Kategoria BISAC: History >> Eastern Europe - General

Russia's emergence as a Great Power in the eighteenth century is usually attributed to Peter I's radical programme of 'Westernising' reforms. But the Russian military did not simply copy European armies. Adapting the tactics of its neighbours on both sides, Russia created a powerful strategy of its own, integrating steppe defence with European concerns. In "Russia's Wars of Emergence," Carol Belkin Stevens examines the social and political factors underpinning Muscovite military history, the eventual success of the Russian Empire and the sacrifices made for power.

The reforms initiated by Peter the Great transformed Russia not only into a European power, but into a European culture--a shift, argues James Cracraft, that was nothing less than revolutionary. The author of seminal works on visual culture in the Petrine era, Cracraft now turns his attention to the changes that occurred in Russian verbal culture.

The forceful institutionalization of the tsar's reforms--the establishment of a navy, modernization of the army, restructuring of the government, introduction of new arts and sciences--had an enormous impact on language. Cracraft details...

The leading Polish poet still residing in his native land, Zbigniew Herbert as not been the subject of a book-length study in English until now. Stanislaw Baranczak, himself a poet, critic, and translator, emigrated from Poland only in 1981, and is therefore eminently qualified to supply a politico-cultural context for Herbert while describing and analyzing the texts and themes of his poems.

Herbert's poetry is based on permanent confrontation--the confrontation of Western tradition with the experience of a "barbarian" from Eastern Europe, of the classical past with the modern era,...

Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological...

How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons? Many people asked this question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it, and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing--by an Orthodox Jew--of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg (now L'viv, Ukraine). Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century...

Richard Lukas presents the compelling eyewitness accounts of these and other Polish Christians who...