Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Why, asks Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in this controversial book, has Russia been a country of suffering? Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and...

The Russian Diaspora:1917-1941 is a complete reference work to be used as an overview of the mass exodus from the Russian Empire after the revolutions and civil war (1917-1921). This book provides Russian Studies scholars, as well as students of world...

At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a gradual shift occurred in the ways in which European governments managed their populations. In the Russian Empire, this transformation in governance meant that Jews could no longer...

Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an...

"I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children.""From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to live...

When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the...

Andrew Donskov takes a critical look not only at Tolstoy's attitude towards the peasant class he so often championed for their simple ways and freedom from upper-class sophistication and pretentiousness, but more importantly, gives voice to...

Based on extensive research in the Arctic Russian region of Chukotka, Settlers on the Edge is the first English-language account of settler life anywhere in the circumpolar north to appear since Robert Paine's The White Arctic (1977), and the first to...

The Cold War was a unique international conflict partly because Josef Stalin sought socialist transformation of other countries rather than simply the traditional objectives. This intriguing book, based on recently accessible Soviet primary sources, is...

A long overdue contribution to the study of Cold War history and Chinese foreign policy, Contending with Contradictions provides an incisive interpretation of China's relations with Poland and its irreversible impact on the communist world. Mercy A. Kuo...

More than seventy years since the Bolsheviks came to power, there is still no comprehensive study of workers' activism in history's first successful workers' revolution. Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 is the first effort in any language to...

This book explores thoroughly the reforms of Russian administration from 1775 to 1785, this work also reaches beyond Catherine's reign to challenge established opinions on the nature of eighteenth-century Russian government and the autocracy of the tsars...

This book explores thoroughly the reforms of Russian administration from 1775 to 1785, this work also reaches beyond Catherine's reign to challenge established opinions on the nature of eighteenth-century Russian government and the autocracy of the tsars...

Whereas most Soviet and American scholars of the Russian Revolution have emphasized the great leaders and the great events of 1917, Diane Koenker reverses this trend in a study of the Russian working class. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton...

From the Soviet technical intelligentsia emerged more than three quarters of recent Politburo members, including Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny. The largest single group of dissenters, including Grigorenko, Sakharov, and Solzhenitsyn, have also been...

A searing historical account of a tragic episode of the Stalinist terrorDuring the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to...

A rare, behind-the-scenes look at Russian military politicsWhy have Russian generals acquired an important political position since the Soviet Union's collapse while at the same time the effectiveness of their forces has deteriorated? Why have there been...

A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar eraAs the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning...

"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed...

In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this...

Fedor Chizhov built the first railroad owned entirely by Russian stockholders, created Moscow's first bank and mutual credit society, and launched the first profitable steamship line based in Archangel. In this valuable book, Thomas Owen vividly...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices...

This publication in three volumes originated in papers delivered at two conferences held in May 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC. Like many other conferences organized...

In the interwar period, Red Army commanders headed by Tukhachevskii developed a new doctrine of mobile warfare and 'deep operations'. The military requirements of armaments and industrial production in the event of war was a central parameter in...

During Russia's late imperial period, Orthodox churchmen, professionally trained theologians, and an array of social commentators sought to give meaning to Russian history and its supposed backwardness. Many found that meaning in asceticism. For some,...

How did Ludwig van Beethoven help overthrow a tsarist regime? With the establishment of the Russian Musical Society and its affiliated branches throughout the empire, Beethoven's music reached substantially larger audiences at a time of increasing...

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic...

World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War to Russians, ravaged the Soviet Union and traumatized those who survived. After the war, memory of this anguish was often publicly repressed under Stalin. But that all changed by the 1960s. Under Brezhnev,...

Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women's central role in the...

The clash between scholarship and politics-between truth and propaganda-was ruthless for historians in Istpart, the Russian Communist Central Committee's official historical department. Istpart was tasked with preserving the documentary record,...

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated...

For 60 years, scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union participated in state-organized programs of collaboration. But what really happened in these programs? What were the hopes of the participants and governments? How did these programs...

Nikolai Charushin's memoirs of his experience as a member of the revolutionary populist movement in Russia are familiar to historians, but A Generation of Revolutionaries provides a broader and more engaging look at the lives and relationships beyond...

John Bushnell's analysis of previously unstudied church records and provincial archives reveals surprising marriage patterns in Russian peasant villages in the 18th and 19th centuries. For some villages the rate of unmarried women reached as high as 70...

Following Moldovan women who "commute" for six to twelve months at a time to work as domestics in Istanbul, Worker-Mothers on the Margins of Europe explores the world of undocumented migrants from a postsocialist state. Leyla J. Keough examines the...

Dealing with Dictators explores America's Cold War efforts to make the dictatorships of Eastern Europe less tyrannical and more responsive to the country's international interests. During this period, US policies were a mix of economic and psychological...

Seeking to rebuild the Russian film industry after its post-Soviet collapse, directors and producers sparked a revival of nationalist and patriotic sentiment by applying Hollywood techniques to themes drawn from Russian history. Unsettled by the...

Factory of Strategy is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's...

Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation...

The decade and a half since Gorbachev came to power has been a tumultuous time for Russia. It has seen the expectations raised by perestroika dashed, the collapse of the Soviet superpower, and the emergence of a new Russian state claiming to base itself...