Russia & the Former Soviet Union

This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were...

This book, first published in 1923, endeavoured to provide a brief account of the social and economic conditions in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia and Peace discusses the interest in Russia shown by other countries, the...

This volume, originally published in 1990 and now with an updated Preface, gives an account of the Allies' last concerted attempt to destroy Russia's nascent Bolshevik regime. At the start, it looked like a threat that should be taken seriously, as the...

An established introductory textbook that provides students with an engaging overview of the complex developments in Eastern Europe from the end of the Second World War through to the present. Tracing the origins of the socialist experiment,...

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set...

The metaphor of the nomad may at first seem surprising for Russia given its history of serfdom, travel restrictions, and strict social hierarchy. But as the imperial center struggled to tame a vast territory with ever-expanding borders, ideas of...

Combining concepts and methodologies from anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, music, cultural studies, and film studies, this collection of ten original essays addresses issues crucial to gender and national identity in Russia from the...

What did it mean to be Russian as the imperial era gave way to Soviet rule? Andrew Jenks turns to a unique art form produced in the village of Palekh to investigate how artists and craftsmen helped to reshape Russian national identity. Russia in a Box...

Women known as "shriekers" howled, screamed, convulsed, and tore their clothes. Believed to be possessed by devils, these central figures in a cultural drama known as klikushestvo stirred various reactions among those who encountered them...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780875801438Author Ezra MendelsohnFormat HardbackPage Count 330Imprint Northern Illinois University PressPublisher Cornell University PressWeight(grams) 28g

In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the...

Why 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 no radical defense reforms in Russia since the end of the...

This book examines the interplay between energy policy and security policy under Vladimir Putin, and his drive to re-establish Russia's 'greatness'.Assessing the internal contradictions of this policy, the book argues that Russia's desire to strengthen...

This book examines a number of key questions about social change in contemporary Russia - issues such as how people survive when they are not paid for months on end, 'the New Poor', the falling birth rate, why so many Russian men die in middle age,...

Over the last hundred years, Russia has undergone a succession of failed projects of state construction - from Tzarist modernisation to Soviet state socialism to liberal democratic market capitalism. This new book introduces these vastly different...

This comprehensive study of local politics in Russia shows that the key reforms of local government, and the struggle to forge viable grassroots democracies have been inextricably linked to the wider struggle for power between the regions and the...

This book examines federalism and regional and local politics in Russia. Many commentators have alluded to the unique nature of Russia's dual transition and its difficult task of simultaneously reforming its economy and polity. But there is in fact a...

The flow of money to national, regional, and local Soviet communist party organizations, the manner in which money was collected, and how their financial discipline was enforced all yield deep insights into the party's role in the Soviet institutional...

". . . the specificity and breadth of this [work] makes it unique. . . . lively reading . . . particularly recommended for academic collections with a strong focus in Russian history." -Library Journal". . . a remarkable new collection of essays . . ...

In post-Soviet Russia, there is a persistent trend to repress, control, or even co-opt national history. By reshaping memory to suit a politically convenient narrative, Russia has fashioned a good future out of a "bad past." While Putin's...

The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was "gifted" to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace's visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a sort...

Saving Stalin's Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders' determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the...

Originally published in 1928, this book is a result of a visit to Russia by the author who stayed in a remote village and mixed with the local population. A crusader for social justice, Dorothy Buxton in theory saw Bolshevism as a fairer system and went...

Examines the theoretical and practical outlook of forensic physicians in Imperial Russia, from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, arguing that the interaction between state and these professionals shaped processes of reform in contemporary Russia. It...

Russian leaders have always considered the Balkans to be an area of special Russian interests. After the end of the Cold War, the region again became the focus of attention with the violent break-up of federal Yugoslavia, as Moscow's policy-makers...

In this examination of Solzhenitsyn and his work, Lee Congdon explores the consequences of the atheistic socialism that drove the Russian revolutionary movement. Beginning with a description of the post-revolutionary Russia into which Solzhenitsyn was...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474467230Author Kevin RiehleFormat HardbackPage Count 248Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

Russia in World History uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474444309Author Paolo SartoriFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University PressWeight(grams) 156g

Using Mongolia as its example, this book examines how knowledge is transmitted and transformed in light of political change by looking at shifting conceptions of historical figures. It suggests that the reflection of people's concept of themselves is a...

Barbara Alpern Engel's Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia is the first book to explore the intricacies of domestic life in Russia across the modern period. Surveying the period from 1700 right up to the present day, the book explores the...

This book, originally published in 1987, focuses on the factors which contributed to the Moscow uprising of December 1905, by comprehensively surveying a vast field of both Russian and English language literature on the subject. In order to explain why...

Bringing together important new work by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe approaches emotions as a phenomenon complexly intertwined with society, culture, politics, and...

In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors-most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime-new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could...

In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier's mix of Turkic,...

Russia has more woodlands than any other country in the world, and its forests have loomed large in Russian culture and history. Historical site of protection from invaders but also from state authority, by the nineteenth century Russia's forests became...

What caused the emergence of nationalist movements in many post-communist states? What role did communist regimes play in fostering these movements? Why have some been more successful than others? To address these questions, Yitzhak Brudny traces the...

This book explores how one of the world's most literary-oriented societies entered the modern visual era, beginning with the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, focusing then on literature's role in helping to shape cinema as a tool of...

Sergei Kovalyov is a central figure in the struggle for human rights in Russia. He was a leading Soviet biology academic and, in the 1970s after becoming active in dissident circles, was arrested by the KGB, tried, imprisoned and subjected to internal...

In the absence of democratic state institutions, eastern European countries were considered to possess only myths of democracy. Working on the premise that democracy is not only an institutional arrangement but also a civilisational project, this book...