importance--both to historians and to a broader public in the USSR--as it now is. In this timely volume, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, using a breadth of source material including Soviet archives and the local press, present the most recent thinking and up-to-date research available. The original essays discuss Gorbachev and Soviet history, the changing nature of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s, the politics of shopfloor culture between the wars, and the evolution of the political elite from the 1930s to the present day.

Inessa Armand was born of French-English parents in Paris in 1874, raised in the family of a wealthy Moscovite manufacturer, and buried at the age of 46 next to the walls of the Kremlin. In this biography, Professor R. C. Ellwood explores her relatively short life as a Tolstoyan, a lady philanthropist interested in rehabilitating prostitutes, an underground propagandist arrested five times by the tsarist police, an important Bolshevik organizer in Western Europe before the revolution, and a leading Soviet feminist from 1917 to 1920. Armand's unique life is made even more interesting by her...