Russia & the Former Soviet Union

In this richly comparative analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's...

As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how...

During the 1930's, 23 million peasants left their villages and moved to Soviet cities, where they comprised almost half the urban population and more than half the nation's industrial workers. Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David...

"... lucid and stimulating... " -The New York Times Book Review "Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the new Eastern Europe and the collapse of Soviet control over it-informative and incisive." -Zbigniew Brzezinski ...

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,...

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...

Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle popular enthusiasm for the revolution, which eventually gave rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels (The Fiery Revolutionaries/Plamennye revoliutsionery...

Unique and insightful, this book takes a look at Russia's development through the Tsarist and Soviet periods. Rather than make the more familiar comparisons between Russia and the West, Russia and Development focuses on political and social mobilization...

This book, originally published in 1943 deals with the features of Soviet life which the editor and contributors feel are of particular significance to Western readers. It describes the soviet political system and gives an account of the institutions of...

This book examines the nature of Russia's relations with the former Soviet states (FSS), in particular with countries which formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, and seeks to assess whether there has been a resurgence of imperialism since the...

This is the first comprehensive study of Russian political and social thought in the post-Communist era. The book portrays and critically examines the conceptual and theoretical attempts by Russian scholars and political thinkers to make sense of the...

The causes of the First World War have been studied and debated for many decades, yet cultural historians of Germany have largely neglected the German-Russian aspect of the conflict for a focus on the clash of Germany and Great Britain. When they have...

The dacha is a sometimes beloved, sometimes scorned Russian dwelling. Alexander Pushkin summered in one; Joseph Stalin lived in one for the last twenty years of his life; and contemporary Russian families still escape the city to spend time in them...

This fascinating study which shows how, from the seventh century to the present day, the region's people have negotiated their distinctively Central Asian Islamic identity in the face of enduring external Islamic and non-Islamic dominations, ethnic...

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 weaves scholarly commentary with...

With a new introductory theoretical chapter, the book collects thoroughly revised nine articles and book chapters based on Pal Kolsto's thirty years of study of nationalism and ethnic conflict in post-Soviet states. Kolsto examines how the drivers behind...

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...

The result of 10 years' worth of painstaking research, this volume, originally published in 1926 is a sympathetic critique of certain phases of revolutionary dictatorship in Russia. Among other things it focusses on the philosophy and psychology of...

This volume, originally published in 1964, presents a series of slides illustrating the major events of the Russian Revolution. Gathering together many accounts from the memoirs of innumerable people from every walk of life and political frame of mind:...

This book, originally published in English in 1932, covers the Soviet occupation of Latvia during 1919. The attempt of Moscow to set up a foreign Soviet State, extending to every sphere of public and private life is described in detail, with the aim of...

When Lenin died and the Russian Revolution began to devour its leaders, Trotsky survived longer than most as an exile in Mexico, until his assassination in 1940. The Essential Trotsky, first published in 1963, demonstrates the significance of this...

Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society...

A historical and empirical study of Russian economic and social policy, tracing long-term evolutions across the Soviet and Russian periods. Circumstances explain the failure of transition policies that worked elsewhere, leading Christensen to re-examine...

Anna Geifman examines the explosion of terrorist activity that took place in the Russian empire from the years just prior to the turn of the century through 1917, a period when over 17,000 people were killed or wounded by revolutionary extremists. On the...

Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825, an elegant new book created by a team of leading historians in collaboration with The New York Public Library, traces Russia's development from an insular, medieval, liturgical realm centered on Old Muscovy, into a...

This book presents a new picture of the politics, economics and process of government in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Based in large part on original research in recently declassified archive collections, the book examines...

Examining the role of dramatized narratives in Russian television, this book stresses the ways in which the Russian government under Putin use primetime television to express a new understanding of what it means to be Russian, answering key questions of...

For more than three centuries, St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's westward-oriented capital and as a visually stunning showcase of Russia's imperial ambitions, has been the country's most mythologized city. Like a museum...

"[A]n outstanding work of historical ethnography.... The book offers wonderful insight into how women created and understood the great changes of the 20th century. It is unique in its scope and its intimate knowledge of rural life." -Russian...

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...

From sermons and clerical reports to personal stories of faith, this book of translated primary documents reveals the lived experience of Orthodox Christianity in 19th- and early 20th-century Russia. These documents allow us to hear the voices of...

The essays in the book compare the Czech Republic and Slovakia since the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. The papers deal with the causes of the divorce and discuss the political, economic and social developments in the new countries. This is the only...

This book proposes a new perspective on the role of literature in the Cold War and shifts the reader's attention to the gaps in the ostensibly impenetrable Iron Curtain. It uncovers the histories of the widely forgotten phenomenon of tamizdat:...

After the entry of the Red Army into Czechoslovak territory in 1945, Red Army authorities began to arrest and deport Czechoslovak citizens to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The regions most affected were Eastern and South Slovakia and Prague. The...

In Fragmented Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life--from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil...

Looks at the sources of stability and instability in post-Soviet authoritarian states through the case study of President Lukashenka's firm hold on power in Belarus. In particular, it seeks to understand the role of energy relations, policies, and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781988832050Author Samir AminFormat PaperbackPage Count 126Imprint Daraja PressPublisher Daraja Press

The Tsar's Happy Occasion shows how the vast, ornate affairs that were royal weddings in early modern Russia were choreographed to broadcast powerful images of monarchy and dynasty. Processions and speeches emphasized dynastic continuity and legitimacy...

In Michael Romanov: Brother of the Last Tsar, translator Helen Azar and Romanov historian Nicholas B. A. Nicholson present for the first time in English the annotated 1916-1918 diaries and letters of Russia's Grand Duke Michael, from the murder of the...

This collection of essays makes a significant contribution to the historiography of the end of the Cold War. Research on the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War is constantly growing. Initially, it was dominated by fairly simplistic, and...