A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Generously illustrated with reproductions of rare manuscripts, including 8 color plates, these accounts reveal how estate maps performed vital economic and cultural functions for property owners until the end of the nineteenth century. From plans of plantations in Jamaica and South Carolina to a map of Queens College, Cambridge, handsome examples show that estate maps formed an important part of the historical record of property ownership for both individuals and corporations, and helped owners manage their land and appraise its value. Exhibited in public places for pleasure and as symbols of wealth, they often displayed elaborate cartouches and elegant coats-of-arms.
Small-scale industries in rural areas in China are today an essential element of regional development programs. This monograph analyzes two main development strategies. One involves technology choices in a number of industrial sectors, most of which were initiated during the Great Leap Forward in the late fifties. The scaling down of modern large-scale technology through a product or quality choice, combined with changes in the manufacturing processes, is discussed at some length for nitrogen chemical fertilizer and cement.
The other approach is the integrated rural development strategy where a number of activities are integrated within or closely related to the commune system. This strategy includes industry as only one component of many instruments where improved public health, education, and improved agricultural technology contribute to achieving such policy objectives as increased employment and productivity.
In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
In Rural Renaissance, Moore argues we don’t have to wait for new legislation or technologies to begin our work. From the White House to her hometown in rural Georgia, Moore has gathered the tools needed to bring the far-reaching benefits of clean power to small communities, particularly in rural America. In this accessible guide, Moore provides an overview of the current energy landscape, including the federal, state, and local policies that will shape each community’s unique approach. Next, she describes five pathways to clean power in rural America and strategies for achieving them, including energy efficiency, renewable power, resilience (including microgrids and battery storage), the electrification of transportation, and finally, broadband internet. Throughout this journey, Moore shares stories of challenges and successes and encourages readers to design programs that address inequality.
Clean energy shouldn’t be reserved for the wealthy or for sleek and modern city centers. Rural Renaissance offers a vision of thriving rural communities where clean power is the spark that leads to greater investment, vitality, and equity. We can start today—and this book provides the toolbox.
The peasants known in popular memory as Jaramillistas were led by Rubén Jaramillo (1900–1962). An agrarian leader from Morelos who participated in the Mexican Revolution and fought under Zapata, Jaramillo later became an outspoken defender of the rural poor. The Jaramillistas were inspired by the legacy of the Zapatistas, the peasant army that fought for land and community autonomy with particular tenacity during the Revolution. Padilla examines the way that the Jaramillistas used the legacy of Zapatismo but also transformed, expanded, and updated it in dialogue with other national and international political movements.
The Jaramillistas fought persistently through legal channels for access to land, the means to work it, and sustainable prices for their products, but the Mexican government increasingly closed its doors to rural reform. The government ultimately responded with repression, pushing the Jaramillistas into armed struggle, and transforming their calls for local reform into a broader critique of capitalism. With Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Padilla sheds new light on the decision to initiate armed struggle, women’s challenges to patriarchal norms, and the ways that campesinos framed their demands in relation to national and international political developments.
Through their studies of social movements and popular mobilization in the Mexican countryside, the contributors argue for understanding rural revolts in terms of the specific historical contexts of particular regions and peoples, as well as the broader context of unequal cultural, political, and economic relations between Mexico and the United States. Exploring the connections between external and internal factors in social movements, these essays reveal the wide range of organized efforts through which peasants and Indians have struggled to shape their own destiny while confronted by the influence of U.S. capital and military might. Originally published as a limited edition in 1988 by the Center for U. S.–Mexican Studies, this volume presents a pioneering effort by Latin Americanist scholars to sympathetically embrace and enrich work begun in Subaltern Studies between 1982 and 1987 by projecting it onto a different region of historical experience. This revised and expanded edition includes a new introduction by Daniel Nugent and an extensive essay by Adolfo Gilly on the recent Chiapas uprising.
Leonard Friesen presents a study of the transformation of New Russia—the region north of the Black and Azov seas—from its conquest by the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century to the revolutionary tumult of 1905. Friesen is particularly interested in the dynamic and multifaceted relations between the region’s peasants, European colonists, and Russian estate owners. He gives special attention to the settlement process whereby once free peasants were enserfed within a generation, as well as the period of servile emancipation after 1861, when the paths of the region’s agriculturalists converged in unexpected ways. Overall, Friesen sees the region as vital to an understanding of the empire as a whole. He demonstrates how peasants, nobles, and estate owners were key actors in a series of rural revolutions that eventually threatened the empire itself.
This book contributes to our understanding of Imperial Russia, as well as contemporary Ukraine, by describing and analyzing rural developmental patterns over time. It explores how, when, and why agriculturalists made adjustments to long-established agrarian and social practices, and provides a fresh perspective on the link between the end of empire and the rural developments that preceded it.
As local plots of food crops grown by individual households gave way to commercial fields of cotton, a whole host of social, economic, and environmental changes followed. Likaka reveals how food shortages and competition for labor were endemic, forests were cleared, social stratification increased, married women lost their traditional control of agricultural production, and communities became impoverished while local chiefs enlarged their power and prosperity.
Likaka documents how the cotton regime promoted its cause through agricultural exhibits, cotton festivals, films, and plays, as well as by raising producer prices and decreasing tax rates. He also shows how the peasant laborers in turn resisted regimented agricultural production by migrating, fleeing the farms for the bush, or sabotaging plantings by surreptitiously boiling cotton seeds. Small farmers who had received appallingly low prices from the cotton companies resisted by stealing back their cotton by night from the warehouses, to resell it in the morning. Likaka draws on interviews with more than fifty informants in Zaire and Belgium and reviews an impressive array of archival materials, from court records to comic books. In uncovering the tumultuous economic and social consequences of the cotton regime and by emphasizing its effects on social institutions, Likaka enriches historical understanding of African agriculture and development.
2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS)
A study of the intersection of rural populations, state formation, and the origins of political conflict in Peru.
On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, The Rural State, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru’s rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today.
Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, The Rural State offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos.
Transposed into the folkloric topos of a landlocked Bohemia, the mermaid is rendered here as a Slavic rusalka—a dangerous water nymph—who must choose between love and immortality. Thus, Rusalka, while certainly paying homage to the original story’s Scandinavian roots, is still a distinct work of modern Czech literature. Newly translated by Patrick Corness, Kvapil’s work will now find a fresh group of readers looking to get lost in one of Europe’s great lyrical fairy tale traditions.
These poems deal honestly with the realities of urban life, whether dramatizing the effects of drive-by shootings, unfolding a labor protest that "spreads across the city like a prayer," or summoning a ghostlike immigrant damned to retrace his journey across the border. Daily and historical struggles are elevated to the level of myth. Yet, amid these poems there are images of life and love: a girl leaving hickeys rich as chocolate, a boy pledging to rescue his mother from poverty, a man studying the desert ground for tracks signaling immigrants in distress.
Delgado is unflinching in showing us the harshness surrounding the lives he cherishes, and with resonant details and lyrical language he urges us to examine those lives-and ultimately our own. A Rush of Hands is a spellbinding book that will captivate both the ear and the heart.
One day in March 1987, a barge from Islip, Long Island was evicted from Morehead City, North Carolina, after trying to unload the mountains of trash on its decks. More than five months from the time it began its trip, the unwelcome barge, and it's 3,186 tons of commercial garbage, became the cornerstone of an astonishing news investigation that revealed a country unable to cope with its mounting garbage crisis.
Newsday reporters were the first to locate the barge, the Mobro 4000 as it drifted aimlessly off the shore of Long Island. They were also first to explore and explain the problems and issues that barge had come to symbolize. The results of their investigation are presented in this book. Winner of the Worth Bingham Award, the Page One Award for Crusading Journalism, and the New York State Associated Press Award for In-Depth Reporting, Rush to Burn explains the reasons why we, as a throw-away society, are suffocating in our own trash. It also explains why communities, in desperation, are turning to incineration, the riskiest form of garbage disposal yet developed.
The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as Rush’s Lancers, was a completely volunteer unit and one of the finest regiments to serve in the Civil War. Tracing their history from George Washington’s personal bodyguard during the Revolutionary War, many of the men of the Sixth Pennsylvania were the cream of Philadelphia society, including Richard H. Rush, grandson of Dr. Benjamin Rush, Maj. Robert Morris, Jr., great-grandson of the financier of the Revolutionary War, Capt. Charles Cadwalader, whose great-grandfather was a general under George Washington, Frank H. Furness, architect and Medal of Honor recipient, and George G. Meade, Jr. But it was their actions in battle, not their illustrious family histories, that distinguished Rush’s Lancers. The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry earned a reputation for being a highly trained and reliable unit, despite being armed initially with antiquated weapons, leaving their mark on key battlefields, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Hanover Court House, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Brandy Station—where they conducted one of the most famous charges of the war—and Appomattox.
Drawing upon letters, diaries, memoirs, service and pension files, contemporary newspaper coverage, official records, and other primary sources, Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War by distinguished military historian Eric J. Wittenberg is an engrossing account of these young men from both Philadelphia’s social elite and the city’s working classes who, despite not being professional soldiers, answered the Nation’s call to war.
"This book seems to give me eyes," wrote Charlotte Brontë of Ruskin's Modern Painters. Elizabeth Helsinger here explores theprofound changes Ruskin induced in theway nineteenth-century viewers looked atnature and at art.
Helsinger argues that Ruskin transformedthe artist- or poet-oriented aesthetics ofromanticism into a beholder- or reader-oriented criticism. Combining critical attention to Ruskin's prose with her ownwide-ranging scholarship, Helsinger placesRuskin's perceptual reforms within previously unexplored intellectual and culturalcontexts. She connects his thought withWordsworth's poetry, Turner's landscapeart, and Carlyle's history, and shows theeffect on his ideas of romantic literary andart criticism, associationist psychology, historicism, contemporary travel art andliterature, and Victorian philology.
This illuminating study of Ruskin's criticism should be welcomed by students ofnineteenth-century intellectual, literary,and art history.
While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak, dysfunctional, or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Further, deliberate “un-regioning,” applied by actors external as well as internal to a region, has also gone unnoticed despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries.
This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls “fractured regions” and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, consolidate dysfunctional ties within the region, and foster weak states. Russia Abroad specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. It argues that the level of regional maturity in Russia’s vast vicinities is an important determinant of Russian foreign policy in the emergent multipolar world order.
Many of these fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of protracted conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.
Russia and Iran, 1780–1828 was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Modern Russo-Iranian relations date from the late eighteenth century, when after several centuries of commercial and diplomatic contact, the two nations entered a period of extended warfare for possession of the Caucasian borderlands, disputed territory that eventually fell to Russia. In her history of that struggle, Muriel Atkin reasseses the motives of major figures on both sides and views the Iranians with more sympathy than Western and Russian historians have usually accorded them. Russia embarked on her course in the Caucasus for reasons connected with defense or trade, and with a longterm imperial goal based on uncritical acceptance of prevailing European doctrines of empire. The new dynasty in Iran, on the other hand, had to fend off Russian attack and secure the borderlands in order to justify its basic claim to power. In the end, the wars brought major disruption to the already unstable borderlands, and left Iran with a discredited government and a controversy over reforms and relations with the West that would continue to cause turmoil in subsequent generations.
But recent propaganda images that define public debate around growing tensions with Russia are not new or arbitrary. Russia and the Media asks, what is the role of Western journalism in constructing a new kind of Cold War with Russia? Focusing on British and US media coverage of moments of crisis and of co-operation between the West and Russia, McLaughlin exposes how such a Cold War framework shapes public perceptions of a major, hostile power reasserting itself on the world stage.
Scrutinizing events such as the Ukraine/Crimea crisis, the Skripal Poisoning and Russia's military intervention in Syria - as well as analyzing media coverage of the 2018 Russian presidential election and build up to the 2018 World Cup - Russia and the Media makes a landmark intervention at the intersection of media studies and international relations.
From the Carpathians in the west to the Greater Khingan range in the east, a huge, flat expanse dominates the Eurasian continent. Here, over more than a thousand years, the history and destiny of Russia have unfolded. In a sweeping narrative, one of the English-speaking world's leading historians of Russia follows this story from the first emergence of the Slavs in the historical record in the sixth century C.E. to the Russians' persistent appearances in today's headlines. Hosking's is a monumental story of competing legacies, of an enormous power uneasily balanced between the ideas and realities of Asian empire, European culture, and Byzantine religion; of a constantly shifting identity, from Kievan Rus to Muscovy to Russian Empire to Soviet Union to Russian Federation, and of Tsars and leaders struggling to articulate that identity over the centuries.
With particular attention to non-Russian regions and ethnic groups and to Russia's relations with neighboring polities, Hosking lays out the links between political, economic, social, and cultural phenomena that have made Russia what it is--a world at once familiar and mysterious to Western observers. In a clear and engaging style, he conducts us through the Mongol invasions, the rise of autocracy, the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the battle against Napoleon, the emancipation of the serfs, the Crimean War, the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's reign of terror, the two World Wars, the end of the USSR, to today's war against Chechnya. Hosking's history is shot through with the understanding that becoming an empire has prevented Russia from becoming a nation and has perpetuated archaic personal forms of power. This book is the most penetrating and comprehensive account yet of what such a legacy has meant--to Russia, and to the world.
In a sweeping narrative, Geoffrey Hosking, one of the English-speaking world’s leading historians of Russia, follows the country’s history from the first emergence of the Slavs in the historical record in the sixth century CE to the Russians’ persistent appearances in today’s headlines.
The second edition covers the presidencies of Vladimir Putin and Dmitrii Medvedev and the struggle to make Russia a viable functioning state for all its citizens.
Sivachev and Yakolev trace the course of the U.S.-Russian relations from the years preceding the American Revolution to the 1970s, when human rights issues began to cause friction. Those relations, the authors believe, were characterized by America's repeated failure to take advantage of opportunities to improve them. Recognizing the controversial nature of the book, Sivachev said in an interview with the New York Times: "We did not set out to please the American reader, nor did the University of Chicago Press ask us to. On the contrary, they recommended that we should feel free to present our own views."
"Scholars and students of American foreign policy . . . are likely to be alternatively interested, intrigued, angered, and sometimes illuminated by some of the interpretations found in this work."—Perspective
"An American reader should not prejudge this book as simply another dreary contribution to the rhetoric of Soviet propaganda. It is more than this. The book is an expression of a view of the world that is truly and strikingly different from an American one and it is important to understand that it is a theory of reality that is shared by most, if not all, Soviet intellectuals who study America and its foreign policy. It is not enough simply to establish the inaccuracies and misrepresentations contained in such a view. One must go further and understand that such a view of reality is sincerely deeply held and that it is a part of a larger belief system that gives the authors' scholarly work coherence and meaning."—Boston Sunday Globe
Russia's leadership in establishing the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is emblematic of its desire to end US hegemony and rewrite the rules of the international system. Rachel S. Salzman tells the story of why Russia broke with the West, how BRICS came together, why the group is emblematic of Russia's challenge to the existing global order, and how BRICS has changed since its debut. The BRICS group of non-Western states with emerging economies is held together by a shared commitment to revising global economic governance and strict noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. BRICS is not exclusively a Russian story, but understanding the role of BRICS in Russian foreign policy is critical to understanding the group’s mission. In a time of alienation from the Euro-Atlantic world, BRICS provides Russia with much needed political support and legitimacy. While the longterm cohesion of the group is uncertain, BRICS stands as one of Vladimir Putin's signature international accomplishments. This book is essential reading for scholars and policymakers interested in Russian foreign policy, the BRICS group, and global governance.
Not just in light of a contested pipeline during the war in Ukraine but also after centuries of both exchange and rejection, Russia and Germany were and are as far away from each other as they are intrinsically linked. The geopolitical present seems critical, the signs pointing towards conflict and polarity.
In this hot climate, German author Alexander Kluge makes Russia the exclusive subject of his latest book, offering multiple perspectives: from that of the historical German patriots of the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation to the narrative point of view of Franz Kafka and Heiner Müller; from messianic yearning and utopian expectations of the twentieth century to the full-blown or near-miss catastrophes in the atomic age.
Composed in Kluge’s characteristic short-prose vignette style, interspersed with numerous images and often humorous asides, Russia Container is yet another brilliant and thought-provoking work from one of Europe’s most prolific and deeply intellectual literary genius. The volume includes a preface specially written to engage with the current events in Ukraine, making Kluge’s narratives even more timely and topical.
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 modern, secular, world power embodied in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg. Featuring eight essays and 120 images from the Library's distinguished collections, it is both an engagingly written work and a striking visual object. Anyone interested in the dramatic history of Russia and its extraordinary artifacts will be captivated by this book.
Before the late fifteenth century, Europeans knew virtually nothing about Muscovy, the core of what would become the "Russian Empire." The rare visitor--merchant, adventurer, diplomat--described an exotic, alien place. Then, under the powerful tsar Peter the Great, St. Petersburg became the architectural embodiment and principal site of a cultural revolution, and the port of entry for the Europeanization of Russia. From the reign of Peter to that of Catherine the Great, Russia sought increasing involvement in the scientific advancements and cultural trends of Europe. Yet Russia harbored a certain dualism when engaging the world outside its borders, identifying at times with Europe and at other times with its Asian neighbors.
The essays are enhanced by images of rare Russian books, illuminated manuscripts, maps, engravings, watercolors, and woodcuts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as the treasures of diverse minority cultures living in the territories of the Empire or acquired by Russian voyagers. These materials were also featured in an exhibition of the same name, mounted at The New York Public Library in the fall of 2003, to celebrate the tercentenary of St. Petersburg.
Since the fall of communism, Russia has witnessed a dramatic struggle between old and new, continuity and change. Corruption and violence have plagued society. Most people have benefited little from the new capitalist order. But positive changes are evident. Russians can speak and act more freely in a state that no longer intrudes on their privacy. They are able to travel abroad, enjoy unprecedented access to information from around the world, and organize and campaign for improvement in their living conditions.
In this engrossing account Robert Service traces the formation of the new Russia from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present. He paints a fascinating picture of a people in metamorphosis. In wide-ranging discussions on topics from Kremlin politics to rock music and macroeconomics to contemporary poetry, Service takes us inside to witness the changes from both the top down and the bottom up. He examines the reforms of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations in the context of the complex communist legacy, deftly interweaving political history, intellectual thought, and popular consciousness to illuminate the real difficulties Russia has faced on its rocky path to reform.
For the second time in less than a century, the Russians have been engaged in a fundamental reshaping of their society, and the results will prove of vital importance to the global community. Robert Service has provided a valuable and engaging guide to their recent remarkable journey.
Richard Anderson looks at Russia’s complex relationship to global architectural culture, exploring the country’s central presence in the Rationalism and Constructivism movements of the 1920s, as well as its role as a key protagonist during the Cold War. Looking deeply at Soviet Russia, he brings the relationship between architecture and socialism into focus through detailed case studies that situate buildings and architectural concepts within the socialist milieu of Soviet society. He tracks the way Russian architectural institutions departed from the course of modernism being developed in capitalist countries, and he reappraises the architecture of the Stalin era and the final decades of the USSR. Finally, he traces the influence of Soviet conventions on contemporary Russian architecture—which is now a more heterogeneous mix of approaches and styles— and how it made a lasting and little-known impact on territories extending from the Middle East, to Central Asia, and into China.
A bold new assessment of Russia’s architectural legacy and contemporary contributions, this book is a fascinating exploration of a tumultuous place—and the creativity that has come from it.
The Soviet Union crumbles and Russia rises from the rubble, once again the great nation--a perfect scenario, but for one point: Russia was never a nation. And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood. His book is about the Russia that never was, a three-hundred-year history of empire building at the expense of national identity.
Russia begins in the sixteenth century, with the inception of one of the most extensive and diverse empires in history. Hosking shows how this undertaking, the effort of conquering, defending, and administering such a huge mixture of territories and peoples, exhausted the productive powers of the common people and enfeebled their civic institutions. Neither church nor state was able to project an image of "Russian-ness" that could unite elites and masses in a consciousness of belonging to the same nation. Hosking depicts two Russias, that of the gentry and of the peasantry, and reveals how the gap between them, widened by the Tsarist state's repudiation of the Orthodox messianic myth, continued to grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here we see how this myth, on which the empire was originally based, returned centuries later in the form of the revolutionary movement, which eventually swept away the Tsarist Empire but replaced it with an even more universalist one. Hosking concludes his story in 1917, but shows how the conflict he describes continues to affect Russia right up to the present day.
The Soviet Union crumbles and Russia rises from the rubble, once again the great nation--a perfect scenario, but for one point: Russia was never a nation. And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood. His book is about the Russia that never was, a three-hundred-year history of empire building at the expense of national identity.
Russia begins in the sixteenth century, with the inception of one of the most extensive and diverse empires in history. Hosking shows how this undertaking, the effort of conquering, defending, and administering such a huge mixture of territories and peoples, exhausted the productive powers of the common people and enfeebled their civic institutions. Neither church nor state was able to project an image of "Russian-ness" that could unite elites and masses in a consciousness of belonging to the same nation. Hosking depicts two Russias, that of the gentry and of the peasantry, and reveals how the gap between them, widened by the Tsarist state's repudiation of the Orthodox messianic myth, continued to grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here we see how this myth, on which the empire was originally based, returned centuries later in the form of the revolutionary movement, which eventually swept away the Tsarist Empire but replaced it with an even more universalist one. Hosking concludes his story in 1917, but shows how the conflict he describes continues to affect Russia right up to the present day.
Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, The Russia Reader incorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary’s description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus’, to a scientist’s recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist’s depiction of the decadence of the “New Russians” in the 2000s, The Russia Reader is an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied country.
Khazanov’s careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class. Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a “lost Russia,” Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladamir Putin) successfully steered Russia into oligarchy and increasing autocracy. The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition.
No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war.
While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride.
War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.
As the dust clears from the fall of Communism, will Western eyes see Russia, the unclaimed orphan of Western history or Russia as she truly is, a perplexing but undeniable member of the European family? A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.
The Russian troika hurtles through these pages. The Spectre, modernity's belief in salvation by revolutionary ideology, haunts them. Alice's looking glass greets us at this turn and that. Throughout, Martin Malia's inspired use of these devices aptly conveys the surreality of the whole Soviet Russian phenomenon and the West's unbalanced perception of it. He shows us the usually distorted images and stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia since the eighteenth century. And once these emerge as projections of the West's own internal anxieties, he shifts his focus to the institutional structures and cultural forms Russia shares with her neighbors.
Here modern Europe is depicted as an East-West cultural gradient in which the central and eastern portions respond to the Atlantic West's challenge in delayed and generally skewed fashion. Thus Russia, after two centuries of building then painfully liberalizing its Old Regime, in 1917 tried to leap to a socialism that would be more advanced and democratic than European capitalism. The result was a cruel caricature of European civilization, which mesmerized and polarized the West for most of this century. As the old East-West gradient reappears in genuinely modern guise, this brilliantly imaginative work shows us the reality that has for so long tantalized--and eluded--Western eyes.
A writer who defies categorization, Daniil Kharms has come to be regarded as an essential artist of the modernist avant-garde. His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work.
Russian Citizenship is the first book to trace the Russian state’s citizenship policy throughout its history. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the consolidation of Stalin’s power in the 1930s, Eric Lohr considers whom the state counted among its citizens and whom it took pains to exclude. His research reveals that the Russian attitude toward citizenship was less xenophobic and isolationist and more similar to European attitudes than has been previously thought—until the drive toward autarky after 1914 eventually sealed the state off and set it apart.
Drawing on untapped sources in the Russian police and foreign affairs archives, Lohr’s research is grounded in case studies of immigration, emigration, naturalization, and loss of citizenship among individuals and groups, including Jews, Muslims, Germans, and other minority populations. Lohr explores how reform of citizenship laws in the 1860s encouraged foreigners to immigrate and conduct business in Russia. For the next half century, citizenship policy was driven by attempts to modernize Russia through intensifying its interaction with the outside world. But growing suspicion toward non-Russian minorities, particularly Jews, led to a reversal of this openness during the First World War and to a Soviet regime that deprived whole categories of inhabitants of their citizenship rights.
Lohr sees these Soviet policies as dramatically divergent from longstanding Russian traditions and suggests that in order to understand the citizenship dilemmas Russia faces today—including how to manage an influx of Chinese laborers in Siberia—we must return to pre-Stalin history.
Russia has deployed cyber operations to interfere in foreign elections, launch disinformation campaigns, and cripple neighboring states—all while maintaining a thin veneer of deniability and avoiding strikes that cross the line into acts of war. How should a targeted nation respond? In Russian Cyber Operations, Scott Jasper dives into the legal and technical maneuvers of Russian cyber strategies, proposing that nations develop solutions for resilience to withstand future attacks.
Jasper examines the place of cyber operations within Russia’s asymmetric arsenal and its use of hybrid and information warfare, considering examples from French and US presidential elections and the 2017 NotPetya mock ransomware attack, among others. A new preface to the paperback edition puts events since 2020 into context. Jasper shows that the international effort to counter these operations through sanctions and indictments has done little to alter Moscow’s behavior. Jasper instead proposes that nations use data correlation technologies in an integrated security platform to establish a more resilient defense.
Russian Cyber Operations provides a critical framework for determining whether Russian cyber campaigns and incidents rise to the level of armed conflict or operate at a lower level as a component of competition. Jasper’s work offers the national security community a robust plan of action critical to effectively mounting a durable defense against Russian cyber campaigns.
Although younger than most European theatrical traditions, the Russian professional theater has generated an exciting body of criticism and theory which until recently has remained unknown or nearly inaccessible in the West. This anthology presents a selection of important Russian writing on the aesthetics of drama and the theater from 1828 to 1914.
The focus of these essays, most published here for the first time in English, is on the so-called Crisis in the Theater of 1904 to 1914, a lively debate between the symbolists and the naturalists that evoked brilliant polemic writing from Meyerhold, Bely, Bryusov, and others. Along with Chekhov's amusing critique of Sarah Bernhardt ("monstrously facile!") and Ivanov's abstruse analysis of the essence of tragedy, the essays form a running commentary on the development of the Russian theater: Pushkin on his predecessors, Gogol on his own work, Belinsky on Gogol, Sleptsov on Ostrovsky and Leskov, Bely on Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard ("enervated people, trying to forget the terror of life"), the symbolists on one another.
Each selection is printed in its entirety, with extensive notes, and a lengthy introduction places all the pieces within their historical and cultural contexts to comprise a brief history of Russian dramatic theory before the revolution. This volume is essential reading for all who wish to extend their knowledge of the Russian contribution to theatrical history, theory, and criticism.
This book is the first analytical treatment in any language of the “most durable ‘sino–foreign’ institution in modern Chinese history.” It traces the beginnings of a Russian-Orthodox presence in Peking several decades back before the commonly held date of its origin. It also shows how the news of the plight of prisoners from the Russian fortress of Albazin (taken by the Ch’ing in 1685) was transmitted back to Russia, and how the indecisiveness of the official Russian response colored the entire subsequent history of the mission. The chapters on the Orthodox missionary life in Peking and on the institutions of the mission provide us with new insight into life in the Ch’ing capital.
The tentative beginnings of Russian scholarly and scientific interest in Chinese matters, an outgrowth of the missionary presence in Peking, are also discussed. The book tackles an especially difficult case, for by ordinary standards the Russian ecclesiastical mission was a failure, not a success. The monks and students were an unruly lot, the mission itself never functioned as a full diplomatic institution, and the Chinese frequently treated the missionaries with neglect or disdain.
Yet, as the author demonstrates, even this apparent failure had a purpose. The mission served to maintain a minimal contact between the two empires throughout a long period of conflicting ambitions and actions in the Inner Asian theater.
Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and the Gentry Decline offers a comprehensive reevaluation of the Russian realist novel and proposes that a composite style, “grotesque realism,” developed in response to social upheaval during the post-Reform era. In this compelling new study, Ani Kokobobo argues that if the realism of pre-Reform Russia could not depict socioeconomic change directly, the grotesque provided an indirect means for Russian writers to capture the instability of the times and the decline of the gentry. While realism historically represented the psychological depth of characters, the grotesque focused more on the body, materialism, and categorical confusions in order to depict characters whose humanity had eroded.
With original readings of some of Russian realism’s greatest novels, Anna Karenina, Demons, and Brothers Karamazov, as well as lesser known novels like The Family Golovlev, The Precipice, Resurrection, and Cathedral Folk, Russian Grotesque Realism traces the transformation of gentry representation from spiritual strivers and thinkers to more materialist beings. By the end of the nineteenth century, the gentry, originally seen as society’s preservers, were represented as grotesque, reflecting a broader societal breakdown that would eventually precipitate the end of the novel genre itself.
Long recognized as the best and most comprehensive work on its subject, Brown’s fine book is now thoroughly revised and updated. It provides a comprehensive treatment of Russian literature, including underground and émigré writings, from 1917 to the early 1980s.
Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces.
The book examines and makes intelligible the persistent conflict between the writer and the state, between the literary artist’s urge for untrammeled self-expression and the pervasive control of intellectual activity exercised by the Soviet government. Chapters on “The Levers of Control under Stalin,” “The First Two Thaws,” “Into the Underground,” and “Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps” reveal the conditions under which Russian literature was produced in various periods and investigate the forces that drove an important segment of the literature into clandestine publication or into exile. “Exiles, Early and Late” deals with some of the leading figures in émigré literature and examines the condition of exile as an influence on literary creation. “The Surface Channel” describes and analyzes a number of significant works published aboveground in the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies. Brown abandons the old distinction between Soviet and émigré literature, treating all Russian writing as part of a single stream, divided since 1917 into two currents not totally separate but subtly interrelated.
Overall, this volume shows how the Russian memoir specifically compares with and complements the writing of Russian fiction and Russian history, helping readers to appreciate and interpret the most popular form of authoritative “nonfiction” in modern Russian society.
The paradoxical genre of the prose poem, developed by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, provides Wanner with an overarching theoretical rubric for a variety of works of Russian literature, ranging from Ivan Turgenev's "Poems in Prose" to a host of decadent, symbolist, realist, and futurist miniatures, including Fedor Sologub's "Little Fairy Tales," Aleksei Remizov's dreams, Vasilii Kandinskii's prose poems, and Daniil Kharms' absurdist ministories. His book demonstrates how the negativity inherent in the form of the prose poem transformed the overwrought lyricism of fin de siècle prose into the ascetic starkness of the twentieth-century minimalist anti-story.
The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg.
It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.
Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In this book, which is especially suitable for course use, eleven scholars examine one of the most important institutions of imperial Russia, the Orthodox church in the two centuries before the Russian revolution. The material is arranged in two sections, the first devoted to Orthodoxy's role in Russian social and cultural life and the second dealing with the church's relationship to the tsarist regime.
Challenging the primacy of the written word in this field, the volume fosters a larger intellectual community informed by theories and practices of performance from anthropology, art history, dance studies, film studies, cultural and social history, literary studies, musicology, political science, theater studies, and sociology.
In his letters from exile, Trubetskoi describes his grim situation in Central Asia-how he snatched moments to write between mornings playing piano in a ballet studio and late nights in a restaurant band, struggling with the heat, the insect-borne illness, and the problems of a large, uprooted family. His memoirs of 1911-12, "Notes of a Cuirassier," are the culmination of his efforts and they convey in vivid detail the glittering prewar world of an elite Russian Guards regiment. These reminiscences as well as his stories offer a glimpse of what life was like for a citizen of Imperial Russia who tried to make a life for himself in the new Soviet state. Instructive, amusing, moving, Trubetskoi's stories are also an inspiring example of how a person of grace and true nobility meets large-scale social and political upheaval.
Russian Refuge is a comprehensive account of the Russian immigrant experience in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia since the first settlements over two hundred years ago. Susan Hardwick focuses on six little-studied Christian groups—Baptists, Pentecostals, Molokans, Doukhobors, Old Believers, and Orthodox believers—to study the role of religion in their decisions to emigrate and in their adjustment to American culture.
Hardwick deftly combines ethnography and cultural geography, presenting narratives and other data collected in over 260 personal interviews with recent immigrants and their family members still in Russia. The result is an illuminating blend of geographic analysis with vivid portrayals of the individual experience of persecution, migration, and adjustment.
Russian Refuge will interest cultural geographers, historians, demographers, immigration specialists, and anyone concerned with this virtually untold chapter in the story of North American ethnic diversity.
As Russia entered the modern age in the nineteenth century, many Russian intellectuals combined the study of European philosophy with a return to their own traditions, culminating in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in the religious philosophy of their younger contemporary, Vladimir Soloviev. This book explores central issues of modern Russian religious thought by focusing on the work of Soloviev and three religious philosophers who further developed his ideas in the early twentieth century: P. A. Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, and S. L. Frank. The essays place these thinkers in the contexts of both Western philosophy and Eastern Orthodoxy, presenting a substantially new perspective on Russian religious thought.
The work of these four philosophers, this volume demonstrates, influenced virtually all aspects of twentieth-century Russian culture, and indeed, many aspects of Soviet culture as well, but also represents a rich philosophical tradition devoted to issues of divinity, community, and humanity that transcend national boundaries and historical eras.
Included in Russian Religious Thought is an introduction, brief biographical information on Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, and Frank, and an Afterword by scholar James Scanlan, who elaborates on the volume’s aim to provide a thoughtful corrective, both to unexamined assumptions of past scholarship and to nationalist readings currently popular in post-Soviet Russia.
"Russian religious philosophy, banned under the Soviets, has been marginalized in the Western academy as well. This interdisciplinary volume helps explain why this body of thought has remained for so long at the center of Russian culture."—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Viacheslav Ivanov’s treatise in response, “The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God,” have been considered the foundation of the dithyramb revival, but Katherine Lahti shows Erwin Rohde’s Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks also to have played a significant role.
Lahti’s wide-ranging and expertly curated survey of art, music, and letters includes the poetry and plays of the Symbolists and Futurists, with special attention to The Fairground Booth and Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy; the theater of Ozarovsky, Meyerhold, and Evreinov; dancing by Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky, and Fokine; and Matisse’s canvas The Dance.
Lahti follows the persistence of the dithyramb’s popularity after 1917, when it enjoyed a special place in Russian culture during the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution. Demonstrating the influence of the dithyramb on the development of Russian avant-garde culture, this book reshapes our understanding of an extraordinarily dynamic period in Russian art and thought.
This important study analyzes the challenges faced by second-generation Russians in post-Soviet Estonia, and, in doing so, explores the interrelationships between ethnicity and social equality. It will be of great value to scholars of immigration, cultural assimilation, ethnicity, and nationalism.
However, while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin’s neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state’s mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin’s Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin’s regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin’s first two decades in power.
In the first English-language collection to examine twenty-first-century Russian theater, this special issue of Theater also includes the complete texts of two new Russian plays, published for the first time in English. Ivan Vyrypaev’s Oxygen is a poetic panorama of new Russian identity set to techno music, and Danila Privalov’s 5-25 explores traditional Dostoyevskian existential themes in the language of a new generation. One contributor chronicles the sweeping cultural and institutional changes in the Russian theater since 2000, while another provides an overview of the regional theater system in the world’s most geographically vast country. Another essay explores the development of the new playwriting movement, identifying its key writers and producers. This special issue also includes interviews with the movement’s directors and producers. Additionally, it contains letters, previously unpublished in English, from the Moscow Art Theater’s Olga Bokshanskaya to the Russian theatrical titan Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, reporting on the Moscow Art Theater’s legendary U.S. tour in 1920–22, which was recorded in theater history as a turning point for American acting.
Contributors. AKHE, Dmitri Chernikov, Nina Chusova, Marina Dmitrievskaya, Sasha Dugdale, John Freedman, Elena Gremina, Nina Karpova, Mindaugus Korbauskis, Ryan McKittrick, Arkady Ostrovsky, Danila Privalov, Victor Rizhakov, Yana Ross, Tom Sellar, Kirill Serebrennikov, Anatoly Smeliansky, Julia Smeliansky, Ivan Vyrypaev
This book analyzes the evolution of Russian military thought and how Russia's current thinking about war is reflected in recent crises. While other books describe current Russian practice, Oscar Jonsson provides the long view to show how Russian military strategic thinking has developed from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. He closely examines Russian primary sources including security doctrines and the writings and statements of Russian military theorists and political elites. What Jonsson reveals is that Russia's conception of the very nature of war is now changing, as Russian elites see information warfare and political subversion as the most important ways to conduct contemporary war. Since information warfare and political subversion are below the traditional threshold of armed violence, this has blurred the boundaries between war and peace. Jonsson also finds that Russian leaders have, particularly since 2011/12, considered themselves to be at war with the United States and its allies, albeit with non-violent means. This book provides much needed context and analysis to be able to understand recent Russian interventions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, how to deter Russia on the eastern borders of NATO, and how the West must also learn to avoid inadvertent escalation.
—Marcus C. Levitt
Professor, Department of Slavic Languages, University of Southern California
Russian-American Dialogue on the History of U.S. Political Parties is the fourth volume in the Russian-American Dialogues series—a series that brings together scholars in the former Soviet Union and the United States who share an interest in the study of America's heritage and its importance to contemporary Russia.
In this valuable work, Russian scholars such as N. V. Sivachev, Alexander S. Manykin, and Vladimir V. Sogrin examine the history of American political parties and the role they played across two centuries. The Russians draw their own conclusions about the durability of the two-party system, giving careful consideration to historical crises—the secessionist movement and the Civil War, the reform era of the Populists and Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century, the Great Depression and the New Deal—in which the two-party structure was tested. Russian perspectives are also applied in analyzing the evolution of particular parties, from the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century Whigs to the shifting balance between twentieth-century Democrats and Republicans. The dialogue is then developed through commentaries by American historians such as Allan G. Bogue and Theodore J. Lowi and through counter-responses, often strongly expressed, by the Russian authors.
This lively exchange of ideas helps advance an understanding of key aspects of American party history and offers thought-provoking discussions of comparative international studies and historiography. Because the book provides unique perspectives on the American partisan experience by non-American specialists, it will be welcomed by all historians, as well as by anyone with an interest in the American-Russian connection.
Since the original publication of this reference work in 1962, and especially over the past decade, the vocabulary of Soviet life has changed dramatically, reflecting the marked changes in Soviet society. The new material incorporated into this second edition—a result of a thorough scanning of the Soviet press and recent books in sociology, politics, economics, law, accounting, public administration, welfare, and education—addresses not only additional terminology but modification of meanings. R. E. F. Smith also takes into account the increasingly Western influence on Soviet vocabulary—from the advent of words such as “hippie” to the Western flavor of the language of planners and politicians.
The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.
Black’s work challenges the standard perspective on the Russian period in Alaska as a time of unbridled exploitation of Native inhabitants and natural resources. Without glossing over the harsher aspects of the period, Black acknowledges the complexity of relations between Russians and Native peoples.
She chronicles the lives of ordinary men and women—the merchants and naval officers, laborers and clergy—who established Russian outposts in Alaska. These early colonists carried with them the Orthodox faith and the Russian language; their legacy endures in architecture and place names from Baranof Island to the Pribilofs.
This deluxe volume features fold-out maps and color illustrations of rare paintings and sketches from Russian, American, Japanese, and European sources—many have never before been published. An invaluable source for historians and anthropologists, this accessible volume brings to life a dynamic period in Russian and Alaskan history. A tribute to Black’s life as a scholar and educator, Russians in Alaska will become a classic in the field.
In 1945, when the Red Army marched in, eastern Germany was not “occupied” but “liberated.” This, until the recent collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is what passed for history in the German Democratic Republic. Now, making use of newly opened archives in Russia and Germany, Norman Naimark reveals what happened during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany from 1945 through 1949. His book offers a comprehensive look at Soviet policies in the occupied zone and their practical consequences for Germans and Russians alike—and, ultimately, for postwar Europe.
In rich and lucid detail, Naimark captures the mood and the daily reality of the occupation, the chaos and contradictions of a period marked by rape and repression, the plundering of factories, the exploitation of German science, and the rise of the East German police state. Never have these practices and their place in the overall Soviet strategy, particularly the political development of the zone, received such thorough treatment. Here we have our first clear view of how the Russians regarded the postwar settlement and the German question, how they made policy on issues from reparations to technology transfer to the acquisition of uranium, how they justified their goals, how they met them or failed, and how they changed eastern Germany in the process. The Russians in Germany also takes us deep into the politics of culture as Naimark explores the ways in which Soviet officers used film, theater, and education to foster the Bolshevization of the zone.
Unique in its broad, comparative approach to the Soviet military government in Germany, this book fills in a missing—and ultimately fascinating—chapter in the history of modern Europe.
Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language.
This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‑century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.
Russia's Factory Children presents the first English-language account of the changing role of children in the Russian workforce, from the onset of industrialization until the Communist Revolution of 1917, and profiles the laws that would establish children's labor rights.
In this compelling study, Boris B. Gorshkov examines the daily lives, working conditions, hours, wages, physical risks, and health dangers to children who labored in Russian factories. He also chronicles the evolving cultural mores that initially welcomed child labor practices but later shunned them.
Through extensive archival research, Gorshkov views the evolution of Russian child labor law as a reaction to the rise of industrialism and the increasing dangers of the workplace. Perhaps most remarkable is his revelation that activism, from the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and children themselves, led to the conciliation of legislators and marked a progressive shift that would impact Russian society in the early twentieth century and beyond.
This volume draws upon extensive archival research to examine the effects of the pastoral movement on Russian society and the Orthodox Church. Scarborough argues that the social work of parish clergymen shifted the focus of Orthodox practice in Russia toward cooperative social activism as a devotional activity. He furthers our understanding of Russian Orthodoxy by illuminating the difficult position of parish priests, who were charged with both spiritual and secular responsibilities but were supported by neither church nor state. His nuanced look at the pastorate shows how social and historical traumas shifted perceptions of what being religious meant, in turn affecting how the Orthodox Church organized itself, and contributed to Russia’s modernization.
The performance art of burlesque, once a faded form, has made a comeback in the twenty-first century, and it has shimmied back to life with a vengeance in Cleveland. Thanks to fans and entrepreneurs, neo-burlesque has taken the stage—and it’s more inclusive, less seedy, and emphatically fun.
Rust Belt Burlesque traces the history of burlesque in Cleveland from the mid-1800s to the present day, while also telling the story of Bella Sin, a Mexican immigrant who largely drove Northeast Ohio’s neo-burlesque comeback. The historical center of Cleveland burlesque was the iconic Roxy Theater on East Ninth Street. Here, in its twentieth-century heyday, famed dancers like Blaze Starr and comics like Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello entertained both regulars and celebrity guests.
Erin O’Brien’s lively storytelling and Bob Perkoski’s color photos give readers a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the house at the Beachland Ballroom every year. Today’s burlies come in all shapes, ethnicities, and orientations, drawing a legion of adoring fans. This is a show you won’t want to miss.
In part a gripping biography of this Australian expatriate, Rustic Cubism chronicles Dangar's personal battles and the tumult of the World War II era during her tempestuous tenure at Moly-Sabata. Dangar dedicated herself to the colony's aims by working in the region's village potteries, combining their vernacular elements with Gleizes' design methods to arrive at a type of rustic Cubism. Her work there would ultimately be rewarded; her pieces can today be found in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and many other museums.
Rustic Cubism places Dangar at the heart of Moly-Sabata's alternative art movement—one that, in its nostalgic present, attempted to construct a culture based on the distant past. Generously illustrated with photographs of the art and social milieu of the period, this captivating and original narrative makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of French modernism and early twentieth-century cultural politics as well as of the life of a most talented and intriguing female artist.
Originating as a doctoral dissertation and first published in 1926, Ernst Kris’s The Rustic Style is a pioneering inquiry into the relationship between art and nature in early modern decorative arts and garden design. This precocious study—by a young Viennese museum curator who would subsequently make his name as a leading psychoanalyst—was an attempt to define the character of late-sixteenth-century naturalism. It put scientific observation at the service of elite artistic production, and the result was an ambivalent blend of lifelike plasticity, organic texturing, and material richness in which the use of advanced technologies, such as life casting, deliberately blurred the boundary between products of natural processes and human craft. This hybrid aesthetic, which Kris described as the “rustic style,” was championed by the two main protagonists of his essay, the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer and the ceramist Bernard Palissy. It found a broader characteristic expression in the design of Renaissance grottos, where classical iconography and all’antica ornamentation often came to encode the environmental knowledge of the age.
This Ex Horto edition of The Rustic Style, accompanied by introductory essays by Robert Felfe and Anatole Tchikine, is made available in English for the first time in a masterly translation by Linda B. Parshall. A long overdue tribute to Kris’s pathbreaking scholarship, this lavishly illustrated book should appeal to anyone interested in the intersections of early modern art and natural history.
Examining key points in Russian cultural and spiritual history, Rus–Ukraine–Russia is essential reading for those wishing to understand the current state of Russia and Ukraine—the so-called heir to an “alternative Russia.” Putna uses literary and artistic works to offer a rich analysis of Russia as a cultural and religious phenomenon: tracing its development from the arrival of the Greeks in prehistoric Crimea to its invasion by “little green men” in 2014; explaining the cultural importance in Russ of the Vikings as well as Pussy Riot; exploring central Russian figures from St. Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin.
Unique in its postcolonial perspective, this is not merely a history of Russia or of Russian religion. This book presents Russia as a complex mesh of national, religious, and cultural (especially countercultural) traditions—with strong German, Mongol, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, and Lithuanian influences—a force responsible for creating what we identify as Eastern Europe.
Using their shared Jewish heritage as a starting point, Jergovic constructs a fictional family history populated by historical figures with the precocious Ruta at the center. Stephen Dickey’s translation masterfully captures Jergovic´’s colloquial yet deeply observed style, which animates the tangled and troubled history of persecution and war in Croatia.
Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet is a richly illustrated history of one of the most storied programs in all of college football. From the first intercollegiate contest against Princeton in 1869, which started college football as we know it, through the years that Paul Robeson suited up for the team, the famous undefeated season of 1976, and right up to the Schiano era, former Scarlet Knight Michael Pellowski takes you on a fascinating journey that chronicles the highlights of the first 137 years of Rutgers football. He makes special mention of the Scarlet Knights who have gone on to successful careers in the NFL-Brian Leonard, Mike McMahon, L.J. Smith, Gary Brackett, Ray Lucas, Deron Cherry, among others-and includes a complete listing of letter winners.
Now, with the Empire State Building being lit red in the team's honor, and fans believing that a national championship is within reach, Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet provides the indispensable backstory for this team as it "chops" its way to future greatness.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press