Aleksandr Tvardovskii was not only one of the finest, most popular and most important poets of his epoch, but also the editor of Novyi mir, the most prominent Soviet literary journal of the postwar period until the 1970s. This book is a detailed biography of the writer and journal editor who probably changed the literary culture of the Soviet Union more than any other person in the two decades after Stalin's death. Geoffrey Hosking shows how Tvardovskii gradually evolved from being an ardent Stalinist who renounced his own so-called “kulak” family to becoming a convinced advocate of tolerance, an all-human morality, civil rights, and free literary creativity.  

By giving a balanced account of his strengths and weaknesses, his achievements and failures, the author succeeds in giving the fullest picture available anywhere of a controversial man who turns out to be more complex than he has been portrayed so far. To understand him better is to understand why the Soviet intelligentsia changed so fundamentally in the USSR’s final decades, a change that helps to explain the rise of Gorbachev twenty years later. The study—which includes an in-depth analysis of Tvardovskii’s major works—also helps to better understand the fate of culture under an authoritarian regime and the intricacies of the struggle against censorship.

Takes a comparative perspective on family life and childhood in the past half century in Russia and Eastern Europe, highlighting similarities and differences. Focuses on the problematic domains of the institutions and laws devised to cope with family difficulties, and discusses the social strains created by the transition from communist to post-communist national systems. In addition to the substantial historic analysis, actual challenges are also discussed. The essays examine the changing gender roles, alterations in legal systems, the burdens faced by married and unmarried women who are mothers, the contrasts between government rhteoric and the implementation of policies toward marriage, children and parenthood. By addressing the specifics of welfare politics under the Communist rule and the directions of their transformation in 1990–2000s, this book contributes to the understanding of social institutions and family policies in these countries and the problems of dealing with the socialist past that this region face.

This memoir about the experiences of German occupation during the siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was written by Moscow-born Evdokiia Vasil’evna Baskakova-Bogacheva (1888–1976), an émigré in Australia, at the age of eighty-one. The text had been forgotten in the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco since 1970 until the editors of this volume discovered it.

In the memoirs, after accounting on her youth spent against the background of the First World War and of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, Evdokiia describes the inferno of the Nazi occupation as experienced in a suburb of Leningrad in 1941-43. She survived for nearly two years almost on the front line, within a few kilometers of the blockade ring. As a medical practitioner, she became useful for the occupational authorities and the ever-shrinking town population, until her family was evacuated to the west in October 1943. Besides hunger, discord, disease, the hunt for food and firewood, along with violence and death, Evdokiia’s account deals with various forms of cooperation between Soviet citizens and the new authorities.

All the events she recalls can be confirmed through other sources. The introduction and the detailed notes to the text help the reader to locate Evdokiia’s recollections in time and place, and situate them in their historical context. 

An eminent historian of the Holocaust examines why Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, though faced with mounting evidence of the Nazi extermination of Jews, were reluctant to speak out against the atrocities.

The Allied leaders rarely spoke directly about the Holocaust in public. When Churchill and Stalin alluded to Nazi mass murder of civilians in early speeches, they said much less than they knew. Not until December 1942 did Allied governments issue a joint statement about Nazi Germany’s policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe. Roosevelt deferred his own public statement until March 1944. Why didn’t these leaders speak up sooner?

Through close readings of public and private statements, Richard Breitman pieces together the competing motivations that drove each leader’s response to the atrocities. All three knew that their reactions would be politically sensitive, as Nazi propagandists frequently alleged that the Allies were fighting on behalf of Jews, and that Jews were the puppet masters behind their governments. At a time of globally prevalent antisemitism, these calumnies had force. After the German invasion of the USSR, moreover, Stalin clearly wanted to focus on the threat to the Soviet state and people. At the same time, Churchill and Roosevelt realized that complete silence would prompt accusations of willful blindness. They usually finessed this dilemma by denouncing Nazi atrocities in general, prioritizing wartime constraints over moral considerations.

Timely and incisive, A Calculated Restraint sheds new light on the relationship between World War II and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the Allied leaders’ responses cannot be reduced to a matter of character. What they said—and chose not to say—about the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military exigencies that drove their decision-making.

The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.

An illuminating new history of World War II–era Smolensk, a region at the crossroads of the two great dictatorships of the twentieth century.

During the Cold War, the Smolensk Archive held the only collection of Communist Party documents available to Western scholars, becoming the foundation for generations of scholarship on Soviet history. Crucibles of Power returns to the Smolensk Region with fresh eyes and fresh sources. Prizewinning historian Michael David-Fox traces the experiences of Smolensk residents between the interwar years and the end of World War II, a period during which the city and region passed from Stalinist rule to Nazi occupation and back. The result is a revelatory examination of choice and power under dueling forms of murderous totalitarianism.

Exploring the life-and-death decisions of a fascinating cast of characters—from young women in the Communist Youth League to a defense lawyer during Stalin’s Great Terror who became Smolensk’s collaborationist mayor during the German occupation—David-Fox shows how deeply the Stalinist and Nazi regimes relied on the cooptation of average citizens motivated by greed and need, but always within the orbit of ideology. Challenging today’s Russian nationalist narrative of heroic WWII resistance, he finds that large numbers of Russians aided the Nazi occupation of Smolensk in order to protect themselves, secure their own self-interest, or pursue vendettas against a Soviet state they found no less corrupt or oppressive than its German foe.

At a time when much of the world is tilting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism, Crucibles of Power masterfully unravels the threads of dictatorial rule. Smolensk emerges as a laboratory for understanding the mechanics of both outright coercion and subtler forms of power, as well as the enabling behavior of ordinary citizens acquiescing to extraordinary crimes.

Containing meticulous research of a long under-represented part of the Holocaust, this book provides a rich pictorial documentation of the Gulag environment as told by Jewish refugees.

While millions of Soviet slaves awaited liberation from the Nazi troops, millions of German concentration camp victims put their last bit of hope in the Red Army.

An in-depth look into the Soviet persecution of Jewish refugees, this book offers twenty-one different interviews with Czechoslovak Jewish refugees who found themselves in Soviet labor and prison camps between 1939 and 1941. They represent around two thousand Czechoslovak Jews who escaped persecution from German and Hungarian occupational forces and Slovak fascists by fleeing to the East. The Soviets sentenced most of them to long stints of forced labor in the Gulags for illegal immigration, espionage, and other arbitrary accusations. A specific group was formed by the Jews from the Hungarian labor service who either defected to or were captured by the Soviets.

Dvořák and Hradilek chronicle four waves of escape—those from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nisko concentration camp, Carpathian Ruthenia, and the aforementioned labor service. Thorough and clear, every interview coincides with supplementary documents and photographs found in the NKVD archives, sourced from Ukraine.

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies.

In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women’s letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a “diplomacy of the heart” that led them to question why their countries were so divided.

Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other’s world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents.

A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of “enemy” and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.

During the Cold War, dancers and musicians from the United States and the USSR were drawn into the battle for hearts and minds, crossing the Iron Curtain to prove their artistic and ideological prowess. After the passage of the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, direct cultural exchange between the two superpowers opened up, and the Moiseyev Dance Company arrived in the United States in 1958. The first Soviet cultural representatives to tour America, this folk-dance troupe’s repertoire included dances from territories controlled or influenced by the USSR, including Uzbekistan, Crimea, and Poland.

Drawing on contemporary personal and published accounts, Victoria Hallinan explores why the dancers garnered overwhelming acclaim during their multicity tour and Ed Sullivan Show appearance. The “boy-meets-girl” love stories of the dances, and their idealized view of multiple Soviet cultures living together in harmony, presented a comforting image of post–World War II gender norms and race relations for audiences. Americans saw the dancers—their supposed enemies—as humans rather than agents of communist contagion.

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows, after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project.

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.

This book compares the various aspects – political, military economic – of Soviet occupation in Austria, Hungary and Romania. Using documents found in Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian archives the authors argue that the nature of Soviet foreign policy has been misunderstood. Existing literature has focused on the Soviet foreign policy from a political perspective; when and why Stalin made the decision to introduce Bolshevik political systems in the Soviet sphere of influence.This book will show that the Soviet conquest of East-Central Europe had an imperial dimension as well and allowed the Soviet Union to use the territory it occupied as military and economic space. The final dimension of the book details the tragically human experiences of Soviet occupation: atrocities, rape, plundering and deportations.

This exceptional volume contains exciting new information about Stalin's actual and political "family", the Kremlin Mafia and the clans around him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era, including officials of the KGB and the Party, as well as people who had personal contact with the dictator as secretaries or interpreters. Kun's special expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. In addition to the interviews and hitherto unpublished correspondence between Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Zhdanov and others, the book also contains a fascinating collection of over 300 photos of Stalin, his family members, and various political actors of the period. Extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index of names add to the value of the volume.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.

Oleksandr Shums´kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known of them. He not only refused to confess but sustained for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on his country, Ukraine. Stalin punished him mercilessly in response, paralyzing him in jail and murdering his wife, but refrained from assassinating him for more than ten years.

This book unravels the Shum´skyi riddle to explain why. In doing so, it opens a new window into understanding the history of Soviet repression and the Russian pathologies toward Ukrainian independence, which help us understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.

Oleksandr Shums´kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known of them. He not only refused to confess but sustained for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on his country, Ukraine. Stalin punished him mercilessly in response, paralyzing him in jail and murdering his wife, but refrained from assassinating him for more than ten years.

This book unravels the Shum´skyi riddle to explain why. In doing so, it opens a new window into understanding the history of Soviet repression and the Russian pathologies toward Ukrainian independence, which help us understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.