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During the Cold War, determined translators and publishers based in the Soviet Union worked together to increase the number of foreign literary texts available in Russian, despite fluctuating government restrictions. Based on extensive interviews with literary translators, Made Under Pressure offers an insider's look at Soviet censorship and the role translators played in promoting foreign authors—including figures like John Fowles, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner.

Natalia Kamovnikova chronicles the literary translation process from the selection of foreign literary works to their translation, censorship, final approval, and publication. Interviews with Soviet translators of this era provide insight into how the creative work of translating and the practical work of publishing were undertaken within a politically restricted environment, and recall the bonds of community and collaboration that they developed.

Few poets have led lives as tempestuous as that of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Born in 1893 and dead by his own hand in 1930, Mayakovsky packed his thirty-six years with drama, politics, passion, and—most important—poetry. An enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution and the emerging Soviet State, Mayakovsky was championed by Stalin after his death and enshrined as a quasi-official Soviet poet, a position that led to undeserved neglect among Western literary scholars even as his influence on other poets has remained powerful.
 
With Mayakovsky, Bengt Jangfeldt offers the first comprehensive biography of Mayakovsky, revealing a troubled man who was more dreamer than revolutionary, more political romantic than hardened Communist. Jangfeldt sets Mayakovsky’s life and works against the dramatic turbulence of his times, from the aesthetic innovations of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde to the rigidity of Socialist Realism and the destruction of World War I to the violence—and hope—of the Russian Revolution, through the tightening grip of Stalinist terror and the growing disillusion with Russian communism that eventually led the poet to take his life.
 
Through it all is threaded Mayakovsky’s celebrated love affair with Lili Brik and the moving relationship with Lili’s husband, Osip, along with a brilliant depiction of the larger circle of writers and artists around Mayakovsky, including Maxim Gorky, Viktor Shklovsky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Roman Jakobson. The result is a literary life viewed in the round, enabling us to understand the personal and historical furies that drove Mayakovsky and generated his still-startling poetry.
 
Illustrated throughout with rare images of key characters and locations, Mayakovsky is a major step in the revitalization of a crucial figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.

Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the ensuing communist regime have often been portrayed as a man’s revolution, with women as bystanders or even victims. Midwives of the Revolution examines the powerful contribution made by women to the overthrow of tsarism in 1917 and their importance in the formative years of communism in Russia.

Focusing on the masses as well as the high-ranking intelligentsia, Midwives of the Revolution is the first sustained analysis of female involvement in the revolutionary era of Russian history. The authors investigate the role of Bolshevik women and the various forms their participation took. Drawing on the experiences of representative individuals, the authors discuss the important relationship between Bolshevik women and the workers in the turbulent months of 1917.

The authors demonstrate that women were an integral part of the revolutionary process and challenge assumptions that they served merely to ignite an essentially masculine revolt. By placing women center stage, without exaggerating their roles, this study enriches our understanding of a momentous event in twentieth-century history.

In 1958, after fourteen years of military occupation, Khrushchev—in an unprecedented act—withdrew the Soviet Union’s troops from Romania as part of a political move intended to encourage the withdrawal of Western military forces from Europe. In analyzing this crucial historic episode, Sergiu Verona’s comprehensive study illustrates the dynamics of Soviet military presence in Romania and provides a framework for understanding Soviet security policy, then and now, as well as the interaction between Soviet military objectives and diplomacy.
Drawing on declassified archival material in the United States and the United Kingdom, the author considers Khrushchev’s reversal of Stalinist expansionism by examining the motivation, function, and operation of the initial occupation of Romania; the complex involvement of Soviet diplomacy and its perception by the United States and other Western powers; the process by which Khrushchev decided to withdraw Soviet troops from that country; and the impact of this decision on Soviet policy. Verona extends his analysis, providing comparisons between Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s approaches to Eastern Europe, noting that similarities exist not only in domestic policies but in the realm of foreign policy as well.

   The Depression era closing
        of a Ford plant sends Andy and two companions to Moscow to find work in
        a Soviet automotive plant, where he meets Natasha, an exemplar of the
        "new Soviet woman." Based on Myra Page's own experiences in Moscow during
        the first Five-Year Plan, Natasha is a portrait of women's contradictory
        social position in the early periods of socialist construction. At the
        core of this novel is a firsthand look at the developing forces and changing
        relations of production forces that bring about the conversion of Andy
        into a "Moscow Yankee." While revealing the political and economic policies
        that would inevitably lead to the demise of Soviet-style socialism, Moscow
        Yankee refutes the notion that egalitarian societies cannot succeed
        because they fail to take into account the individualism and greed of
        "human nature." Barbara Foley's introduction analyzes the Soviet Socialist
        construction in Page's novel and the politics of the novelistic form in
        relation to Moscow Yankee.
      Originally published in 1935
      "A picture of Americans lured
        to Moscow by hope in the 'great experiment,' and of others driven there
        by the depression, and of still others attracted by the simple desire
        to get good engineering jobs, Moscow Yankee; has a decided
        value . . . a sense of life, stirring in the chaos of destruction and
        reconstruction." -- The New York Times Book Review
 
 

The terrible events afflicting Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tajikistan fill the news, commanding the world's attention. This timely volume offers rare insight into the background of these catastrophic conflicts. First published in German on the eve of the breakup of the Yugoslav and Soviet republics, it is one of the few books in any language to analyze, in detail and in depth, the historical and contemporary situation of Muslims in former communist states and thus clarifies the sources, development, and implications of the events that dominate today's foreign news.

In fourteen chapters and an updated introduction, European and North American specialists examine the recent evolution of Islamic expression and practice in these former Communist regions, as well as its political significance within officially atheistic regimes. Representing a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, the authors detail how the modern ethno-religious situation developed and matured in hostile circumstances, the degree of latitude the local Muslims achieved in religious expression, and what prospect the future seemed to offer just before the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Overall, the book provides a thorough analysis of the coincidence and tension between ethnic and religious identity in two countries officially devoted to the separation of ethnic groups in domestic cultural arrangements but not in the social or political realm.

Contributors. Edward Allworth, Hans Bräker, Marie Broxup, Georg Brunner, Bert G. Fragner, Uwe Halbach, Wolfgang Höpken, Andreas Kappeler, Edward J. Lazzerini, Richard Lorenz, Alexandre Popovi´c, Sabrina Petra Ramet, Azade-Ayse Rorlich, Gerhard Simon, Tadeusz Swietochowski

In this study, Bennigsen and Wimbush trace the development of the doctrine of national communism in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the heart of this doctrine—as elaborated by the Volga Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev—was the concept of "proletarian nations," as opposed to the traditional notion of a working class. With such ideological innovations, Sultan Galiev and his contemporaries were able to reconcile Marxist nationalisms and Islam and devise an "Eastern strategy" whereby the national revolution was to be spread.

The authors show that the ideas of Muslim national communism persist in the land of their birth and have spread to such developing societies as China, Algeria, and Indonesia. This doctrine is an important factor in the ideological split and increasing tensions between industrial and nonindustrial nations, East and West, and now North and South, which grip the world communist movement.

Donna Solecka Urbikas grew up in the Midwest during the golden years of the American century. But her Polish-born mother and half sister had endured dehumanizing conditions during World War II, as slave laborers in Siberia. War and exile created a profound bond between mother and older daughter, one that Donna would struggle to find with either of them.
            In 1940, Janina Ślarzynska and her five-year-old daughter Mira were taken by Soviet secret police (NKVD) from their small family farm in eastern Poland and sent to Siberia with hundreds of thousands of others. So began their odyssey of hunger, disease, cunning survival, desperate escape across a continent, and new love amidst terrible circumstances.
            But in the 1950s, baby boomer Donna yearns for a “normal” American family while Janina and Mira are haunted by the past. In this unforgettable memoir, Donna recounts her family history and her own survivor’s story, finally understanding the damaged mother who had saved her sister.

Finalist, Best Traditional Non-Fiction Book, Chicago Writers Association

A poignant account of the perils and fortunes of an indomitable survivor of violence in Eastern Europe during World War II.

In 1939, to escape Nazi occupation, 14-year-old Adam Broner and his older brother Sam left their home and family in Lodz, Poland, and made their way to the Soviet Union. Adam enlisted in the Red Army to join the fight against the Nazis but was sent to work in a Siberian coal mine instead when his nationality was discovered. After a bold and daring escape from Siberia, Broner reached the Soviet Polish Kosciuszko Army, joined the struggle against the Nazis, participated in the liberation of Poland, and rode victorious into Berlin in 1945. He later learned that his parents, siblings (except Sam), and all other close relatives had perished during the war. 

 Broner rebuilt his life, established a family, returned to Moscow for a degree in economics, and then went back to Poland, where he accepted a job in the Polish central planning agency. Eventually fed up with the growing anti-Semitism of the Communist government there, the author emigrated to the United States in 1969. He earned a doctorate from Princeton University and served as an economic adviser to New Jersey governors and the state legislature. In retirement, Broner learned portrait painting and reproduced the likenesses of his parents and siblings from memory, which are presented along with their biographies in this book.

In recounting his struggle for survival during some of the most dramatic upheavals of the 20th century— the Great Depression, Nazism, World War II, and the spread of Communism in Central Europe— Broner reveals a life dedicated to the ultimate goal of freedom, which he achieved through a combination of arduous effort and fortunate circumstance.