It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia. In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear. Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.

    But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world.Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In Sovietistan, she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships.In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate Polygon in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested explosions of nuclear bombs; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she witnesses the fall of a dictator.She travels incognito through Turkmenistan, a country that is closed to journalists. She meets exhausted human rights activists in Kazakhstan, survivors from the massacre in Osh in 2010, and German Mennonites that found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago. We learn how ancient customs clash with gas production and witness the underlying conflicts between ethnic Russians and the majority in a country that is slowly building its future in nationalist colors.Once the frontier of the Soviet Union, life follows another pace of time. Amidst the treasures of Samarkand and the brutalist Soviet architecture, Sovietistan is a rare and unforgettable adventure.

    Using captivating photos and compelling first person accounts, award-winning author Candace Fleming (Amelia Lost; The Lincolns) deftly maneuvers between the imperial family’s extravagant lives and the plight of Russia's poor masses, making this an utterly mesmerizing read as well as a perfect resource for meeting Common Core standards.

    A beautiful woman lost. A mystery unsolved … until now.2000: The wreckage of a downed WWII fighter plane is discovered in the forests near Russia’s Ukrainian border. The aircraft belonged to Natalya Azarova, ace pilot and pin-up girl for Soviet propaganda, but the question of her fate remains unanswered. Was she a German spy who faked her own death, as the Kremlin claims? Her lover, Valentin Orlov, now a highly-decorated general, refuses to believe it.Lily, a young Australian woman, has moved to Moscow to escape from tragedy. She becomes fascinated by the story of Natalya, and when she meets an elderly woman who claims to know the truth behind the rumours, Lily is drawn deeper into the mystery.From the pomp and purges of Stalin’s Russia through the horrors of war and beyond - secrets and lies, enduring love and terrible betrayal, sacrifice and redemption all combine in this sweeping saga from Belinda Alexandra.

    In the twilight of the Cold War (the late 1980s), nine-year old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult, sets out to retrace his family's long trek, locate the strangers who fought for his freedom, and in the process, gain a future by understanding his past.Lev Golinkin's memoir is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union. It's also the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible . . . and say thank you. Written with biting, acerbic wit and emotional honesty in the vein of Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Bezmozgis, Golinkin's search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir—it's a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging. Lev Golinkin achieves an amazing feat—and it marks the debut of a fiercely intelligent, defiant, and unforgettable new voice.

    By the next day the USSR was officially no more and the USA had emerged as the world’s sole superpower. Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy presents a page-turning account of the preceding five months of drama, filled with failed coups d’état and political intrigue.Honing in on this previously disregarded but crucial period and using recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, he shatters the established myths of 1991 and presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union’s final months. Plokhy argues that contrary to the triumphalist Western narrative, George H. W. Bush desperately wanted to preserve the Soviet Union and keep Gorbachev in power, and that it was Ukraine and not the US that played the key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The consequences of those five months and the myth-making that has since surrounded them are still being felt in Crimea, Russia, the US, and Europe today.With its spellbinding narrative and strikingly fresh perspective, The Last Empire is the essential account of one of the most important watershed periods in world history, and is indispensable reading for anyone seeking to make sense of international politics today.

    From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, the bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. Herwig’s series attracted considerable media interest around the world, and now with the 12 year project complete, the full collection will be presented in Soviet Bus Stops as a deluxe, limited edition, hard cover photo book. The book represents the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled.

    Kaplan The New Tsar is the book to read if you want to understand how Vladimir Putin sees the world and why he has become one of the gravest threats to American security.The epic tale of the rise to power of Russia's current president—the only complete biography in English – that fully captures his emergence from shrouded obscurity and deprivation to become one of the most consequential and complicated leaders in modern history, by the former New York Times Moscow bureau chief. In a gripping narrative of Putin’s rise to power as Russia’s president, Steven Lee Myers recounts Putin’s origins—from his childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad, to his ascension through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule. Along the way, world events familiar to readers, such as September 11th and Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, as well as the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, are presented from never-before-seen perspectives.  This book is a grand, staggering achievement and a breathtaking look at one man’s rule. On one hand, Putin’s many reforms—from tax cuts to an expansion of property rights—have helped reshape the potential of millions of Russians whose only experience of democracy had been crime, poverty, and instability after the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Putin has ushered in a new authoritarianism, unyielding in his brutal repression of revolts and squashing of dissent. Still, he retains widespread support from the Russian public. The New Tsar is a narrative tour de force, deeply researched, and utterly necessary for anyone fascinated by the formidable and ambitious Vladimir Putin, but also for those interested in the world and what a newly assertive Russia might mean for the future.

    Scattered Links is a novel that pulls its characters from the gutters and, in the end, celebrates the tenacity of the human spirit. Thirteen-year-old Oksana lives on the streets of Russia with her pregnant mama and abusive aunt—both prostitutes. When Mama swells into labor, Oksana makes a decision to save herself from abandonment, a decision that torments her forever. But her plan fails when her aunt dumps her in an orphanage before she has the chance to say goodbye to her mama or tell her the secret that haunts her.Scattered Links is a story of family and the consequences that come from never learning how to love, of a girl’s inability to bond with her adopted family and the frustrations that follow. How can a child understand the mechanics of forming a healthy relationship when she never had a mother who answered her cries, held her when she was frightened, fed her when she was hungry, or loved her unconditionally?Only when the child meets a rescued abused horse, and recognizes the pain in his eyes, does she begin to trust again.

    Yet Hitler and Stalin signed a treaty of nonaggression that lasted for nearly a third of the war, and that is key to understanding why the war evolved—and ended—the way it did.In The Devils’ Alliance, Roger Moorhouse explains how the two powers—though ideologically opposed—forged a brutally efficient partnership, exchanging raw materials and machinery and orchestrating the division of Poland and the Baltic States. Hundreds of thousands caught between Hitler and Stalin were killed or deported. But ironically, by sharing materiel and technological expertise during the Pact, the Nazis and Soviets made possible a far more bloody and protracted war than would have been otherwise conceivable.Combining comprehensive research with a gripping narrative, The Devils’ Alliance is the authoritative history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact—and a portrait of the people whose lives were irrevocably altered by the alliance.

    The book exposes the realities and truths of Soviet Oppression that was hid to the outside world behind the Iron Curtain of the 1960’s. Join readers around the world as they follow the story of Joseph, learning of what he faced during arrest, imprisonment, and loss of freedom for almost ten years in the merciless state of the communist driven society of the U.S.S.R. Inside the walls of the GULAG, Bondarenko faced near-starvation, beatings, torture and evil, seen and unseen, all because he boldly proclaimed the Gospel and refused to accept the ways of communism and the ways of the hammer and the sickle.

    While other historians have focused their examinations on the cataclysmic years immediately before and after 1917, Figes shows how the revolution, while it changed in form and character, nevertheless retained the same idealistic goals throughout, from its origins in the famine crisis of 1891, until its end with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.Figes traces three generational phases: Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who set the pattern of destruction and renewal until their demise in the terror of the 1930s; the Stalinist generation, promoted from the lower classes, who created the lasting structures of the Soviet regime and consolidated its legitimacy through victory in war; and the generation of 1956, shaped by the revelations of Stalin’s crimes and committed to “making the Revolution work” to remedy economic decline and mass disaffection. Until the very end of the Soviet system, its leaders believed they were carrying out the revolution Lenin had begun.With the authority and distinctive style that have marked his magisterial histories, Figes delivers an accessible and paradigm-shifting reconsideration of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.

    One billionaire. Mikhail lies in a coma. For while Mikhail's methods were ruthless, his arrogance left him vulnerable. His associates can shoot, but they cannot manage the financial empire he built so painstakingly. Is there a way to avoid its rapid descend into turmoil? Rise of an Oligarch is a thrilling historical fiction set against the background of the Big Bang of the USSR. This is the book that tycoons don't want you to read!

    From the vision of one woman who fled Bolshevik Russia and opened her doors to artists, musicians, writers, and refugees from war-torn Europe, it has become a sanctuary for generations of her family. Over the course of one day they face marital crisis, impending birth, teenage trauma, a father’s roving eye, momentous news from the past, communal financial crisis, and a lost love from the summer of 1957.

    But Russia squirms under the pressure of any attempt to pin it down. In the midst of social and financial upheaval, the more Parker sought answers the more the questions kept coming: What was Russia? How did it work? How did people live? How could they eat kholodetz (meat jelly)? Did love mean something different to them than it meant to us? Why did so many women leave the country to marry strangers? What good did knowing Pushkin by heart do them? Why did the police keep robbing him?The four years at the heart of this book focus largely on the period between 2008 and 2012 and the revealing friendship Parker made with a young barkeep and draft dodger named Igor. The book became the story of Igor, as a metaphor for Russia, in crisis. While Igor is not the model Perestroika generation man nor some kind of Putin-era everyman, he is, like The Big Lebowski, a man for his time and place. What Parker has created is the story of Igor as refracting mirror for the story of Russia, told with intelligence, humour and no small amount of misadventure.

    In fact, they are posed even more sharply today. David North argues against contemporary historians who maintain that the dissolution of the USSR signaled the “end of history” (Fukuyama}, or the “short twentieth century”(Hobsbawm). Disputing postmodernism’s view that all history is merely subjective “narrative,” North insists that a thorough materialist knowledge of history is vital for humanity’s survival in the twenty-first century.

    His subsequent escape to England via Finland is describedfollowed by details of his return to Europe through Lithuania as amember of SOE. Finally a reunion with Polish Forces in the MiddleEast was made possible after the Nazi invasion of Russia caused theSoviets to become an uneasy ally of Poland.He returned to England once more and became a fighter pilot with thePolish Air Force at the tail end of hostilities, all by the ripe old age of 22.He died in Norfolk in 1999 aged 76.

    From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close.In The Baron's Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire's final decades through the arc of the Baron's life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern's movements, he transits through the Empire's multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial collapse was particularly vicious. In compulsively readable prose that draws on wide-ranging research in multiple languages, Sunderland recreates Ungern's far-flung life and uses it to tell a compelling and original tale of imperial success and failure in a momentous time.Sunderland visited the many sites that shaped Ungern's experience, from Austria and Estonia to Mongolia and China, and these travels help give the book its arresting geographical feel. In the early chapters, where direct evidence of Ungern's activities is sparse, he evokes peoples and places as Ungern would have experienced them, carefully tracing the accumulation of influences that ultimately came together to propel the better documented, more notorious phase of his careerRecurring throughout Sunderland's magisterial account is a specific artifact: the Baron's cloak, an essential part of the cross-cultural uniform Ungern chose for himself by the time of his Mongolian campaign: an orangey-gold Mongolian kaftan embroidered in the Khalkha fashion yet outfitted with tsarist-style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived across the Russian Empire, combined its contrasting cultures, fought its wars, and was molded by its greatest institutions and most volatile frontiers. By the time of his trial and execution mere months before the decree that created the USSR, he had become a profoundly contradictory figure, reflecting both the empire's potential as a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.

    For many in the West, Moscow's actions in early 2014 marked the end of illusions about cooperation, and the return to geopolitical and ideological confrontation. Russia, for so long a peripheral presence, had become the central actor in a new global drama. In this groundbreaking book, renowned scholar Bobo Lo analyzes the broader context of the crisis by examining the interplay between Russian foreign policy and an increasingly anarchic international environment. He argues that Moscow's approach to regional and global affairs reflects the tension between two very different worlds—the perceptual and the actual.The Kremlin highlights the decline of the West, a resurgent Russia, and the emergence of a new multipolar order. But this idealized view is contradicted by a world disorder that challenges core assumptions about the dominance of great powers and the utility of military might. Its lesson is that only those states that embrace change will prosper in the twenty-first century.A Russia able to redefine itself as a modern power would exert a critical influence in many areas of international politics. But a Russia that rests on an outdated sense of entitlement may end up instead as one of the principal casualties of global transformation.

    From the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, Bronnikov worked as a senior expert in criminalistics at the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and part of his duties involved visiting the correctional institutions of the Ural and Siberia regions. It was there that he interviewed convicts, gathering information and taking photographs of their tattoos, amassing one of the most comprehensive archives of this phenomenon. Bronnikov regularly helped to solve criminal cases across Russia by using his collection of tattoos to identify culprits and corpses. Selections from Bronnikov's collection, which includes more than 900 photographs, will be published by Fuel in two volumes. The Bronnikov collection was made exclusively for police use, to further the understanding of the language of these tattoos and to act as an aid in the identification and apprehension of criminals in the field. Unimpeded by artistic aspirations, these amazing vernacular photographs present a seemingly straightforward representation of criminal society. Every image discloses evidence of an inmate's character: aggressive, vulnerable, melancholic, conceited. The prisoners' bodies display an unofficial history waiting to be deciphered, told not just through tattoos, but also in scars and missing digits. Yet close inspection seems only to make the language of the tattoos more baffling and incredible, pointing to the unimaginable lives of this previously unacknowledged caste.

    These subversive tall tales and their colourful hero are the creation of Stepan Pisakhov (1879-1960), who lived his life in Arkhangelsk - a stone’s throw from the White Sea. Dmitry Trubin, from the same city, has illustrated the work; as an artist Trubin is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Blackwell Boyce, from Canada but a once-upon-a-time resident of Arkhangelsk, has rendered the tales for the first time into English - and confesses to tinkering with two or three of them along the way.For readers who believe that all Russian literature is dark and depressing - Senya Malina Tells It Like It Was is going to surprise.

    Over the course of nearly twelve years he reported on academe and the sciences for the world’s leading publications, and sought out the best baths—or banyas—everywhere he went. His story of Russia through its cult of steam begins on a frosty Sunday morning in a gypsy cab traveling to a bathhouse in Moscow, where the steam is conjured by an out-of-work carpenter named Grisha, who takes on MacWilliams as a kind of apprentice, allowing him into an otherwise closed world through which MacWilliams could see himself, and Russia, with different eyes. The Russian bathers insist, only half-jokingly, that the American is a spy. Writing in a highly engaging style, MacWilliams travels the country to convey the breadth of banya culture and what it means to steam, a process that is at once a simple cleansing and a deep purification. It awakens the body and quiets the mind, generating waves of good feeling akin to an endorphin high. Each chapter of this splendid book is an episode—spanning from several hours to several days—from the Far North, Moscow, the Ural Mountains, the Solovetsky Islands, and a southern stretch of the Volga River.With Light Steam, the title is derived from the phrase used in banyas in lieu of goodbye, is the only book in English devoted to the banya and the only volume in any language to present Russia through the lens of its bath culture, the most Russian thing there is. General readers and scholars alike will be enchanted with this unforgettable portrait of a people and a millennia-spanning tradition.

     Praise for the series from Amazon Top Reviewers: "Julia Gousseva has done an excellent job here in writing a great story and one that I can recommend. This book serves as an excellent read but more so than that, as an introduction to a genre of literature that is satisfyingly refreshing. I am most definitely looking forward to reading more stories like this one." -- Dennis Waller, Amazon Top 500 Reviewer "The interaction of the children with the book opens the idea of taking part in the story, which encourages us to get involved and make the connection to our own life and choices; but it may also spurn on the talented reader to think about writing stories themselves." -- ChristophFischerBooks, Amazon Top 500 Reviewer "Highly recommended for parents who are looking for a fun, exciting adventure to read to their children and grandchildren." -- EbooksReloaded Reviews "Firebird by Julia-Gousseva is an admirable undertaking, striving to update one of the most fascinating fairytales in literature, and make it accessible to young readers." -- Uvi Poznansky, Amazon Reviewer "This is a brilliant idea: take an old fairy tale and update it in such a way that it would be interesting for kids to read it. Let's face it, kids today won't sit through most of the classic fairy-tale stories. So, the author takes this: 'Once upon a time, there lived a father with three sons. The father had a garden where golden apples grew. One night, the apples started disappearing. The father ordered his sons to catch the thief. The oldest son stood guard the first night, but fell asleep and did not see the thief. Etc. etc etc.' And turns it into this: 'Are you ready for a little adventure? If you are, you can go in. Rule One: Come back as soon as you get the feather. Rule Two: Don't talk to old ladies. They can be dangerous.' There's also a little hint of The Chronicles of Narnia in this book, which would make kids relate to the story much more readily; and some humor for a good chuckle: '...we got a little lost.' 'And now you may get a little eaten!!' -- Oleg Medvedkov, Amazon Top 500 Reviewer

    Arriving in Vienna to find his friend Adam Kallay, an official at the International Atomic Energy Agency, presumed dead, crime novelist Greg Martens teams up with Interpol Agent Anne Rossiter and Julia, Kallay’s Russian girlfriend, to solve the case and track the disappearance from a former Soviet nuclear site of enough uranium to make a bomb. The story moves from espionage entrepȏt Vienna to radioactivity contaminated Chelyabinsk and to front-line Georgia, as the three combat arms merchants allied to Russian secret police to prevent the stolen uranium from getting into the wrong hands. Along the way, Greg learns brutal truths about himself and his family.

    The fiery devastation had a profound effect on the Grand Army, but for thirty-five days Napoleon stayed, making increasingly desperate efforts to achieve peace with Russia. Then, in October, almost surrounded by the Russians and with winter fast approaching, he abandoned the capital and embarked on the long, bitter retreat that destroyed his army. The month-long stay in Moscow was a pivotal moment in the war of 1812 – the moment when the initiative swung towards the Tsar’s armies and spelled doom for the invading Grand Army – yet it has rarely been studied in the same depth as the other key events of the campaign.Alexander Mikaberidze, in this third volume of his in-depth reassessment of the war between the French and Russian empires, emphasizes the importance of the Moscow fire and shows how Russian intransigence sealed the fate of the French army. He uses a vast array of French, German, Polish and Russian memoirs, letters and diaries as well as archival material in order to tell the dramatic story of the Moscow fire. Not only does he provide a comprehensive account of events, looking at them from both the French and Russian points of view, but he explores the Russians’ motives for leaving, then burning their capital. Using extensive eyewitness accounts, he paints a vivid picture of the harsh reality of life in the remains of the occupied city and describes military operations around Moscow at this turning point in the campaign.

    Described as the ‘Most beautiful princess in Europe’, and a woman ‘capable of arousing profane passion’, this is the story of a woman whose life combined privilege and tragedy, love and riches, conviction and courage, humanity and inhumanity. A granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Ella was born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine. At 20, her marriage to the hardline Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, who became the victim of terrorist assassination, like the marriage of her younger sister Alexandra to Tsar Nicholas II, was partly responsible for the fall of the Imperial House of Romanov. In her widowhood and against great opposition, Ella established the first convent community of its kind in Moscow. As the ordained abbess of the Order of Saints Martha and Mary, Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna worked tirelessly with the sick, needy, outcast and untouchable inhabitants of the city’s slum districts. Brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks at the height of the Russian Revolution, Ella was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as the Holy Imperial Martyr Saint Elisabeth Romanova. This study is based on a wealth of original material, much of it previously unpublished, from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt, the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and the Russian State Historical Archives in St Petersburg.

    Timed for publication in February 2014, on the eve of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the book is a provocative riposte to Russia’s recently passed and ill-defined ban on “homosexual propaganda.”As part of a strategy to consolidate political control in Russia following massive pro-democracy protests that shook the government, President Putin’s ruling party decided it needed an enemy to unite the country. Hoping to manipulate backward but widely-held prejudices, it opted to demonize gays and lesbians. As a result, in June 2013, Putin signed a bill banning any and all “propaganda” of so-called non-traditional relationships. Quite predictably, in the months that followed, attacks, firings, and hate crimes have spiked across Russia, and the state-sanctioned campaign shows no sign of abating. The Russian Duma is now debating a law to take children away from gay and lesbian parents.As the world’s media turns its attention to the host country of the Winter Olympics, the stories gathered in Gay Propaganda offer a timely and intimate window into the hardships faced by Russians on the receiving end of state-sanctioned homophobia. Here are tales of of men and women in long-term committed relationships as well as those still looking for love; of those trying to raise kids or taking care of parents; of those facing the challenges of continuing to live in Russia or joining an exodus that is rapidly becoming a flood.

    Author Alan Barenberg's eye-opening study reveals Vorkuta as an active urban center with a substantial nonprisoner population where the borders separating camp and city were contested and permeable, enabling prisoners to establish social connections that would eventually aid them in their transitions to civilian life. With this book, Barenberg makes an important historical contribution to our understanding of forced labor in the Soviet Union and its enduring legacy.

    Holding one of the largest collections of Western art in the world, the Hermitage is also a product of Russia and its dramatic history. Founded by Empress Catherine the Great in 1764, the stunning Winter Palace was built to house her growing collection of Old Masters and to serve as a home for the imperial family. Tsars came and went over the years, artworks were acquired and sold, buildings were burned down in terrible fires, and still the collections grew. After the violent upheavals of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the palaces and collections were opened to the public.Now, in an unprecedented collection of illuminating essays, Piotrovsky explores the cultural history of a collection as rich in adventure as art. From fascinating intrigues to revelatory scholarship on the collection’s incredible art and artifacts, My Hermitage is a profound and captivating story of art’s timelessness and how it brings people together.

    Despite their enmity, regime allies and detractors alike have wielded traditional concepts of masculinity, femininity, and homophobia as a means of symbolic endorsement or disparagement of political leaders and policies.By repeatedly using machismo as a means of legitimation, Putin's regime (unlike that of Gorbachev or Yeltsin) opened the door to the concerted use of gendered rhetoric and imagery as a means to challenge regime authority. Sex, Politics, and Putin analyzes the political uses of gender norms and sexualization in Russia through three case studies: pro- and anti-regime groups' activism aimed at supporting or undermining the political leaders on their respective sides; activism regarding military conscription and patriotism; and feminist activism. Arguing that gender norms are most easily invoked as tools of authority-building when there exists widespread popular acceptance of misogyny and homophobia, Sperling also examines the ways in which sexism and homophobia are reflected in Russia's public sphere.

    Petersburg is one of the world’s most alluring cities—a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city’s pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past. In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg’s residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city’s glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place.

    At sixty-nine, Russia's most celebrated writer was being treated like a major criminal. Prominent Russians were always watched, but Tolstoy earned particular scrutiny. Over a decade earlier, when his advocacy on behalf of oppressed minorities angered the Orthodox Church and the Tsar, he was placed under permanent police surveillance. Although Tolstoy was wearing his peasant garb, people on the streets had no trouble recognizing him from his portraits. He was often seen in the company of his chief disciple, Vladimir Chertkov. A man of striking appearance, twenty-five years younger, Chertkov commanded attention. His photographs with Tolstoy show him towering over the writer. Close to the Tsars and to the chief of the secret police, Chertkov represented the very things Tolstoy had renounced ––class privilege, unlimited power, and wealth. Yet, Chertkov fascinated and attracted Tolstoy. He became the writer's closest confidant, even reading his daily diary, and by the end of Tolstoy's life, had established complete control over the writer and his legacy. Tolstoy’s full exchange with Chertkov comprises more than 2,000 letters, making him the writer’s largest correspondent. The Russian archives have suppressed much of this communication as well as Chertkov’s papers for more than a century. The product of ground-breaking archival research, Tolstoy's False Disciple promises to be a revelatory portrait of the two men and their three-decade-long clandestine relationship.

    Born in 1852 in the last years of serfdom, Vera Figner came of age as Imperial Russian society was being rocked by the massive upheaval that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At first champion of populist causes and champion of women's higher education, Figner later became a leader of the terrorist party The People's Will and was an accomplice in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Drawing on extensive archival research and careful reading of Figner's copious memoirs, Lynne Ann Hartnett reveals how Figner survived the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin's Great Purges and died a lionized revolutionary legend as the Nazis bore down on Moscow in 1942.

    His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text." Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. (wikipedia.org)

    A major milestone in U.S.-Russia relations, the tour also served Duke Alexis's family by helping to extricate him from an unsuitable romantic entanglement with the daughter of a poet. Alexis in America recounts the duke's progress through the major American cities, detailing his meetings with celebrated figures such as Samuel Morse and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and describing the national self-reflection that his presence spurred in the American people.The first Russian royal ever to visit the United States, Alexis received a tour through post-Civil War America that emphasized the nation's cultural unity. While the enthusiastic American media breathlessly reported every detail of his itinerary and entourage, Alexis visited Niagara Falls, participated in a bison hunt with Buffalo Bill Cody, and attended the Krewe of Rex's first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. As word of the royal visitor spread, the public flocked to train depots and events across the nation to catch a glimpse of the grand duke. Some speculated that Russia and America were considering a formal alliance, while others surmised that he had come to the United States to find a bride.The tour was not without incident: many city officials balked at spending public funds on Alexis's reception, and there were rumors of an assassination plot by Polish nationals in New York City. More broadly, the visit highlighted problems on the national level, such as political corruption and persistent racism, as well as the emerging cultural and political power of ethnic minorities and the continuing sectionalism between the North and the South. Lee Farrow joins her examination of these cultural underpinnings to a lively narrative of the grand duke's tour, creating an engaging record of a unique moment in international relations.

    Women who wrote in Yiddish go largely unrecognized outside a rapidly diminishing Yiddish readership. Even in the heyday of Yiddish literature, they were regarded as marginal. But for over four centuries, women wrote and published Yiddish poems that addressed the crises of Jewish history—from the plague to the Holocaust—as well as the challenges and pleasures of daily life: prayer, art, friendship, nature, family, and love. Through close readings and translations of poems of eighteen writers, Hellerstein argues for a new perspective on a tradition of women Yiddish poets. Framed by a consideration of Ezra Korman's 1928 anthology of women poets, Hellerstein develops a discussion of poetry that extends from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, from early modern Prague and Krakow to high modernist Warsaw, New York, and California. The poems range from early conventional devotions, such as a printer's preface and verse prayers, to experimental, transgressive lyrics that confront a modern ambivalence toward Judaism. In an integrated study of literary and cultural history, Hellerstein shows the immensely important contribution made by women poets to Jewish literary tradition.

    But this account is wrong: Washington and its European allies actually share most of the responsibility, having spent decades pushing east into Russia’s natural sphere of interest.©2014 Foreign Affairs

    Made in secret, they satirize the Communist Party system and expose the absurdities of Soviet life. Baldaev touches on a wide range of subjects, from drinking (Alcoholics and Shirkers) to the Afghan war (The Shady Enterprise), via dissent (Censorship, Paranoia and Suspicion) and religion (Atheism as an Ideology). He reveals the cracks in the crumbling socialist structure, describing the realities of living in a country whose leaders are in pursuit of an ideal that will never arrive. The drawings date from the 1950s to the period immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, with caricatures exposing communism's winners and losers: the stagnation of the system, the corruption of its politicians and the effect of this on the ordinary soviet citizen. Baldaev's drawings are contrasted with classic propaganda-style photographs taken by Sergei Vasiliev for the newspaper Vercherny Chelyabinsk. These photographs depict the world the Communist leaders dreamed of: where the local factory produced its millionth tractor and heroic workers fulfilled their five-year plans. It is impossible to imagine the daily reality of living under such a system; this book shows us--both broadly and in minute detail--what it must have been like.

    Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns."

    Detailing the evolution and development of traditional Russian cooking, this book gives a better understanding of the foods that are now known as classical Russian dishes. Through the words of native Muscovite, Maria Depenweiller, who was born and raised in Moscow before immigrating to Canada, Savours and Flavours covers not only Russian cooking methods such as the Russian oven samovar, but also the impact of Russian politics on its food. Discover how the Soviet Revolution impacted Russian eating habits. Or how the Russian tea drinking tradition got started. Learn about the home cooking of the Russian Empire and try schi and rasstegai. Delight your guests with marvelous assortment of zakuski or ant hill torte from the classical Soviet cuisine. Complete the experience with suggested reading from the literature Russian classics and music accompaniment to match the mood. From table settings, to backyard gardens and pantry items, this book teaches you everything you need to know about Russian food."

    Inna Shtakser argues that radicalization involved an emotional transformation that enabled many young Jewish revolutionaries to develop an activist stance towards reality and a prioritization of feelings demanding action over others. Uncovering the links between emotion and activism holds a special significance in the context of modern Jewish history. When pogroms swept through the Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement during 190507, young Jews who had fled their communities years earlier, often after bitter conflicts with their families, returned to protect them. Never expecting to be accepted back, they arrived with new identities, forged in radical study circles and revolutionary experience, as activist, self-assertive Jews. The self-assertion that previously drove them away often made them more effective leaders than the traditional Jewish communal authorities.

    It includes poetry, prose, drama and scholarly texts, many of which appear in English translation for the first time. The three sections, -Rethinking Identities, - -'Little Terror' and Traumatic Writing, - and -Writing Politics, - address issues of critical relevance to contemporary Russian culture, history and politics. With its selection of texts and introductory essays 'Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader' brings university curricula into the twenty-first century.

    The essays in Nationalizing Empires want to overcome the strict dichotomy between empire and nation state that has dominated historiography for decades.

    Founded in the early eighteenth century by a Greek Archbishop from Alexandria in Egypt, the church was aided by the nascent Russian Empire of Tsar Peter the Great and joined by Englishmen finding in it the Apostolic faith. It became a key centre of Orthodox Church life for Western Europe and America until the Bolshevik revolution and ultimately proved to be a haven for the many refugees of that calamity. In turn it became a spiritual home for those who escaped the upheavals following World War II or who sought economic opportunities in the West after the fall of communism in Russia. For much of this time the parish was a focal point for Anglican-Orthodox relations and Orthodox missionary endeavours from Japan to the Americas.This is a history of the Orthodox Church in the West, of the Russian emigration to Europe, and of major world events through the prism of a particular local community. We become acquainted with the stories of an array of persons, from archbishops to members of Parliament and imperial diplomats to post-war refugees. Their lives and the constantly changing mosaic of global political and economic realities provide the background for the struggle to create and sustain the London church through time.

    Preobrazhensky as the most famous Soviet economist of the 1920s. English-language readers know him best as author of The New Economics and co-author (with N.I. Bukharin ) of The ABC of Communism.The documents in this volume, many newly discovered and almost all translated into English for the first time, reveal a Preobrazhensky previously unknown, whose interests ranged far beyond economics to include not only party debates and issues affecting the lives of workers and peasants, but also philosophy, world events, and Russian history, culture and politics. Including moments of triumph and tragedy, they tell an intimate story of political awakening and of commitment to socialist revolution as the path to human dignity.

    Operation Barbarossa. Hitler's armies advance into the Soviet Union to conquer Lebensraum in the East. Among the corps commanders is General Gotthard Heinrici, a career soldier, a highly decorated First World War veteran, who observed and recorded in his diary and letters the unprecedented harshness of the German conduct of the campaign. With remarkable candour he described his experiences at the front and the everyday lives of the troops under his command - and the appalling conditions in which the war was fought. In his writings he revealed his growing doubts about Hitler's strategy and his mounting concern as the Wehrmacht was implicated in war crimes and the first actions of the Holocaust. This selection from Heinrici's diaries and letters, edited and with a perceptive introduction by Johannes Hurter, gives a fascinating inside view of the fighting on the Eastern Front from a commander's perspective. It is also provides an unusual insight into the feelings, attitudes and acute anxieties of one of the Wehrmacht's most able generals in the midst of a brutal campaign.

    6, issue XI. In retrospect it is regarded as arguably the strongest political anti-serfdom statement in the Russian literature of its time.

      In the early twentieth century, Lilianna Lungina was a Russian Jew born to privilege, spending her childhood in Germany, France, and Palestine. But when she was thirteen, her parents moved to the USSR—where Lungina became witness to many of the era’s greatest upheavals.   Exiled during World War II, dragged to KGB headquarters to report on her friends, and subjected to her new country’s ruthless, systematic anti-Semitism, Lungina nonetheless carved out a career as a translator, introducing hundreds of thousands of Soviet readers to Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg, and, most famously, Astrid Lindgren. In the process, she found herself at the very center of Soviet cultural life, meeting and befriending Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, and many other major literary figures of the era. Her extraordinary memoir—at once heartfelt and unsentimental—is an unparalleled tribute to a lost world.

    It has never been told in full until now.General Alexander Orlov, Stalin's most loyal and trusted henchman during the Spanish Civil War, was also the Soviet handler controlling Kim Philby, the British spy, defector, and member of the notorious 'Cambridge Five'. Escaping Stalin's purges, Orlov fled to America in the late 1930s and livedunderground. He only dared reveal his identity to the world after Stalin's death, in his 1953 best-seller The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, after which he became perhaps the best known of all Soviet defectors, much written about, highly praised, and commemorated by the US Congress on his deathin 1973.But there is a twist in the Orlov story beyond the dreams of even the most ingenious spy novelist: General Alexander Orlov never actually existed. The man known as Orlov was in fact born Leiba Feldbin. And while he was a loyal servant of Stalin and the controller of Philby, he was never a General inthe KGB, never truly defected to the West after his flight from the USSR, and remained a loyal Soviet agent until his death. The Orlov story as it has been accepted until now was largely the invention of the KGB - and one perpetuated long after the end of the Cold War.In this meticulous new biography, Boris Volodarsky, himself a former Soviet intelligence officer, now tells the true story behind Orlov for the first time. An intriguing tale of Russian espionage and deception, stretching from the time of Lenin to the Putin era, this is a story that will sendshockwaves through the world's intelligence agencies.

    This book examines the events that led to Soviet control and the dramatic and sometimes harrowing political, economic, and social changes that Ukrainian people have experiencedboth during the Soviet era and since the Soviet collapse.

    Furthermore, it addresses key topics such as the geopolitical significance of the Arctic and the importance of oil and gas resources in the Arctic. The book also investigates what the main characteristics of governance in the Arctic are, and how institutions and regimes can promote stability and security in the region. The volume maintains two layers of focus. The first relates to the dynamics within the Arctic and the second to developments outside the region, highlighting that we cannot understand the Arctic in isolation from global developments such as energy markets, security conflicts and NATO-Russian antagonism.This book will be of much interest to students of Arctic politics, security studies, geopolitics, Russian and Scandinavian politics, and international relations in general.

    Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning public things in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects--rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics--should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation.Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing the public through the reform of property rights.

    The book is based on the concepts of constructivism and orientalism in international relations to analyse the policies of the Russian Federation, whilst highlighting that Russian foreign policy is complex phenomenon constructed from internal as well as external developments, perceptions and expectations.

    It offers a unique and detailed picture of the nature of Russian “autocracy”, life at the tsar’s court, social mores of the nobles and commoners, military affairs, diplomatic relations, etc.. The book is a veritable ethnographic encyclopedia of early Russian life.

    

    Although Russia was the site of some of the last century's most radical upheavals, and although Russian governments are usually characterized by autocracy, corruption, and political decay, the central government has retained a remarkable hold on the vast country. Does its historical progress represent change, or continuity? How has the political culture molded the expectations and behavior of the Russian people over time? What features of the Russian state are the keys to understanding it? The Strong State in Russia provides a succinct account of Russia's "strong state" model by reviewing the external and internal contexts in each major period and tracing its evolution over time. Every era saw the emergence and growth of a strong state as well as a subsequent decline, but in each the contexts combined in unique ways to produce very different political outcomes. Tsygankov argues that while the Western perspective on Russia is limited, there is an alternative way of thinking about the nation and its problems. Despite focusing on the contemporary Russian state, the book situates it in a broader historical continuity and explains that the roots of its development can be found in the Tsar's autocratic system. Russia's strong state has evolved and survived throughout centuries, and that alone suggests its historical vitality and possible future revival. From this perspective, the central scholarly question is not whether Russia will recreate a strong state, but, rather, what kind of a strong state it will be, and under which circumstances it will likely function.

    The story follows the changing functions, organization, and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and it provides documented detail about how Stalin used these organs to achieve and maintain undisputed power. Although written as a narrative, it includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.

    Through charisma and cunning, Thomas emigrated to Europe, where his acquired skills as a multilingual maitre d'htel allowed him to travel from London to Monte Carlo before settling in Moscow in the glorious days before the 1917 Revolution. There Thomas became a rich and respected nightclub impresario, opening a lavish nightclub called Maxim.With evocative backdrops in Moscow and later in Odessa and Constantinople, where Thomas rebuilt his life after the revolution, THE BLACK RUSSIAN is an inspiring story of personal reinvention set in one of history's richest periods.

    These wars were the culmination of the Prussian struggle against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815, which occupied a key position in German national historiography and memory. Although these conflicts have been analyzed in thousands of books and articles, much of the focus has been on the military campaigns and alliances. Karen Hagemann argues that we cannot achieve a comprehensive understanding of these wars and their importance in collective memory without recognizing how the interaction of politics, culture, and gender influenced these historical events and continue to shape later recollections of them. She thus explores the highly contested discourses and symbolic practices by which individuals and groups interpreted these wars and made political claims, beginning with the period itself and ending with the centenary in 1913.

    How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared"Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains oppression to the ones born free. Deftly modulating language, imagery, and events of past and present, comfort and tyranny, atrocity and family, home and war, Leningrad and Edmonton, she touches readers emotionally, drawing them into the journey. This authentic account of Russian-Jewish immigration to Canada during the Cold War will speak to all who have left their country or who moved far away from home.