Russia & the Former Soviet Union

This book explores the mythology woven around the Soviet secret police and the Russian cult of state security that has emerged from it. Tracing the history of this mythology from the Soviet period through to its revival in contemporary post-Soviet...

Between 1970 and 1986, countries around the world expelled hundreds of Soviet officials and personnel for espionage or other misconduct. One official source puts the number at 672 for the 16-year period, or an average of 42 expulsions per year. Some...

First published in 1985, Shamans, Lamas and Evangelicals tells the little known yet fascinating story of a missionary venture to Eastern Siberia in the year 1818. Two missionaries, one English, one Swedish, with the tiresome voyage across the Baltic...

First Published in 1990, Moscow Graffiti is a unique and unprecedented look at the graffiti that began to appear for the first time on the walls of Moscow and other Soviet cities in the late 1970s. John Bushnell first traces the social and cultural...

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Beginning with the 1881 Itinerant Art Exhibition, this book examines the history of modern Russia through the paintings of Vasily Surikov and Viktor Vasnetsov, two of the most important Russian painters of the period. By placing specific paintings and...

Beginning with the 1881 Itinerant Art Exhibition, this book examines the history of modern Russia through the paintings of Vasily Surikov and Viktor Vasnetsov, two of the most important Russian painters of the period. By placing specific paintings and...

This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union’s antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many...

Through 30 interpretative essays, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Russian Revolution sees an international team of leading scholars comprehensively examine Russia’s revolutionary years. In the wake of the 2017 centenary, this handbook is the first...

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of...

The Bolshevik takeover of Russia created an alternative Russia in exile that never laid down its arms. For two decades, expelled White Russians sought ways to retaliate against the Soviet Union and return home. Their irreconcilability was galvanized by a...

This timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and...

This timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and...

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR?...

For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills - from the Mongol yoke, to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, Soviet atheism, the chaotic 1990s and now two decades of Vladimir Putin.In this provocative...

Corruption on an immense scale and the unscrupulous use of law enforcement have left indelible marks on post-Soviet Russia. Federico Varese reveals the scars of these grim decades through an unusual lens: its criminal history.Varese weaves together the...

When Stalin came to power, making music in Russia became dangerous. Composers now had to create work that served the socialist state, and all artistic production was scrutinized for potential subversion. In The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars vividly...

The Civil War and early Soviet food policies left millions of children homeless and starving in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Child mortality rates reached 95% in certain areas, and all of these problems remained endemic throughout the...

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of...

Cold has long been a fixture of Russian identity both within and beyond the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union, even as the ongoing effects of climate change complicate its meaning and cultural salience. The Russian Cold assembles fascinating new...

This book extends principal-agent theory to the case of pro-Russian rebel militias in Eastern Ukraine.Russia's war in Ukraine demonstrates the much-discussed relations between the principal (Russia) and agent (rebel militias) in Eastern Ukraine. Russia’s...

Recent years have witnessed a growing affinity between increasingly radicalized right-wing movements in the United States and Russia, countries that only recently viewed each other as intractable foes. In Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the...

The Armenian world was shattered by the 1915 genocide. Not only were thousands of lives lost but families were displaced and the narrative threads that connected them to their own past and homelands were forever severed. Many have been left with only...

This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union’s antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many...

When Ukrainian journalist Iuliia Mendel got the call she had been hired to work for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she had no idea what was to come.In this frank and “moving” (The Washington Post) insider account, Zelenskyy’s former press secretary tells...