This is Kapuscinski's vivid, compelling and personal report on the life and death of the Soviet superpower, from the entrance of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, through his journey across desolate Siberia and the republics of Central Asia in the 1950s and 60s, to his wanderings over the vast Soviet lands - from Poland to the Pacific, the Arctic Circle to Afghanistan - in the years of the USSR's decline and final disintegration in 1991.

    Russian playwright and historian Radzinsky mines  sources never before available to create a  fascinating portrait of the monarch, and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days.  Updated for the paperback edition.

    An album that chronicles both a tragic tale of failed leadership and an extraordinary love story compiles more than three hundred family photographs of the last czar, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, their hemophiliac son, and their four daughters.

    It's the greatest pioneering story in history, uniquely combining the heroic colonization of an intractable virgin land, the ghastly dangers & high adventure of Arctic exploration, & the grimmest saga of penal servitude. 400 years of continual human striving chart its course, a drama of unremitting extremes & elemental confrontations, pitting man against nature, & man against man. East of the Sun, a work of panoramic scope, is the 1st complete account of this strange & terrible story. To most Westerners, Siberia is a vast & mysterious place. The richest resource area on the face of the earth, its land mass covers 5 million square miles-7.5% of the total land surface of the globe. From the 1st foray in 1581 across the Ural Mountains by a band of Cossack outlaws to the fall of Gorbachev, East of the Sun is history on a grand scale. With vivid immediacy, Bobrick describes the often brutal subjugation of Siberia's aboriginal tribes & the cultures that were destroyed; the great 18th-century explorations that defined Siberia's borders & Russia's attempt to "extend" Siberia further with settlements in Alaska, California & Hawaii; & the transformation of Siberia into a penal colony for criminal & political exiles, an experiment more terrible than Australia's Botany Bay. There's the building of the stupendous Trans-Siberian Railway across 7 time zones; Siberia's key role in the bloody aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917; & Stalin's dreaded Gulag, which corrupted its very soil. Today, Siberia is the hope of Russia's future, now that all her appended republic have broken away. Its story has never been more timely.

    How did people divided for two generations by an Iron Curtain come so suddenly to dance together atop the Berlin Wall? Why did people who had once seemed resigned to their fate suddenly take their future into their own hands? Some analysts have explained the Revolution in economic terms, arguing that the Warsaw Pact countries could no longer compete with the West. But as George Weigel argues in this thought-provoking volume, people don't put their lives, and their children's futures, in harm's way simply for better cars, refrigerators, and TVs. Something else--something more--had to happen behind the iron curtain before the Wall came tumbling down. In The Final Revolution, Weigel argues that that something was a revolution of conscience. The human turn to the good, to the truly human, and, ultimately, to God, was the key to the political Revolution of 1989. Weigel provides an in-depth exploration of how the Catholic Church shaped the moral revolution inside the political revolution. Drawing on extensive interviews with key leaders of the human rights and resistance movements, he opens a unique window into the soul of the Revolution and into the hearts and minds of those who shaped this stirring vindication of the human spirit. Weigel also examines the central role played by Pope John Paul II in confronting what V�clav Havel called communism's culture of the lie, and he suggests what the future role of the Church might be in consolidating democracy in the countries of the old Warsaw Pact. The final revolution is not the end of history, Weigel concludes. It is the human quest for a freedom that truly satisfies the deepest yearnings of the human heart. The Final Revolution illustrates how that quest changed the face of the twentieth century and redefined world politics in the year of miracles, 1989.

    At the family's center stands the indomitable Malkeh, an intelligent and beautiful woman, who marries Yoysef, an itinerant tailor. Together, the young couple embrace the simple joys and traditions of Jewish life in a tightly knit Russian city.But soon their safe world is shattered with the dawn of the tsar's reign of terror. As famines and cholera epidemics sweep the nation, the Jews swiftly become scapegoats, with the Russian peasants taking their revenge in violent pogroms. Against this land torn by revolution and bloodshed, Malkeh and Yoysef's children must grow up and pursue their own destinies.In a novel that sweeps from provincial life in a Jewish ghetto, to the streets of Lenin's St. Petersburg, rife with revolt, to Moscow in the chaos after the civil war, author Marjorie Edelson has woven a timeless tapestry of the old country with both its torments and its joys. Malkeh and Her Children is a loving evocation of powerful family values and traditions -- an imaginative work of love and hope that transports us into the life of a proud woman, whose courage and love will leave no one unmoved.

    In a tragic time her fate was perhaps the most tragic of all. Born in 1892, the daughter of a gifted pianist and the founder of what is today the Pushkin Museum, Tsvetaeva had an intense, cloistered and romantic childhood. Her early teenage years were spent largely in Italy, Switzerland and Germany, as the family travelled Europe in search of a cure for her mother's tuberculosis. In 1910 she published her first collection of poetry, which was immediately recognized in literary circles as the work of a true poet, and the following year in the Crimea she met Sergey Efron, the man around whom her life would revolve to the end. Although Tsvetaeva married him, had three children by him and dedicated her life to him, she had passionate affairs with many lovers, the poets Osip Mandelstam and Sofia Parnok foremost amongst them. In 1917 Sergey joined the White Army and Marina did not see him again for five years. She and her elder daughter, Alya, barely survived the Revolution (her younger daughter died) and, in 1922, they joined Efron in emigration in Prague. There, and later in Paris, she wrote and published many of her greatest works, and kept up an intense correspondence with Rilke and Pasternak. However, by 1939, hardly known in her own country, estranged from her husband and virtually ostracized by the emigre community, she was nevertheless persuaded by Sergey, who had by then been exposed as a Soviet agent, to return to Moscow. Efron and Alya were arrested, and as the German Army pushed ever deeper into Russia, Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Elabuga on the KamaRiver. There, on 31 August 1941, Tsvetaeva took her own life. Viktoria Schweitzer, who is recognized as being pre-eminent amongst Tsvetaeva specialists, spent twenty years researching her subject and was able to interview many of the people who knew Tsvetaeva personally, including her daughter and her sister. This is the first full-length story of the life and work of this supreme lyric poet and prose stylist to be based on such detailed research.

    This major survey of Russia as a multi-ethnic empire spans the imperial years from the sixteenth century to 1917, with major consideration of the Soviet phase. It asks how Russians incorporated new territories, how they were resisted, what the character of a multi-ethnic empire was and how, finally, these issues related to nationalism.Greeted with critical acclaim in the original German, this major survey of Russia as a multi ethnic empire spans the imperial years from the sixteenth century to 1917, with a serious consideration of the Soviet phase. It asks how Russians incorporated new territories, how they were resisted, what the character of a multi ethnic empire was and how, finally, these issues related to nationalism. With modern Russia at the forefront of contemporary world affairs, our need to understand its colonial and national past and its implications for the present has never been greater. Breaking completely new ground, The Russian Empire is essential reading. Andreas Kappeler is Professor of East European History, University of Vienna. The translator of this edition is Alfred Clayton.

    Chekhov's miraculous stories not only changed the face of the short story form, but have provided for the innumerable readers who have cherished his work and access to the quiet dramas of the soul, and a degree of human fellow-feeling never before offered by literature.

    government officials who lied about their fate for half-a-century, keeping a lid on the most disgraceful cover-up in American history. Soldiers of Misfortune reveals for the first time that top U.S. officials, from Roosevelt to Bush, made the determination to write off America's missing sons, secretly held hostage in the Soviet Union. In an explosive revelation, Colonel Philip Corso, an intelligence aide to President Dwight Eisenhower, revealed exclusively to the authors that the president personally made the decision to abandon hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. POWs from the Korean War. More than six years ago, Jim Sanders began his lonely quest for the truth about American POWs "liberated" by Soviet troops in Germany and Eastern Europe near the end of World War II. Then Mark Sauter and R. Cort Kirkwood joined in the search - sifting through thousands of formerly classified documents, interviewing military brass and escapees from Russia, and evaluating chilling eyewitness accounts. As the authors neared the truth, top level Pentagon officials attempted to "neutralize" and silence them in a desperate attempt to bury the truth from the public. At the same time a newspaper office and Sanders's car were surreptitiously entered, his apartment ransacked and crucial documents stolen. A secret covenant of the 1945 Yalta agreement provided that the U.S. and Britain would return Soviet citizens residing in the West. In exchange, Stalin promised to return Western soldiers who had been liberated by the Red Army. After the war, American and British authorities breached that agreement by secretly permitting Soviets to remain in the West. Stalin learned about the deception and retaliated by holding 23,500 American and 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers captive in the vast Soviet gulag system. The authors trace the fate of Ameri

    They find there a world familiar from the moral and philosophic landscapes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy. In Lessons of Armenia, the first of the two personal memoirs that constitute this book, Bitov explores the way Pushkin's confines of boundless Russia seem never to be truly escapable. Though held in thrall by Armenia, a captive of the Caucasus, Bitov the traveler is a captive, however alienated, of his homeland, too. Bitov's works characteristically proceed from and comment on one another, and the realization of captivity leads to a different journey; the second account, Choosing a Location, an entertaining impressionistic record of his travels in Soviet Georgia, is Bitov's quest for his own place and time. Compellingly conceived and spectacularly crafted, A Captive of the Caucasus is an intellectually spirited inquiry into the persistent idea of homeland and the individual's identity, cultural and creative. When Lessons of Armenia first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1969, censors deleted its subtitle, Journey Out of Russia, and made numerous small cuts. This translation restores all the deletions. Choosing a Location could not be published in the Soviet Union.

    1992 1st edition hardcover

    Drawing on an unparalleled body of Russian and Turkish sources--including chronicles, epics, travelogues, and previously unstudied Ottoman archival materials--Michael Khodarkovsky offers a fresh interpretation of this long and destructive conflict, which ended with the unruly frontier becoming another province of the Russian empire.Khodarkovsky first sketches a cultural anthropology of the Kalmyk tribes, focusing on the assumptions they brought to the interactions with one another and with the sedentary cultures they encountered. In light of this portrait of Kalmyk culture and internal politics, Khodarkovsky rereads from the Kalmyk point of view the Russian history of disputes between the two peoples. Whenever possible, he compares Ottoman accounts of these events with the Russian sources on which earlier interpretations have been based. Khodarkovsky's analysis deepens our understanding of the history of Russian expansion and establishes a new paradigm for future study of the interaction between the Russians and the non-Russian peoples of Central Asia and Transcaucasia.

    Scientists Edition in English and Russian.History of Soviet constructivist posters in one book.227 illustrations covering a period from 1918 to 1941.

    Victor Terras argues eloquently that Russian literature has reflected, defined, and shaped the nation’s beliefs and goals, and he sets his survey against a background of social and political developments and religious and philosophic thought. Terras traces a rich literary heritage that encompasses Russian folklore of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, medieval literature that in style and substance drew on the Byzantine tradition, and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Russia passed through a succession of literary schools—neoclassicism, sentimentalism, romanticism, and realism—imported from the West. Terras then moves on to the masterful realist fiction of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoi during the second half of the nineteenth century, showing how it was a catalyst for the social and cultural advances following the reforms of Alexander II. In discussing the period preceding the revolution of 1917, Terras links the literary movements with parallel developments in the theater, music, and the visual arts, explaining that these all placed Russia in the forefront of European modernism. Terras divides Russian literature after the revolution into émigré and Soviet writing, and he demonstrates how the latter acted as a propaganda tool of the Communist party. He concludes his survey with the dissident movement that followed Stalin’s death, arguing that the movement again made literature a leader in the struggle for freedom of thought, genuine relevance, and communion with Western culture.

    It covers from the early history of Siberia after the Russian conquest to collectivization and conscription during World War II and to the 1980s movement ror native rights. In this, the first substantive post-Glasnost account to appear, James Forsyth compares the Siberian experience with that of Indians and Eskimos in North America.

    Most 4-year colleges and some 2-year colleges offer a survey course,usually 2-semester,on sophomore,junior,and senior levels. Course is taken by history and political science majors; also by significant numbers of business,sociology,economics,and engineering majors. This book provides the essentials of the subject to supplement lecture and text. In view of the vast and dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet Union today,the book should attract general readers as well as students.

    Their love conquers the pain of constant separations and overcomes the horrors of the Tsarist regime and the Revolution.

    A stunning collection of art, graphic design, photography, and sculpture from one of the most fertile and inventive periods in the history of Russian art. Works by artists such as Lizitsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, and Tatlin are included.Catalog of a traveling exhibition held at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Mar. 1–May 10, 1992; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, June 5–Aug. 23, 1992 and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Sept. 25–Dec. 15, 1992.Some essays appear in slightly different form or translation from those published to accompany the exhibition in Amsterdam (De Grote Utopie)—and Frankfurt (Der Grosse Utopie).

    Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformative power of this science-based enterprise. A centralized plan of electrification triumphed, to the benefit of the Communist Party and the detriment of local governments and the electrical engineers. Coopersmith's narrative of how this came to be elucidates the deep-seated and chronic conflict between the utopianism of Soviet ideology and the reality of Soviet politics and economics.

    By examining the symbolic structures revealed in the art and archaeology of the Early Nomads, the author challenges existing theories regarding Early Nomadic cosmology. The reconstruction of meanings embedded in the deer image carries the investigation back to rock carvings, paintings, and monolithic stelae of South Siberia and northern Central Asia, from the Neolithic period down through the early Iron Age. The succession of images dominating that artistic tradition is considered against the background of cultures including the Baykal Neolithic Afanasevo, Okunev, Andronovo, and Karasuk evolving from a hunting-fishing dependency to a dependency on livestock. The archaic mythic traditions of specific Siberian groups are also found to lend critical detail to the changing symbolic systems of South Siberia."

    This second and final volume of the author's definitive study of the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath focuses on the years 1906 and 1907, and in particular on the struggle over the Duma, the elected legislature that was the major consequence of the events of 1905.

    In The Intimate Diary of a Russian Woman, educated, middle-class Elena Romine exposes, through the details of her daily life, the problems, frustrations, and hopes of the everyday that wear down the Russian people, morally and physically. The year is 1988 and Elena writes candidly of her achievements and failures, her family, her lost sense of purpose, her joys, her love life, her work, her travels, and her friends. She struggles between the promise of a life in the West, which she experienced on a trip to Munich, and her deep nationalism and sense of family, which bind her to her homeland. Written with pain and a soft, bitter humor, Elena gives tribute to her generation of Russians and their emotional struggles in a time that may now seem only to have changed for the worse.

    Only with the advent of glastnost and the publication of this magnificent book can they be appreciated once again. 86 full-color photos, with 10 gatefolds.

    Written with exclusive access to transcripts of Penkovsky's meetings with the CIA. Photographs.

    In this study, newly translated by Roberta Reeder, Propp considers the Russian folk lyric in the social and historical context in which it was produced.Reeder supplements Propp's theoretical presentation with a comprehensive anthology of examples. Some songs were imitated by or appear in the works of Russia's major writers, such as Pushkin and Nekrasov. Here we find the customs of Russian peasant life expressed through the ritual of song. Whether the songs are about love, labor, or children's games; whether they are sad, humorous, or satiric in tone, Russian folk lyrics are rich in metaphor and symbolic meaning. In addition to the editor's notes to the text and songs, Reeder supplies a bibliography of Propp's sources as well as an extensive selected bibliography.

    A brief profile of the Russian engineer, architect, and artist accompanies paintings, book illustrations, typography, exhibition designs, photographs, and architectural projects he created.

    Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891. Professor Donald Rayfield, in his notes to Chapter 42 and the Goldfinch by Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, wrote that Mandelstam's "poetry of the thirties, almost all unpublished in his own lifetime, marks him as arguably the greatest Russian poet this century." He died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938. Elaine Feinstein, in her foreword to A NECKLACE OF BEES, writes that "Maria Enzensberger has chosen not only early poems where Mandelstam is grateful for the quiet joy of being alive, but later poems which have the 'flavour of smoke and grief;' the abrupt, intimate, miraculous poems of Mandelstam's years in exile. And here these translations speak with heartbreaking clarity." Maria Enzensberger was born in Moscow in 1943. She died in London in 1991.

    He analyses the ill-considered and self-interested attempts made by the nomenklatura to privatize assets and inaugurate a free-market economy, finding an essential continuity between the plans of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s advisers. He reveals, too, how the new Russian President has displayed a greater capacity to assert dictatorial powers than did the last General Secretary, a tendency which has brought him into repeated conflict with elected bodies.Boris Kagarlitsky is himself a Socialist member of the Moscow Soviet and one of the founders of Russia’s new Party of Labour. The Disintegration of the Monolith furnishes both a memorable indictment of the greed and irresponsibility of Russia’s new/old rulers and a fascinating account of the slow but unmistakeable awakening of forces of resistance as the peoples of Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union confront the hyper-inflation, shortages, unemployment and general havoc wreaked by the free-market experiment. Kagarlitsky describes the gradual emergence of a new Russian trade unionism, but warns that popular discontent is also being exploited by nationalist demagogues, such as the leader of Russia’s new Liberal Party. For those seeking to understand what has changed in Russia—and what has remained the same—The Disintegration of the Monolith is required reading.

    Autocracy, Andrzej Kaminski analyzes a pivotal period in the relationship between two Eastern European powers. By this time Poland-Lithuania had lost control of East-Bank Ukraine and Kiev to Russia, and saw the election of a Saxon king to the Polish crown. While Russia was growing stronger in the international sphere, Poland-Lithuania had begun a decline that would eventually lead to the ever-increasing absorption of its territories by its adversaries. This book concentrates on the diplomatic relationship between the two powers as witnessed by the records of the respective offices responsible for foreign affairs. Particular attention is paid to the residences maintained in Warsaw and Moscow. Kaminski shows how Poland-Lithuania and Russia perceived each other, and how the fate of Ukraine and the balance of power in Eastern Europe were decisively altered during these years.