Kategoria BISAC: History >> Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Russian Empire offers new perspectives on the strategies of imperial rule pursued by rulers, officials, scholars, and subjects of the Russian empire. An international team of scholars explores the connections between Russia's expansion over vast territories occupied by people of many ethnicities, religions, and political experiences and the evolution of imperial administration and vision. The fresh research reflected in this innovative volume reveals the ways in which the realities of sustaining imperial power in a multiethnic, multiconfessional, scattered, and diffuse environment inspired...

Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents
Anne E. Gorsuch

A vivid account of Bolshevik efforts to "Sovietize" young people in the 1920s.

"A very impressive work--broad, learned, and very readable." --Lynn Mally

"A welcome and fascinating addition to the social and cultural history of the 1920s in Russia and to the comparative study of youth politics and culture in contemporary Europe and elsewhere." --Mark von Hagen

In Bolshevik Russia, the successful transformation of young people into communists was crucial for the future of the Soviet...

Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades
Celebrations in the Time of Stalin
Karen Petrone

A lively investigation of the official and unofficial meanings of Stalinist celebrations.

"An impressive and highly readable book that... casts a clear and disturbing light on the relationship of Stalinist mythology, state power, popular participation, and the unending complexities of social and cultural survival mechanisms and daily life." --Richard Stites

In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, public celebrations flourished while Stalinist repression intensified. What explains this...

..". will challenge (and should transform) existing interpretations of late Imperial Russian governance, peasant studies, and Russian legal history." --Cathy A. Frierson

..". a major contribution to our understanding both of the dynamic of change within the peasantry and of legal development in late Imperial Russia." --William G. Wagner

Russian Peasants Go to Court brings into focus the legal practice of Russian peasants in the township courts of the Russian empire from 1905 through 1917. Contrary to prevailing conceptions of peasants as backward, drunken, and ignorant, and as...

The Soviet project of creating a new culture and society entailed a plan for the modeling of "new" persons who embodied and fulfilled the promise of socialism, and this vision was expressed in the institutions of government. Using archival sources, essays, and interviews with journalists, Thomas C. Wolfe provides an account of the final four decades of Soviet history viewed through the lens of journalism and media. Whereas most studies of the Soviet press approach its history in terms of propaganda or ideology, Wolfe's focus is on the effort to imagine a different kind of person and...

"Graham has brilliantly encapsulated and interwoven the major features of Soviet and post-Soviet history in his riveting stories.... a splendid and extraordinary work." --Edward Grant, author of God and Reason in the Middle Ages

"A very lively read, indeed a real page turner... Graham's discussion of pressing ethical dilemmas displays a sureness of hand and a refreshing candor about his own struggles with the issues." --Susan Solomon, University of Toronto

The distinguished American historian of Russian and Soviet science Loren R. Graham recounts with warmth and wit his...

"Olga Litvak has written a book of astonishing originality and intellectual force.... In vivid prose, she takes the reader on a journey through the Russian-Jewish literary imagination." --Benjamin Nathans

Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large...

Victor Israelyan was a senior ambassador in the Soviet Foreign Ministry when the armies of Egypt and Syria invaded Israeli-occupied territory on October 6, 1973. Critical to the outcome of this conflict were the Soviet Union and the United States, whose diplomatic maneuverings behind the scenes eventually ended what came to be known as the Yom Kippur War. During the crisis, however, tensions between the superpowers nearly escalated into nuclear war. Israelyan is the first Soviet official to give us a firsthand account of what actually happened inside the Kremlin during these three...

Scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America working with the support of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs combine their efforts to bring us new insights into how Russia has conducted its foreign affairs since the fall of Communism. Drawing on both archival sources and interviews, they cover such major issues as Russia's decision to use military force in Chechnya, its reactions to NATO expansion, and its emergent relations with Japan and East Asia. The contributors are Eunsook Chung, Henrikki Heikka, Ted Hopf, Andrea Lopez, Hiroshi Kimura, Sergei Medvedev, and Christer...

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with...

This is the first major study based on Soviet documents and revelations of the Soviet state security during the period 1939-1953--a period about which relatively little is known. The book documents the role of Stalin and the major players in massive crimes carried out during this period against the Soviet people. It also provides the first detailed biography of V. S. Abakumov, Minister of State Security, 1946-1951.

Based on Glasnost revelations and recently released archival material, this study covers the operations of Soviet state security from Beriia's appointment in 1938...

The interest of Russian intellectuals in the French Revolution demonstrates that some Russian thinkers of the 19th century had begun to question the concept of Russia's uniqueness. Yet most of them came to believe that the French Revolution (which they tended to equate with the Western experience) was irrelevant not only to Russia but to the rest of the world as well. They saw, perhaps correctly, that the Western experience, with the French Revolution as its symbol, was foreign to Russian destiny. Most of the Russian intellectuals of that time had rightly foreseen Russia, and to some...

An American academic describes the breakup of the Soviet Union and the formation of an independent Latvia from the vantage point of Riga, where he was acting as an advisor to the Latvian Parliament and was a visiting faculty member at the time of the events. This description is unusual for several reasons--the author was based in Riga rather than Moscow or Leningrad, where most reporters lived, the work was written by someone who had access to the government, and the author was able to understand the local press and people. Background material on the Baltic countries and their relationship...

Of all the violent disputes that have flared across the former Soviet Union since the late 1980s, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is the only one to pose a genuine threat to peace and security throughout Eurasia. By right of its strategic location and oil resources, the Transcaucasus has been and will continue to be a source of interest for external powers competing to advance their geopolitical influence in the region. Under such conditions, the possibility will remain for the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict to reignite and expand to include other powers.

The ten-year conflict between...

It is increasingly important to understand the complexity of central and southeastern Europe following the enlargement of NATO into Central Europe, the ongoing problems of the Balkans, and the subsequent focus of global attention on the entire region. Gardner brings together exceptional French and Eastern European scholars who present first-hand accounts of their experience and knowledge of the region. Each provides differing political, social, cultural, and economic perspectives on Central and Southeastern Europe.

The volume begins with a general discussion of the place of central and...

Using a variety of old and new archival sources to examine the emergence of the Soviet system (1917-1937), this combined approach offers chronologically coherent and original construction of some crucial stages and problems in Soviet history. The past two centuries have produced an extraordinary number of new states--more than 30 in 20th-century Europe alone. It is within this turbulent context that one must analyze the rise of the Soviet state, an entity that would prove fragile in the long run despite its all-powerful facade. An examination of the extreme features and peculiarities of...

The relationship between the Russian Federation and the 14 non-Russian successor states is unequal, with Russia the dominant power. This power imbalance is a hold-over from the Soviet era in which the RSFSR was first among equals. Empires, like the Soviet one, are specific types of political systems that differed from modern states. The centralized, multi-ethnic and non-democratic character of empires explains the continued dominance of the Russian Federation. It also explains the absence of alternative economic arrangements and political contacts between the former republics. The Soviet...

The relationship between the Russian Federation and the 14 non-Russian successor states is unequal, with Russia the dominant power. This power imbalance is a hold-over from the Soviet era in which the RSFSR was first among equals. Empires, like the Soviet one, are specific types of political systems that differed from modern states. The centralized, multi-ethnic and non-democratic character of empires explains the continued dominance of the Russian Federation. It also explains the absence of alternative economic arrangements and political contacts between the former republics. The Soviet...

Between 1932 and 1953, a fleet of ordinary cargo ships was pressed into extraordinary service. The fleet's task was to relocate approximately one-million forced laborers to the Soviet Gulag in Kolyma, located along the Arctic Circle in far northeastern Siberia. The Kolyma Gulag, the most infamous in the Soviet Union, was accessible only by sea, and the fleet became the lifeblood of the entire operation. As one of the largest seaborne movements of people in history, this transport took a devastating toll on human lives. Bollinger presents the often-horrific stories of the Gulag fleet and...

This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet "culture." In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the...