Best of
Russia

1997

Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra


Peter Kurth - 1997
    The text, which follows Nicholas & Alexandria from their childhood's to the Siberian cellar where their lives ended, is complemented by rare images from the imperial family's private collections (locked away for decades in Soviet archives, & published here for the first time), as well as by contemporary full-color photographs of the places & palaces the Romanovs knew.

Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945


Richard Overy - 1997
    Overy's engrossing book provides extensive details of teh slaughter, brutality, bitterness and destruction on the massive front from the White Sea to the flank of Asia.--Chicago Tribune The Russian war effort to defeat invading Axis powers, an effort that assembled the largest military force in recorded history and that cost the lives of more than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, was the decisive factor for securing an Allied victory. Now with access to the wealth of film archives and interview material from Russia used to produce the ten-hour television documentary Russia's War, Richard Overy tackles the many persuasive questions surrounding this conflict. Was Stalin a military genius? Was the defense of Mother Russia a product of something greater than numbers of tanks and planes--of something deep within the Russian soul?

A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story


Andrei Maylunas - 1997
    16-page, full-color insert, 2 photos, maps & family trees.

On Grief and Reason: Essays


Joseph Brodsky - 1997
    In addition to his Nobel lecture, the volume includes essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the idea of the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni, as well as a homage to Marcus Aurelius and an appraisal of the case of the double agent Kim Philby (the last two were selected for inclusion in the annual Best American Essays volume). The title essay is a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost, and the book also includes a fond appreciation of Thomas Hardy, a "Letter to Horace", a close reading of Rilke's poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes", and a memoir of Stephen Spender. Among the other essays are Mr. Brodsky's open letter to Czech President Vaclav Havel and his "immodest proposal" for the future of poetry, an address he delivered while serving as U.S. Poet Laureate.

The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia


David King - 1997
    On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade. For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes. The efforts of the Kremlin airbrushers were often unintentionally hilarious. A 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, for example, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself. The Commissar Vanishes is nothing less than the history of the Soviet Union, as retold through falsified images, many of them published here for the first time outside Russia. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history.

Anton Chekhov


Donald Rayfield - 1997
    The traditional image of Chekhov is that of the restrained artist torn between medicine and literature. But Donald Rayfield's biography reveals the life long hidden behind the noble facade. Here is a man capable of both great generosity toward needy peasants and harsh callousness toward lovers and family, a man who craved with equal passion the company of others and the solitude necessary to create his art. Based on information from Chekhov archives throughout Russia, Rayfield's work has been hailed as a groundbreaking examination of the life of a literary master.A new biography of the great author and playwright.

Michael and Natasha: The Life and Love of Michael II, the Last of the Romanov Tsars


Rosemary Crawford - 1997
    Based on private diaries, letters, and documents long hidden in the Soviet archives, it sheds light on an extraordinary tale of enduring love and ultimate tragedy that, until now, has never been told. He was the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, the tall, dashing brother of Tsar Nicholas II. She was Nathalie Wulfert, a beautiful, elegant, intelligent, divorced commoner, and the wife of a Guards officer under Michael's command. Everything was wrong...yet for Grand Duke Michael, it was love at first sight-an obsession that would lead to disgrace, humiliation, and exile.Much of Michael and Natasha's story is told in their own words, through hundreds of hitherto unpublished letters. Here they reveal their passion, their joy, and their despair as they are banished from their own country, bathed in scandal in the courts of Europe, and forced to suffer cruel separation. But more than a love story, Michael and Natasha is a historical drama played out against the elegant background of a bygone age and a world at war. It is a spell-binding account of Michael's return to Russia, his reputation as a war hero, the downfall of Nicholas II, the strange and short reign of Grand Duke Michael, and the cruel and tragic end of one of the most colorful eras in world history.

The Virgin and the Fool


Douglas Boyd - 1997
    Now it's highly dangerous too. When ex-university lecturer Tom Fielding goes on the run with Clive Ponsonby of MI6 - the man who put him in Longfield Open Prison for eight years - he has only hours in which to save several lives. Ponsonby's former agent, Nosarenko, is now President of the the Ukraine. He is determined to silence Tom. Why? Because he was the sole witness of a gruesome murder in the 1980s which could destroy his political career. Clive Ponsonby wants the half-million dollars that went missing during Tom's mission in Russia. And Tom wants to stay alive long enough to protect the three women in his life - his Russian ex-wife, their daughter Svetlana, and Karen McKenzie, the one person to stand by him when he went to jail. There is only one thing that will stop the killing. It's a film Tom shot of the murder, hidden somewhere in the centre of Asia with the Virgin of Kazan, the most valuable icon in the world. If he can get the both the icon and the film safely back to the west in time, Tom will be rich and safe. If not, he'll be dead... 'The Virgin and the Fool' is a pacy, atmospheric spy story full of passion and intrigue. It will appeal to fans of Alan Furst, John Le Carre, Robert Harris and Frederick Forsyth. 'A block-buster thriller.' - Tom Kasey, best-selling author of 'Trade-Off'. 'Packs a tremendous punch.' - Robert Foster, best-selling author of 'The Lunar Code'. Douglas Boyd is a television producer and writer. His best-selling books include 'The Eagle and the Snake' and 'The Truth and the Lies'.

The Last Diary of Tsaritsa Alexandra


Tsaritsa Alexandra - 1997
    The story of the demise of the Romanov dynasty has been recounted many times.

Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays


Richard Taruskin - 1997
    Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always [been] tinged or tainted ... with an air of alterity--sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period.Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to an "East" during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical "Wests," Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its national consciousness. The final section, expanded from a series of Christian Gauss seminars presented at Princeton in 1993, focuses on four individual composers, each characterized both as a self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating chapters--Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman--Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the "last great eighteenth-century composer" and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.

The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs


Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal - 1997
    The cultural ferment unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet Union reawakened interest in the study of Russian religion and spirituality. This book provides a comprehensive account of the influence of occult beliefs and doctrines on intellectual and cultural life in twentieth-century Russia.Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal's introduction delineates the characteristics of occult cosmology which distinguish it from mysticism and theology, and situates Russian occultism in historical and pan-European contexts. Contributors explore the varieties of occult thinking characteristic of prerevolutionary Russia, including Kabbala, theosophy, anthroposophy, and the fascination with Satanism. Other contributors document occultism in the cultural life of the early Soviet period, examine the surprising traces of the occult in the culture of the high Stalin era, and describe the occult revival in contemporary Russia. The volume includes bibliographical essays on Russian occult materials available outside Russia.Contributors: Mikhail Agursky, Hebrew University; Valentina Brougher, Georgetown University; Maria Carlson, University of Kansas; Robert Davis, New York Public Library; Mikhail Epstein, Emory University; Kristi Groberg, North Dakota State University; Irina Gutkin, UCLA; Michael Hagemeister, Ruhr University, Bochum; Linda Ivanits, Pennsylvania State University; Edward Kasinec, New York Public Library; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, University of Wisconsin; Hakan Lovgren, Independent Scholar; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Fordham University; William F. Ryan, Warburg Institute, London; Holly Denio Stephens, University of Kansas; Anthony Vanchu, University of Texas, Austin; Renata Von Maydell, Munich University; George Young, Independent Scholar

Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus


Carlotta Gall - 1997
    Exploring Chechnya's complex and bloody history, the work is also a portrait of Russia's failed attempt to make the transition to a democratic society.

Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village


Serge Schmemann - 1997
    Family recollections of life a century ago summon up an aura of devotion to tsar and church. The unjust, benevolent, complicated, and ultimately doomed relationship between master and peasants--leading to growing unrest, then to civil war--is subtly captured.Diary entries record the social breakdown step by step: grievances going unresolved, the government foundering, the status quo of rural life overcome by revolutionary fervor. Soon we see the estate brutally collectivized, the church torn apart brick by brick, the manor house burned to the ground. Some of the family are killed in the fighting; others escape into exile; one writes to his kin for the last time from the Gulag.The Soviet era is experienced as a time of privation, suffering, and lost illusions. The Nazi occupation inspires valorous resistance, but at great cost. Eventually all that remains of Sergiyevskoye is an impoverished collective.Without idealizing the tsarist past or wholly damning the regime that followed, Schmemann searches for a lost heritage as he shows how Communism thwarted aspiration and initiative. Above all, however, his book provides for us a deeply felt evocation of the long-ago life of a corner of Russia that is even now movingly beautiful despite the ravages of history and time.

The Legacy of St. Vladimir: Byzantium, Russia, America


John Meyendorff - 1997
    Twenty essays by a diverse group of theologians, musicians, historians and musicologists, on the historical, theological, social and spiritual developments which brought Orthodoxy from Byzantium to the modern world.

My Half-Century: Selected Prose


Anna Akhmatova - 1997
    The title section, My Half Century, recounts fellow poets and artists Blok, Modigliani, Mandelstam, Gumilyov, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, et al. Also here, Akmatova's illuminating Prose About the Poem, on the genesis of her masterpiece A Poem Without a Hero, ' along with extensive notes and a detailed biographical sketch.

A History Of Soviet Russia


Adam B. Ulam - 1997
    

Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II


Kazimiera Jean Cottam - 1997
    Personal stories of women in three air regiments on the Eastern Front during World War II

A Russian Herbal: Traditional Remedies for Health and Healing


Igor Vilevich - 1997
    Drawing on a wealth of oral and written traditions, the authors examine the best-known Russian herbs (all of which are widely available in North America and Western Europe) and explain their folkways, properties, and uses. Offering time-tested advice for using herbs to maintain general well-being, they also give clear and simple recipes for treating specific health problems from asthma and migraines to influenza and high blood pressure. Blessed with a wide variety of climates, geography, and flora, early Russians developed a rich folk tradition of herbal healing that ranks among the most sophisticated in the world. Nearly every Russian medical school offers courses of study on the knowledge and application of herbs, and many maintain a special research department that investigates the properties and practical modern applications of herbal medicine. This is the first book to examine the traditions of Russian herbal medicine.

Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky


Nadejda Gorodetzky - 1997
    Describes his life, works, and veneration after his death and canonization.

Looking for Trouble: The Life and Times of a Foreign Correspondent


Richard Beeston - 1997
    It recounts an extraordinary and eventful period in the years before instant communication and mass TV coverage and provides a riveting first-hand record of history unfurling during many of the world's most dramatic events of the Cold War era.Richard Beeston describes what the restless, nomadic life of a foreign correspondent is like, providing colourful and lively portrayals of daily life in Fleet Street and communist Moscow; of his years with a radio station for MI6 in the Middle East; and of his acquaintance with the notorious Soviet agent, Kim Philby. Richard Beeston led a truly extraordinary life, superbly captured in this acclaimed memoir - now published in paperback for the first time.

Lost Europe: Images of a Vanished World


Robin Langley Sommer - 1997
    This is a photographic chronicle of architectural treasures lost to civilization in the 20th century, featuring over 150 rare & haunting images of vanished structures of every kind. They include cathedrals & churches, medieval halls, convents & monasteries, ornate palaces, private dwellings, industrial & civic landmarks & early modern masterpieces. Each section is introduced by an architectural or conservation expert from the featured country.

Food in Russian History and Culture


Musya Glants - 1997
    A wide array of sources - including chronicles, diaries, letters, police records, poems, novels, folklore, paintings, and cookbooks - help to interpret the moral and spiritual role of food in Russian culture. Stovelore in Russian folklife, fasting in Russian peasant culture, food as power in Dostoevsky's fiction, Tolstoy and vegetarianism, restaurants in early Soviet Russia, Soviet cookery and cookbooks, and food as art in Soviet paintings are among the topics discussed in this appealing volume.

2001 Russian and English Idioms


Agnes Arany-Makkai - 1997
    The first part presents Russian idioms in Russian with their translations into English with a sample sentence. The second part presents American English idioms, and gives their meanings and sample sentences in Russian.

Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century


G.F. Krivosheev - 1997
    Details are given for four main periods: Red Army losses from 1918 to 1922; Losses between the two world wars; the "Great Patriotic War" 1941-45; losses post WWII to 1989.

Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia


Ellen Mickiewicz - 1997
    The number of viewers who routinely watch the nightly news in Russia matches the number of Americans who tune in to the Super Bowl, thus making TV coverage the prized asset for which political leaders intensely—and sometimes violently—compete. In this revised and expanded edition of Changing Channels, Ellen Mickiewicz provides many fascinating insights, describing the knowing ways in which ordinary Russians watch the news, skeptically analyze information, and develop strategies for dealing with news bias. Covering the period from the state-controlled television broadcasts at the end of the Soviet Union through the attempted coup against Gorbachev, the war in Chechnya, the presidential election of 1996, and the economic collapse of 1998, Mickiewicz draws on firsthand research, public opinion surveys, and many interviews with key players, including Gorbachev himself. By examining the role that television has played in the struggle to create political pluralism in Russia, she reveals how this struggle is both helped and hindered by the barrage of information, advertisements, and media-created personalities that populate the airwaves. Perhaps most significantly, she shows how television has emerged as the sole emblem of legitimate authority and has provided a rare and much-needed connection from one area of this huge, crisis-laden country to the next. This new edition of Changing Channels will be valued by those interested in Russian studies, politics, media and communications, and cultural studies, as well as general readers who desire an up-to-date view of crucial developments in Russia at the end of the twentieth century.

Tupolev TU-95/-142 'BEAR'


Gordon/Miller - 1997
    Every variant of the Bear family is examined including cockpits, engines, under-carriages, weapons bays, and more. Written with full access to the Tupolev OKB archives.

Camouflage Uniforms of the Soviet Union


Dennis Desmond - 1997
    This excellent reference contains factual and interesting material covering the earliest days of uniform development to the most recent issues of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, former KGB and Spetsnaz forces. Packed with detailed color photographs, this book fills an important void in the collector reference library that has been vacant far too long. Designed with both the militaria collector and Russophile in mind, this book is an easy to use picture guide to the most sought after collectible in the Soviet and Russian militaria field, and is a must for any serious collector or intelligence analyst interested in the former Soviet Union or Russia.

Russian Talk


Nancy Ries - 1997
    However, despite the widespread appreciation of Russian talk, no one has analyzed it as a form of cultural performance. As one of the first Western ethnographers to undertake fieldwork in Moscow, Nancy Ries did just that. In this pioneering study, she shows how everyday conversation shapes Russian identity and culture.Dire stories about poverty, hardship, and social decay recited constantly during perestroika served to fabricate a common worldview--conveying a sense of shared experience and destiny, and casting Russian society as an inescapable realm of absurdity and suffering. Ries agues that while these narratives aptly depicted the chaotic events of the time, they also comprised a kind of contemporary folklore, generic in their lamenting, portentous tones and their culturally poignant details.The story of a grandmother who stands in line all day in order to bring home a precious kilo of sugar becomes a parable of feminine self-sacrifice and endurance. Sardonic narratives about frustrated communal apartment dwellers pouring hot pepper in their neighbor's soup pot challenge the myth of camaraderie and express the proverbial notion that revenge is sweeter for Russians than reconciliation.This insightful ethnography suggests the enormous power that ordinary talk has, in any society, to shape social and political attitudes, and to produce distinctive cultural patterns.

The Little Humpbacked Horse: A Russian Tale


Elizabeth Winthrop - 1997
    A young peasant, with the help of his faithful and magical humpbacked horse, captures magical beasts, marries the beautiful Tsarevna and becomes the Tsar of Russia.

The Vaudevilles: And Other Short Works


Anton Chekhov - 1997
    The comedic one-act farces are: "The Bear," "The Proposal," "On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco," "The Night Before the Trial," "On the High Road," "The Wedding," "The Anniversary," "A Tragic Role," and "Tatyana Repina."

The Golden Horde: From the Himalaya to the Mediterranean


Sheila Paine - 1997
    Starting in the forbidden valley of Palas in Pakistan, she travels through the former territories of the Soviet Union -- from Arctic Northern Russia, through the lands of Genghis Khan's Golden Horde and into Soviet Central Asia -- Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and into the wild Tien Shan. She follows ancient trading routes, travelling in the footsteps of merchants and armies, chasing legends of goddess worship, traditions of Orthodox belief and stories of pagan superstition. Her relentless pursuit, involving years of travel, finally ends on the island of Karpathos in Greece, where in a tiny church on Easter Sunday she finds the amulet -- a powerful talisman that is still used to ward off evil spirits. Sheila Paine's search evolved into an unexpected journey full of twists and turns, dead ends and discoveries, ultimately revealing the ancient threads that culturally bind Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

How Life Writes the Book


Thomas Lahusen - 1997
    Whilst researching Far from Moscow, a classic socialist realist novel by a writer named Vasilli Azhaev, author Lahusen discovered Azhaev had assembled an extensive archive integrating his personal history with the poitical history of his time. Drawing on the archive, Lahusen reconstructs the genesis, writing, reworking and reception of the Stalin Prize novel. He leads the reader from a forced labour camp to the highest reaches of the Soviet literary bureaucracy and back, in the process of helping us better understand the failure of the bold Soviet effort to integrate literature and life, utopia and reality. Azhaev's novel chronicled the construction of an oil pipeline in the Soviet Far East during World War II. His personal archive revealed that the pipeline was built not by the book's heroic workers but by inmates of forced labour camps. Azhaev, who would end his life a classic of Soviet literature had himself arrived in the Far East as a prisoner, but later became an honoured member of the GULAG administration.

Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I


Alexander M. Martin - 1997
    He traces the indigenous and foreign roots of conservative ideology through a wide range of sources and shows how Russian conservatism, uniquely double-edged, was part of the movement for change.

The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe


Jacques Lévesque - 1997
    The domino-like collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was not anticipated by political experts in either the East or the West. Most surprising of all was the Soviet Union's permissive reactions to the secession. For the first time in modern history, such an epochal upheaval could take place not only without war but also without major international tensions.This book is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to elucidate Soviet behavior toward Eastern Europe in 1989. Jacques Lévesque thoroughly analyses the policies of the USSR toward Eastern Europe during the Gorbachev era and clarifies the goals that underpinned these policies.Based on interviews with political leaders and exhaustive research in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the other ex-Warsaw Pact countries, this book traces the nuances of each country's case as a set of continually changing, mutually reinforcing causes and effects.