Russia & the Former Soviet Union

In the early 20th century, with Russia full of intense social strife and political struggle, Vladimir Yevgenyevich (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a Revisionist Zionist leader and Jewish Public intellectual. Although previously glossed over, these...

Based on interviews and a broad array of sources from Russian and Austrian archives, this collection provides a comprehensive analysis of the Soviet occupation of Austria from 1945 to 1955. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, including the...

Originally published in the UK in 1966, this was the first biography of Lenin which tied together extensive material unearthed in WWII, and it illuminates the complex personality and explains the riddle of Lenin's seemingly impossible rise to power...

John Fennell's history of thirteenth-century Russia is the only detailed study in English of the period, and is based on close investigation of the primary sources. His account concentrates on the turbulent politics of northern Russia, which was...

In this richly researched and highly original study, Alexander M. Martin explores conservatism in Russian thought, politics, and culture during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Tracing the indigenous and foreign origins of conservative...

An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational...

This interdisciplinary collection of essays on the social and cultural life of late imperial Russia describes the struggle of new elites to take up a "middle position" in society--between tsar and people. During this period autonomous social and cultural...

The popular culture of urban and rural tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg have gathered here a diverse collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars who question conventional interpretations and...

As readers of classic Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. With incomes erratic and banks inadequate, Russians of all social castes were deeply enmeshed in networks of credit and debt. The necessity...

In 1955 the United States and the Soviet Union were matching steps in a race to develop missiles tipped with thermonuclear weapons. American officials were frustrated and alarmed by their inability to learn the scale and progress of the Soviet program,...

"Meticulously researched, impressively documented, and engrossingly written, . . . [it] contributes to a long-overdue reconception of the New Economic Policy (NEP). . . ." -Choice" . . . a well-organized, sophisticated analysis of the difficulties...

Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley is the first English translation of an important 19th-century Russian text describing everyday life in Uzbek communities. Vladimir and Maria Nalivkin were Russians who settled in a "Sart" village in 1878, in a...

The 1960s have reemerged in scholarly and popular culture as a protean moment of cultural revolution and social transformation. In this volume socialist societies in the Second World (the Soviet Union, East European countries, and Cuba) are the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789057024207Author John TichotskyFormat HardbackPage Count 393Imprint Harwood Academic (Medical, Reference and Social ScPublisher Gordon and...

In the wake of communism's decline, women's concerns had become increasingly important in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Yet most discussions of post-communism changes had neglected women's experiences.Originally published in 1993, this...

Communism must kill what it cannot control. So for a century, it has killed artists, writers, musicians, and even dancers. It kills them secretly, using bioweapons and poison to escape accountability. Among its victims was Anna Pavlova, history's...

In the first cultural and political history of the Russian nuclear age, Paul Josephson describes the rise of nuclear physics in the USSR, the enthusiastic pursuit of military and peaceful nuclear programs through the Chernobyl disaster and the collapse...

This book, originally published in 1952, describes and explains the stage of the decline of the Russian Empire between the Crimean and First World Wars. The book is divided up by period: the reign of Alexander II (1855-81), the period of reaction...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780919618251Author VolineFormat PaperbackPage Count 716Imprint Black Rose BooksPublisher Black Rose Books

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their...

Historian Gary Marker traces the Russian veneration of St. Catherine of Alexandria from its beginnings in Kievan times through the onset of female rulership in the 18th century. Two narratives emerge. The first focuses on St. Catherine within Christendom...

This edited volume examines deterrence and the defense efforts of European states neighboring Russia, following the Crimean intervention.Deterrence, after being largely absent from debates among academics and policy-makers for almost a quarter of a...

Sevastopol, located in present-day Ukraine but still home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and revered by Russians for its role in the Crimean War, was utterly destroyed by German forces during World War II. In From Ruins to Reconstruction, Karl D. Qualls...

Why did the Soviet system fail? How is it that a political order, born of revolution, perished from stagnation? What caused a seemingly stable polity to collapse? Philip Roeder finds the answer to these questions in the Bolshevik "constitution"--the...

The description for this book, Moscow's Third World Strategy, will be forthcoming.Book InformationISBN 9780691023328Author Alvin Z. RubinsteinFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint Princeton University PressPublisher Princeton University...

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...

How did Nicholas II, Russia's last Tsar, meet his death? Shot point blank in a bungled execution by radical Bolsheviks in the Urals, Nicholas and his family disappeared from history in the Soviet era. But in the 1970s, a local geologist and a crime...

Sonja Luehrmann explores the Soviet atheist effort to build a society without gods or spirits and its afterlife in post-Soviet religious revival. Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the...

Special Sections: Remembering Diversity in East-Central European Cityscapes and Russias Annexation of Crimea I. Based on up-to-date field material, this issuefocuses onthe palimpsest-like environments of East-Central European borderland cities. The...

Much has been written about the activity of Lenin and his colleagues on the editorial board of the Iskra newspaper, whereas little has been said about the opponents of Leninism, who unsuccessfully fought for control of the Russian Social-Democratic...

Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had...

In From Victory to Peace, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter brings the Russian perspective to a critical moment in European political history. This history of Russian diplomatic thought in the years after the Congress of Vienna concerns a time when Russia...

Blending close readings of literature, films, and other artworks with analysis of texts of political philosophy, science, and social theory, Mieka Erley offers an interdisciplinary perspective on attitudes to soil in Russia and the Soviet Union from the...

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence of musicians in the cultural elite? This is one of the...

Russian Modernity places Imperial and Soviet Russia in a European context. Russia shared in a larger European modernity marked by increased overlap and sometimes merger of realms that had previously been treated as discrete entities: the social and the...

Originally published in 1989, this book presented the first study of the image of Stalin in literature. Analysing the literary presentaiton of historical character and the treatment of 20th Century tyrants in European prose fiction, the book draws a...

Translated from the Russian in 1928, this and the second volume of the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of...

This book, originally published in 1926 but updated in 1967 analyses Russia's economy in the decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War. It covers trade, finance, transport and industry and each chapter is supported by statistics drawn from...

Filling an important gap in a neglected area of Russian history, namely the 1880s and early 1890s, this volume, originally published in 1987, examines the labour movement from the perspective of the politicized workers themselves. It examines not only...

Between 1945 and 1965, the catastrophe of war-and the social and political changes it brought in its wake-had a major impact on the construction of the Soviet masculine ideal. Drawing upon a wide range of visual material, The Fate of the New Man traces...