Journalist Victor Sebestyen witnessed much of the 1989 fall of the Soviet empire at first hand, and in this book, he reassesses this decisive moment in modern history.

    Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past—a past of death, suffering, and scandal that will stay with him until the end of his days. Living in England with his beloved wife, Zoya, Georgy prepares to make one final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, the Russia that both destroyed and defined him. As Georgy remembers days gone by, we are transported to St. Petersburg, to the Winter Palace of the czar, in the early twentieth century—a time of change, threat, and bloody revolution. As Georgy overturns the most painful stone of all, we uncover the story of the house of special purpose.

    The book's urgent, cinema verite style plunges the reader into the shattering events that brought hope, chaos, heroism, and horror to the citizens of the world's first workers' state.The Russian Revolution produced some of the most important advances in the fields of art, photography, and graphic design in the 20th century. More than 550 of these widely influential materials are reproduced here to the highest quality, accompanied by author David King's accessible text. Zooming in from the epic to the particular, King rescues from obscurity many lost heroes and villains through the work of the most brilliant Soviet artists, many of them anonymous or long forgotten.

    Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Archie Brown examines the origins of the most important political ideology of the 20th century, its development in different nations, its collapse in the Soviet Union following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. Fans of John Lewis Gaddis, Samuel Huntington, and avid students of history will appreciate the sweep and insight of this epic and astonishing work.

    Now, taking advantage of never- before-seen documents from the Russian archives, Lieven upends much of the conventional wisdom about the events that formed the backdrop of Tolstoy's masterpiece, War & Peace. Lieven's riveting narrative sweeps readers thru epic battles, tense diplomatic exchanges on which the fate of nations hung & the rise of Russia from near-ruin to Europe's liberator. Rich in detail, Russia Against Napoleon is a groundbreaking masterwork.

    The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July sixteenth to seventeenth, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded. In the vivid style of a TV documentary, Helen Rappaport reveals both the atmosphere inside the family's claustrophobic prison and the political maneuverings of those who wished to save--or destroy--them. With the watching world and European monarchies proving incapable of saving the Romanovs, the narrative brings this tragic story to life in a compellingly new and dramatic way, culminating in a bloody night of horror in a cramped basement room.

    Growing up in a minor noble family in remote Perm, as a very young man he became an influential art historian and publisher in St Petersburg. Moving soon onto a bigger stage, he became a central figure in the artistic worlds of Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and Madrid during the golden age of modern art. He lived through bankruptcy, war, revolution and exile. Furthermore he lived openly as a homosexual and his liaisons, most famously with Nijinsky, and his turbulent friendships with among others Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Misia Sert, Prokoviev and Jean Cocteau give his life an exceptionally dramatic quality. The last biography was thirty years ago. Scheijen's biography is based on extensive research in little known archives, especially in Russia, is revelatory and brings a complex and powerful personality with boundless creative energy fully to life.

    Petersburg after twenty years of exile in Paris, hoping to recapture his youth. Instead, he meets Volsky, an old man who tells him his extraordinary story: of surviving the siege of Leningrad, the march on Berlin, and Stalin's purges, and of a transcendent love affair. Volsky's life is an inspiration to Shutov -- because for all that he suffered, he knew great happiness. This depth of feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empty lives Shutov encounters in the new Russia, and to his own life, that of just another unknown man . . .

    Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men--damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George--and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria--grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third--whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

    Each success noted had to be verified by a witness and signed by a superior officer.The journal of Sutkus is one of only a few such books to have survived the war. It records more than 200 kills, placing him as one of the wars most successful snipers. A large part of his journal is reproduced for the first time here.As a Hitler Youth member his skill as a marksman was quickly noted and, in July 1943, aged 19, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. A month later he was sent on a five month snipers course in Wilna, after which he was posted to the Eastern Front. He was so successful that his superiors sent him to crucial positions. Despite his age, he was regarded as one of Germanys best snipers and in November 1944 he was awarded the Scharfshtzenabzeichen 3 Stufe the highest award for a sniper.After being wounded in January 1945, Sutkus was given time to recuperate away from the Eastern Front. During this time he met a Red Cross nurse, to whom he gave all his journal.When the war finished, Sutkus was forced to join the Red Army. He deserted to join the Lithuanian resistance fighters. After being captured again he was tortured by the KGB and deported to Siberia to endure forced labor. It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that he was able return to Germany and find his journal, still in the hands of the same nurse.Introduction written by David L. Robbins.

    Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn't get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers.In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya's perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her protagonist's vividly drawn inner and outer lives. Maya's life story flows as a long monologue, told in unfussy language dense with Khemlin's magnificently manipulated Soviet clich�s and matter-of-fact descriptions of Soviet life. Born in a center of Jewish life in Ukraine, she spent the war in evacuation in Kazakhstan. She has few friends but several husbands, and her relationships with her relatives are strained at best. The war looms over Klotsvog, and the trauma runs deep, as do the ambiguities and ambivalences of Jewish identity. Lisa Hayden's masterful translation brings this compelling character study full of dark, sly humor and new perspectives on Jewish heritage and survival to an English-speaking audience.

    It is inspiring as a reminder of passionate love beyond early youth." - Dorothy E. Siminovitch, Ph.D., MCC, Coach, Author, Conference speaker and learning consultant.A whirlwind romance on a romantic Black Sea beach turns into a quick marriage for Serge and Janna, only to have family, fate and foolishness tear them apart. As the cold war grinds to a halt, the politics of late Soviet Russia separates the lovers on different continents. Never quite coming together, never quite letting go, their lives overlap and entwine over the years..."Can the power of love stand up to time, politics and distance? Two young lovers face turmoil, separation and the fall of their homeland. This intriguing and often painful love story spans for decades of life-altering years, life-altering events, but proves that true love will endure as long as the human heart beats." - Amazon top 1000 reviewer"The portrayal of Communist and post-1991 Russia is brilliantly done and made the story so much more than 'just' a romance." - Amazon top 500 reviewer, Christoph FischerBeneath the adventure and romance is a deeper story of achieving dreams regardless of obstacles. Janna Yeshanova brings forth her personal account of courage in the face of impossible odds, her indomitable spirit, and a heart of gold that held onto a lost love for decades."This very modern love story, lets you feel the sorrow, fear and joy of a couple coping with events that reshaped the world. A great, dramatic romance in classic Russian style." - Amazon reviewerAnyone who's ever pondered the eternal question, "What makes life worth living?" can find the answer within the international romantic saga of LOVE IS NEVER PAST TENSE.

    At stake is not what he writes about--whether memory, Gertrude Stein, immortality, or a walk on Nevsky Prospect--but how he writes it. Formally, Dragomoshchenko never tires of digression, creating playful games of patience and anticipation for his reader. In so doing, he pushes story and closure into the background--arriving, finally, but not to a destination. Ultimately, Dragomoshchenko "carefully seeks out the dust of traces from the period of oblivion," which evidently lead to the oblivion of minds.

    Here is the work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, among many others.Arranged by theme—love, mortality, art, and the enduring mystery of Mother Russia herself—and presented in the best available translations, these poems will serve as both an introduction to the mastery of Russian poetry and a wide-ranging selection to be returned to again and again.

    

    It would take some time for the scales to fall from her eyes. Over the next 17 years Kim discovered a Russia few tourists see. She ate some of the world's worst food, went to places few of us would venture, made good friends and met a lot of seriously dodgy people. On collective farms and on 40-hour train journeys, at red carpet parties and in marriage agencies, on nuclear bases and in the frozen wastes of Siberia, she navigated the country's changing fortunes, bearing witness to the horrific events of war, nuclear accidents, drug and alcohol addiction and ethnic rivalries. She even tried to make herself into a good Russian woman, abandoning her uniform of jeans, boots and Russian prison coat for heels and a skin-tight dress. RED SQUARE BLUES a full-blooded charge through a crumbling empire as it lurches from dark power to open society and back again. It is an eye-opening portrait of an eternally surprising country, leavened with the kind of bone-dry humour only life in a repressive police state can produce.

    Conveying the texture of everyday life alongside experiences of epic historical events, the book is filled with the voices of men and women, rulers and revolutionaries, peasants, soldiers, literary figures, émigrés, journalists, and scholars. Most of the selections are by Russians, and thirty are translated into English for the first time. 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.

    While he was there he indulged his other great interest - military matters. On his travels he observed first-hand the soldiers of the European Armies in the last days of the colourful and elaborate uniforms that were giving way to grey and khaki across the continent. Realizing that this was a great military heritage that was slipping away, he set out to record these splendid uniforms.In the uncertain days before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Haswell Miller sketched and painted hundreds of figures, each wearing a different uniform from the armies of Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Just before the First World War the paintings were exhibited in Leipzig, and it seemed they might be published. But when war broke out they returned home and lay forgotten for nearly one hundred years.Now, published together at last, they represent a unique record of the uniforms of the last great age of military dress. Accompanied by, in Haswell Miller's own words, 'notes and memories of the days before "the lights went out in Europe" in the year 1914', this is a book of great historical importance.

    Its practices are largely unfamiliar in the West, and have remained essentially unchanged since the earliest days of the faith. This lucid introduction outlines the tenets, nature and holy days of Orthodox belief with the Western reader in mind. It describes the physical church, especially icons, services, and common practices, and offers advice to visitors on how to conduct themselves so that they are accepted and feel comfortable.Several chapters concern the life of Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity; others trace the origins and history of the Church, with particular attention to its great champion, Constantine the Great. The present structure of the Church is described in brief, and the split between the Eastern and the Western Churches is related with differences clearly explained.The great antiquity and beauty of its liturgy, its essentially minimal hierarchy and its mystical yet pragmatic approach make the Orthodox religion a powerful medium for its profound and universal message. This deceptively simple volume takes the reader on a journey to the heart of the Christian tradition.ACCESS THE WORLD’S RELIGIONSSimple Guides: Religion is a series of concise, accessible introductions to the world’s major religions. Written by experts in the field, they offer an engaging and sympathetic description of the key concepts, beliefs and practices of different faiths.Ideal for spiritual seekers and travellers alike, Simple Guides aims to open the doors of perception. Together the books provide a reliable compass to the world’s great spiritual traditions, and a point of reference for further exploration and discovery. By offering essential insights into the core values, customs and beliefs of differentsocieties, they also enable visitors to be aware of the cultural sensibilities of their hosts, and to behave in a way that fosters mutual respect and understanding.

    Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe." Published for the fiftieth anniversary of the trip, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in capitalist America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.

    A broad group of intellectuals and artists in Soviet Russia were able to take advantage of this, and in no realm of the arts was thisperhaps more true than in music. Students at Soviet conservatories were at last able to use various channels--many of questionable legality--to acquire and hear music that had previously been forbidden, and visiting performers and composers brought young Soviets new sounds and new compositions. Inthe 1960s, composers such as Andrey Volkonsky, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo P�rt, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Valentin Silvestrov experimented with a wide variety of then new and unfamiliar techniques ranging from serialism to aleatory devices, and audiences eager to escape the music ofpredictable sameness typical to socialist realism were attracted to performances of their new and unfamiliar creations.This unofficial music by young Soviet composers inhabited the gray space between legal and illegal. Such Freedom, If Only Musical traces the changing compositional styles and politically charged reception of this music, and brings to life the paradoxical freedoms and sense of resistance oropposition that it suggested to Soviet listeners. Author Peter J. Schmelz draws upon interviews conducted with many of the most important composers and performers of the musical Thaw, and supplements this first-hand testimony with careful archival research and detailed musical analyses. The firstbook to explore this period in detail, Such Freedom, If Only Musical will appeal to musicologists and theorists interested in post-war arts movements, the Cold War, and Soviet music, as well as historians of Russian culture and society.

    This thoughtful and balanced text examines the development of Russian foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Jeffrey Mankoff argues that Russia's more assertive behavior since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000 has resulted from both a deep-seated consensus among its elite about Russia's identity and interests as well as a favorable convergence of events-including the persistence of high energy prices and the check on U.S. power resulting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because these factors are the result of long-term trends, the author argues that there is little reason to expect that the election of Dmitry Medvedev will fundamentally alter Russian foreign policy behavior. Presenting an evenhanded treatment of controversial issues, Mankoff analyzes Russia's interactions with major global actors, including the United States, the European Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and China. Despite Moscow's often-harsh rhetoric and the deployment of Russian forces against Georgia in 2008, the author convincingly demonstrates that there is little reason to fear a return to a Cold War-like standoff with the West. Instead, he argues, today's Russia is more interested in restoring what its leaders consider to be its rightful place among the world's major powers rather than in directly challenging the West. Thoroughly researched and knowledgeable, this book will be invaluable for all students of Russia.

    Washington backed away from its initial commitment to a new level of cooperation with Moscow in addressing issues of terrorism, energy security, political instability and weapons proliferation. Much of America’s policy is shaped by an ambition to remain the only world’s superpower and by activities of interest groups with the agenda of isolating Russia from the Western world. Although these groups do not dictate the official policy, their influence has been notable. The book analyzes the negative role played by Russophobia and formulates a different approach to Russia in the post-Cold War world.

    Cosseted as a young grand duke by Catherine the Great, he ascended to the throne in 1801 after the brutal assassination of his father. In this magisterial biography, Marie-Pierre Rey illuminates the complex forces that shaped Alexander’s tumultuous reign and sheds brilliant new light on the handsome ruler known to his people as "the Sphinx." Despite an early and ambitious commitment to sweeping political reforms, Alexander saw his liberal aspirations overwhelmed by civil unrest in his own country and by costly confrontations with Napoleon, which culminated in the French invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow in 1812. Eventually, Alexander turned back Napoleon’s forces and entered Paris a victor two years later, but by then he had already grown weary of military glory. As the years passed, the tsar who defeated Napoleon would become increasingly preoccupied with his own spiritual salvation, an obsession that led him to pursue a rapprochement between the Orthodox and Roman churches. When in exile, Napoleon once remarked of his Russian rival: “He could go far. If I die here, he will be my true heir in Europe.” It was not to be. Napoleon died on Saint Helena and Alexander succumbed to typhus four years later at the age of forty-eight. But in this richly nuanced portrait, Rey breathes new life into the tsar who stood at the center of the political chessboard of early nineteenth-century Europe, a key figure at the heart of diplomacy, war, and international intrigue during that region’s most tumultuous years.

    These cultural warriors sought to recast themselves and other Jews not only as a modern nation but as a nation of moderns.Kenneth Moss offers the first comprehensive look at this fascinating moment in Jewish and Russian history. He examines what these numerous would-be cultural revolutionaries, such as El Lissitzky and Haim Nahman Bialik, meant by a new Jewish culture, and details their fierce disagreements but also their shared assumptions about what culture was and why it was so important. In close readings of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian texts, he traces how they sought to realize their ideals in practice as writers, artists, and thinkers in the burgeoning cultural centers of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. And he reveals what happened to them and their ideals as the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over cultural life.Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.

    Social, political, and historical events were included as a backdrop to this easy reading people history of Russia. The raw reality of life, without the filter of Cold War propaganda, is fascinating as Russian people lived and survived in their everyday life. These stories include Lilias mother who was a daughter of nobility and Lilias father who was a peasant that rose in the ranks to Red Army Intelligence and then to the KGB where he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. There are new perspectives of Stalinism, Soviet Power, the Gulag Archipelago and the KGB, as well as a singular view of historical events, including World War II. Over 90 photographs are included along with site location maps and genealogy charts.

    Although the Russian commercial colony of Fort Ross closed in 1842, the Russian presence in San Francisco continued and the community expanded to include churches, societies, businesses, and newspapers. Some came seeking opportunity, while others were fleeing religious or political persecution. In the 1920s, San Franciscoas Russian population grew exponentially as refugees of the Russian Revolution and civil war arrived, and by the 1950s, a vibrant and culturally rich Russian A(c)migrA(c) community was thriving in San Francisco. Today the 75,000 Russian speakers who live in the San Francisco Bay Area continue to pass on their heritage to their children.

    This catalogue of over three hundred artworks related to the Saisons Russes between 1909 and 1929 is the official companion to an exhibition in Monte Carlo. The legendary productions are brought to life through stage designs, costumes, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and programs. The artwork comes from a wide variety of public and private collections, including the Fokine collection in the St. Petersburg Theatre Museum. Diaghilev’s scenic achievements are complemented by a number of contextual paintings, drawings, and other artifacts, which help to define Russia’s cultural renaissance of the first decades of the twentieth century. The documentary section of the catalog contains rich archival material, including letters, photographs, choreographic notes, and memoirs, many published here for the first time.

    The war in the Caucusus, the struggles of Imam Shamil of Chechnya and the fall of the Ottoman Empire are all spotlighted as we come to admire this intriguing figure of the Caucasian Pasha.

    The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times.Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical--in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities--about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation--have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

    Brian Boeck connects the rivalry of the Russian and Ottoman empires in the northern Black Sea basin to the social history of the Don Cossacks, who were transformed from an open, democratic, multiethnic, male fraternity dedicated to frontier raiding into a closed, ethnic community devoted to defending and advancing the boundaries of the Russian state. He shows how by promoting border patrol, migration control, bureaucratic regulation of cross-border contacts and deportation of dissidents, Peter I destroyed the world of the old steppe and created a new imperial Cossack order in its place. In examining this transformation, Imperial Boundaries addresses key historical issues of imperial expansion, the delegitimization of non-state violence, the construction of borders, and the encroaching boundaries of state authority in the lives of local communities.

    From the Last Supper to the Great Schism, and from Christology to ecclesiology and Christian anthropology-the symbolism of bread has dominated Christian history and belief. What kind of bread did Christ offer to His disciples at the Last Supper? Why do Roman Catholics and the Orthodox disagree on how to bake bread? What is the significance of the symbolism of bread for Christian theology and praxis? This book addresses these and many other questions. Scholars and bakers, clergy and lay folk alike-all are invited to take a closer look at that which speaks of our unity-one loaf to represent one Body.

    Take an awe-inspiring walk through Red Square, hike amongst the geysers and volcanoes of Kamchatka, or sweat it out in a traditional Russian banya (bathhouse); all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Russia and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet's Russia Travel Guide: Colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - history, politics, literature, cinema, religion, performing arts, music, visual art, architecture, cuisine, landscapes, wildlife. Over 80 maps Covers Moscow, St Petersburg, the Golden Ring, Kaliningrad, European Russia, the Volga Region, the Russia Caucasus, Sochi, Lake Baikal, the Urals, Yekaterinburg, Siberia, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Kamchatka and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Russia, our comprehensive guide to Russia, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled. Looking for a guide focused on Moscow or St Petersburg? Check out Lonely Planet's Moscow or St Petersburg guides for a comprehensive look at all these cities have to offer. Looking for more extensive regional coverage? Check out Lonely Planet's Trans-Siberian Railway guide. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet, Simon Richmond, Marc Bennetts, Greg Bloom, Marc Di Duca, Anthony Haywood, Anna Kaminski, Tom Masters, Leonid Ragozin, Tamara Sheward, Regis St Louis and Mara Vorhees. About Lonely Planet: Since 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel media company with guidebooks to every destination, an award-winning website, mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet covers must-see spots but also enables curious travellers to get off beaten paths to understand more of the culture of the places in which they find themselves.

    Morrison’s assignment is to work with British agent Sidney Reilly to kidnap Tsar Nicholas II and remove him from Russia before he can sabotage the upcoming Portsmouth Peace conference.The mission goes awry and Morrison is captured and sentenced to death. Through a quirk of fate, he is instead sent to the infamous Russian prison on Solovetsky Island. There, his increasingly violent nature eventually allows him to dominate the camp as “Moryak” (Russian for Sailor). He soon catches the attention of the Bolshevik prisoners and their growing interactions come to have devastating effects on the evolving revolution in Russia, as well as the Allied war effort as the world descends into the chaos of World War I.As events unfold and secrets are unveiled in an uncanny political intrigue, Moryak in fact tells the life story of one man’s struggle for acceptance, him finding his place and finding himself.

    Millions attended matches and obsessed about their favorite club, and their rowdiness on game day stood out as a moment of relative freedom in a society that championed conformity. This was particularly the case for the supporters of Spartak, which emerged from the rough proletarian Presnia district of Moscow and spent much of its history in fierce rivalry with Dinamo, the team of the secret police. To cheer for Spartak, Edelman shows, was a small and safe way of saying "no" to the fears and absurdities of high Stalinism; to understand Spartak is to understand how soccer explains Soviet life.Champions of the Soviet Elite League twelve times and eleven-time winner of the USSR Cup, Spartak was founded and led for seven decades by the four Starostin brothers, the most visible of whom were Nikolai and Andrei. Brilliant players turned skilled entrepreneurs, they were flexible enough to constantly change their business model to accommodate the dramatic shifts in Soviet policy. Whether because of their own financial wheeling and dealing or Spartak's too frequent success against state-sponsored teams, they were arrested in 1942 and spent twelve years in the gulag. Instead of facing hard labor and likely death, they were spared the harshness of their places of exile when they were asked by local camp commandants to coach the prisoners' football teams. Returning from the camps after Stalin's death, they took back the reins of a club whose mystique as the "people's team" was only enhanced by its status as a victim of Stalinist tyranny.Edelman covers the team from its days on the wild fields of prerevolutionary Russia through the post-Soviet period. Given its history, it was hardly surprising that Spartak adjusted quickly to the new, capitalist world of postsocialist Russia, going on to win the championship of the Russian Premier League nine times, the Russian Cup three times, and the CIS Commonwealth of Independent States Cup six times. In addition to providing a fresh and authoritative history of Soviet society as seen through its obsession with the world's most popular sport, Edelman, a well-known sports commentator, also provides biographies of Spartak's leading players over the course of a century and riveting play-by-play accounts of Spartak's most important matches-including such highlights as the day in 1989 when Spartak last won the Soviet Elite League on a Valery Shmarov free kick at the ninety-second minute. Throughout, he palpably evokes what it was like to cheer for the "Red and White."

    In the terrible turmoil of the Russian revolution he risked his life, rescuing Romanov jewels from the Vladimir Palace worth millions of pounds from under Bolshevik noses, and taking back to Britain in his Gladstone bag gems that were destined to adorn the rich and famous - queens, duchesses and film stars. Within months of his return to London, he was embroiled in a homosexual scandal and a trial at the Old Bailey; he died a broken man. Ninety years later, as an intriguing postscript to this extraordinary story, William Clarke unearthed an unclaimed Romanov bank account in London in the name of Grand Duke Andre; it has now been claimed by more than a score of his heirs.

    Petersburg. Editor Nikolai Nekrasov was the most influential literary entrepreneur of the day, and he assembled works ranging from ethnography to fiction to literary criticism, all written by leading authors and thinkers of the time. The book he edited represents many important strands in Russian culture and history, including the development of Russian prose and the rise of the intelligentsia. A vital political document as well, Petersburg is a record of—and served as a spur to—the changes in Russian society that culminated in the 1917 revolution. This first-ever English edition brings its storied and studied illumination to a new audience, providing a key to understanding the place that St. Petersburg holds in Russia’s identity.

    It discusses the development of Russian nationalism, including in the Soviet era, and examines how Russian nationalism grows out of or is related to ideology, culture, racism, religion and intellectual thinking, and demonstrates how Russian nationalism affects many aspects of Russian society, politics and foreign policy. This book examines the different socio-political phenomena which are variously defined as nationalism, patriotism and xenophobia . As Russia reasserts itself in the world, with Russian nationalism as one of the key driving forces in this process, an understanding of Russian nationalism is essential for understanding the dynamics of contemporary international relations.

    Only a trickle of food and ammunition, a flood of fragile bodies and a resolute determination to resist can safeguard the Russian people from the Nazi jackboot. Adrift in this sea of chaos in the brutal winter of 1942, Private Ivan Petrov of the second squad, 115th rifle company, fights to save the lives of loved ones, friends, comrades... and perhaps if he's lucky, himself. Greatly outnumbered, under strength and woefully undersupplied, these Red soldiers fight with all they have left: cunning, bravery and determination.

    The author of cult classics such as Borders Up and Dreams on Hitler's Couch, Vitaliev has a wry take on the human species as it goes about its daily life. But he is also an imaginative and thoughtful artist, whose perspective has been shaped by his experience growing up in the Soviet Union, from which he was eventually expelled. In this compelling and fiercely honest memoir, Vitaliev describes how on many occasions in his life, words have provided him with the means of survival: the words of great writers from Mikhail Bulgakov to George Orwell; the words of writer friends such as Peter Ustinov and Joseph Heller; the words of his mother, of his children. The end result is a wonderfully uplifting paean to the power of literature to soothe the troubled soul—part memoir, part novel, part dreamlike meditation, part metaphor: how literature as a device can contribute to an individual's survival. Life As A Literary Device is both a summation and a new beginning for Vitaliev—an analysis of how literature has bound his life, and an exploration of how to survive in the modern world.

    Afghanistan has been a battleground since man has occupied its hostile landscape and others have sought to control it as the corridor between great continents. The British-conquerors of the Indian sub-continent-have found themselves fruitlessly bleeding into its dry soil on several occasions. The first was in the mid-nineteenth century as they attempted to secure an unpopular puppet ruler on its throne. Error compounded error as Elphinstone, the British army's incompetent commander, compromised his strategic position in the capital and then, to extricate himself, instigated a forced retreat in winter as hostile tribesmen pressed in on all sides. History knows that this resulted in the annihilation of the entire army. Only a handful of people survived. One of these was Lady Sale, the formidable wife of Robert Sale whose brigade was fighting its own war locked inside Jellalabad. Incredibly Lady Sale kept a daily diary of her experience of the entire appalling catastrophe. It illuminates the events of the retreat uniquely and provides an inspiring view of a woman rising to the demands of extreme adversity that has no parallels.

    In spite of the host of social and economic problems confronting Russia in the demise of Soviet power, the social dislocation endured by increasing numbers of people went largely unrecognized by the state. Being homeless carries a special burden in Russia, where a permanent address is the precondition for all civil rights and social benefits and where homelessness is often regarded as a result of laziness and drinking, rather than external factors.In Needed by Nobody, the anthropologist Tova Höjdestrand offers a nuanced portrait of homelessness in St. Petersburg. Based on ethnographic work at railway stations, soup kitchens, and other places where the homeless gather, Höjdestrand describes the material and mental world of this marginalized population. They are, she observes, not needed in two senses. The state considers them, in effect, as noncitizens. At the same time they stand outside the traditionally intimate social networks that are the real safety net of life in postsocialist Russia. As a result, they are deprived of the prerequisites for dealing with others in ways that they themselves value as decent and human.Höjdestrand investigates processes of social exclusion as well as the remaining world of waste: things, tasks, and places that are wanted by nobody else and on which human leftovers are forced to survive. In this bleak context, Höjdestrand takes up the intimate worlds of the homeless--their social relationships, dirt and cleanliness, and physical appearance. Her interviews with homeless people show that the indigent have a very good idea of what others think of them and that they are liable to reproduce the stigma that is attached to them even as they attempt to negotiate it. This unique and often moving portrait of life on the margins of society in the new Russia ultimately reveals how human dignity may be retained in the absence of its very preconditions.

    "Under the Blows of the Counterrevolution" describes Makhno's odyssey through revolutionary Russia in the spring of 1918. Driven from his Ukrainian village by a German invasion, he wandered through a nation torn by civil war, encountered various remarkable personalities, and survived hair-raising adventures. This volume has interested historians mainly because of Makhno's account of his interview with Lenin, but it also contains valuable eyewitness information about a period of Soviet history that was later almost completely rewritten in officially sanctioned accounts.

    - Primary Research and Sources- Historic Documents- Essential Facts- Source Notes- Select Bibliography- Maps- Timeline

    Anne L. Clunan's analysis of Russia's resurgence convincingly argues that traditional security concerns, historical aspirations, and human agency are coalescing around a new national identity and reconfigured national interests in the post-Soviet nation. Her work moves beyond balance-of-power and realist politics to posit a new, interdisciplinary theory: aspirational constructivism.This groundbreaking theory draws on international relations research and social psychology. Clunan argues that the need for collective self-esteem creates aspirations—often based in a nation's past—that directly shape its national and security interests. In applying this theory to Russia, she points to the nation's continuing efforts to exert influence over former Soviet satellite states and relates the desire for international status found in five broad Russian national self-images—Western, statist, Slavophile, neocommunist, and nationalist—to Russia's definition of its security interests with respect to Europe, Eurasia, and nuclear weapons.Clunan's examination of how sociology, social psychology, and traditional international politics affect post-Soviet Russian identity and security concerns is truly cross-disciplinary. A concluding chapter discusses the policy implications of aspirational constructivism for Russia and other nations and a methodological appendix lays out a framework for testing the theory.

    Graney examines one of the most important, puzzling, and ignored developments of the post-Soviet period: the persistence of the claim to possess state sovereignty by the ethnic republic of Tatarstan, one of the constituent members of the Russian Federation. In the first book by a Western scholar in English to chronicle the efforts made by the leadership of the Russian republic of Tatarstan to build and retain state sovereignty, Graney explores the many different dimensions of Tatarstan's move to become independent. By showing the 'sovereignty project' that the Tatarstani people have begun in order to realize their vision of becoming a separate political, social, and economic entity within the Russian Federation, Graney makes the case that this Tatarstani movement will significantly influence Russia's contemporary development in important and heretofore unrecognized ways. This book provides new insight into tackling policy issues regarding inter-ethnic relations and cultural pluralism within Russia, as well as within other European nations currently facing the same policy dilemmas.

    Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive. It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.

    Maxfield's "A Comprehensive Outline of World History" as originally organized, chronologically by era and across regions within an era. Each chapter covers a period of historical time (e.g. a century). Sections

    Why did political repression affect so many people, most of them ordinary citizens? Why did repression come in waves or cycles? Why were economic and petty crimes regarded as political crimes? What was the reason for relying on extra-judicial tribunals? And what motivated the extreme harshness of punishments, including the widespread use of the death penalty? Through an approach that synthesizes history and economics, Paul Gregory develops systematic explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. The book draws on extensive, recently opened archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves to illuminate in new ways terror and repression in the Soviet Union as well as dictatorships in other times and places.