She was betrothed to Tsarevitch Nicholas of Russia, a love match on both sides, but tragically he died months before the wedding. A year later, out of duty she married his brother the new Tsarevich and sailed for Russia in 1866.

    This is the first complete edition of their letters and telegrams, plus English translations of the few telegrams in Russian. We see in these pages the enormous love the couple shared against the backdrop of a bloody war and the approaching end of the Russian empire. Alexandra offers extensive commentary on hospitals and the wounded (she was a volunteer nurse). Nicholas II reports on the military and the war effort. The growing influence of Rasputin is also thoroughly documented in these texts. The reader sees in detail the crises that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the tsarist regime. Important for all students of late Imperial Russia and World War I, and essential for those interested in the Romanovs.

    

    That he did so with genuine appreciation and Fondness, and with the methodical diligence of an accountant, is evident in his record -- having carefully numbered the more than 300 pieces (some of which were one-of-a-kind creations by Faberge or Cartier), he painted a miniature watercolor of each item. This exquisite album, re-discovered in the archives of the Kremlin Museums in Moscow, is reproduced here as a facsimile for the first time, and accompanied by unpublished private photos of the Russian Imperial Family. As Alexander yon Solodkoff notes in his introduction, these photographs "as opposed to the large quantity of stiff official portraits...show the personality and the private life of the Tsar and those who were close to him."

    The specific focus is the Terek Cossacks, frontier settlers along the Terek river who became servants of the Russian state, warriors, and occasionally soldiers for (and deserters from) the Russian imperial armies. Barrett reconsiders Cossack history with an eye for its relation to the policies and reality of pre-Soviet Russian imperialism. The rich historiography of the American frontier informs this re-evaluation—the Cossack interaction with native peoples and the formation of a unique frontier society closely mirror the contemporary borderland settlements in the American West. But Barrett presents Russian colonization as a fluid mixing of cultures rather than a cut-and dried military conquest, as it has previously been presented in ideology-laden histories of the Soviet Union. This opens up new ways in which to consider the myths and perceptions of historic Russian nationalism and its relation to state formation and ethnic identity in the Caucasus and post-Soviet Russia today.

    The author introduces each source in this volume fully and provides commentary and analysis.Using eye-witness accounts, official documents and new materials which have just come to light, Richard Sakwa gives an historical overview of the Soviet Union from the revolution of 1906 to the fall of the regime.

    With his usual wit and engaging style, Skirda chronicles the life of a legend and the insurgent army that fought in his name. Always controversial, Makhno has been described as everything from a drunken bandit to an inspirational hero. From Makhno’s imprisonment, to battles with the Bolsheviks and the White Army, to the final exile in Paris, Skirda captures the life of Makhno and the history of the Makhnovist movement.Alexandre Skirda is the foremost anarchist theorist and activist writing in Europe today.

    The Spectre, modernity's belief in salvation by revolutionary ideology, haunts them. Alice's looking glass greets us at this turn and that. Throughout, Martin Malia's inspired use of these devices aptly conveys the surreality of the whole Soviet Russian phenomenon and the West's unbalanced perception of it. He shows us the usually distorted images and stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia since the eighteenth century. And once these emerge as projections of the West's own internal anxieties, he shifts his focus to the institutional structures and cultural forms Russia shares with her neighbors.Here modern Europe is depicted as an East-West cultural gradient in which the central and eastern portions respond to the Atlantic West's challenge in delayed and generally skewed fashion. Thus Russia, after two centuries of building then painfully liberalizing its Old Regime, in 1917 tried to leap to a socialism that would be more advanced and democratic than European capitalism. The result was a cruel caricature of European civilization, which mesmerized and polarized the West for most of this century. As the old East-West gradient reappears in genuinely modern guise, this brilliantly imaginative work shows us the reality that has for so long tantalized--and eluded--Western eyes.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    A People Apart is the first study to examine the role played by the Jews themselves, across the whole of Europe, during the century and a half leading up to these momentous events. David Vital explores the Jews' troubled relationship with Europe, documenting the struggles of this 'nation without a territory' to establish a place for itself within an increasingly polarized and nationalist continent. This powerful new analysis represents a watershed in our understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe, and as a result, in the whole history of the continent.

    

    Designed to dislodge the German Army from its position west of Moscow, Mars cost the Soviets an estimated 335,000 dead, missing, and wounded men and over 1,600 tanks. But in Russian history books, it was a battle that never happened. It became instead another victim of Stalin's postwar censorship.David Glantz now offers the first definitive account of this forgotten catastrophe, revealing the key players and detailing the major events of Operation Mars. Using neglected sources in both German and Russian archives, he reconstructs the historical context of Mars and reviews the entire operation from High Command to platoon level.Orchestrated and led by Marshal Georgy Kostantinovich Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's great military heroes, the twin operations Mars and Uranus formed the centerpiece of Soviet strategic efforts in the fall of 1942. Launched in tandem with Operation Uranus, the successful counteroffensive at Stalingrad, Mars proved a monumental setback. Fought in bad weather and on impossible terrain, the ambitious offensive faltered (despite spectacular initial success in some sectors). Zhukov kept sending in more troops and tanks only to see them decimated by the entrenched Germans.Illuminating the painful progress of Operation Mars with vivid battle scenes and numerous maps and illustrations, Glantz presents Mars as a major failure of Zhukov's renowned command. Yet, both during and after the war, that failure was masked from public view by the successful Stalingrad operation, thus eliminating any stain from Zhukov's public image as a hero of the Great PatrioticWar.For three grueling weeks, Operation Mars was one of the most tragic and agonizing episodes in Soviet military history. Glantz's reconstruction of that failed offensive fills a major gap in our knowledge of World War II, even as it raises important questions about the reputations of national military heroes.

    This biographical companion covers Stalin's life and political career from 1879 to 1953, and in particular describes the more personal side of the man who orchestrated the Great Terror of the 1930s and constructed the Soviet monolith.

    Until now his experiments with photography, photomontage, and graphic and exhibition designs in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s have not been documented and thoroughly analyzed. This book explores both the political and aesthetic aspects of Lissitzky's late multimedia work from his designs for the Abstract cabinet to his death in 1941.The author and the two contributors give special attention to Lissitzky's intense collaboration first with German and then with Soviet photographers, designers, and filmmakers, and they discuss how his various personal friendships and acquaintances influenced the directions he took in photography and design. The book presents photographic works by Lissitzky's and these other artists as well as some of Lissitzky's early non-objective art that foreshadows his experiments in figurative art. It also includes Lissitzky's correspondence with his Western colleagues and his wife Sophie Kueppers.

    At first, socialists and economists took Mises's argument seriously, but by the end of the Second World War, a consensus prevailed that Mises had been discredited. More recently, that consensus has been rapidly reversed: it is now widely agreed that 'Mises was right'. Yet the momentous implications of the Mises argument - for economics, politics, culture, and philosophy - remain largely unexplored. From Marx to Mises is a clear, penetrating exposition of the economic calculation debate, and a scrutiny of some of the broader issues it raises.

    

    Using recent theoretical and empirical advances in Anglo-American research, Dr Pallot examines how peasants throughout Russia received, interpreted, and acted upon the government's attempts to persuade them to quit the commune and set up independent farms. She shows how a majority of peasants failed to interpret the Reform in the way its authors had expected, with outcomes that varied both temporally and geographically. The result challenges existing texts which either concentrate on the policy side of the Reform or, if they engage with its results, use aggregated, official statistics which, this text argues, are unreliable indicators of the pre-revolutionary peasants reception of the Reform.

    In time, this new generation of officers projected their characteristic notions onto the state and onto autocracy itself; professional concern for the security of the state eclipsed traditional unquestioning loyalty to the regime. Rich goes on to show how divergence between diplomatic and military aims among those responsible for making strategy cost the state dearly in terms of economic stability and international standing.The author supports his findings with original research in Russian foreign policy and military archives and wide reading in published sources. The Tsar's Colonels contributes to a number of debates in Russian military and social history and offers new insights on the structural roots of the Great War, and on the theoretical problems of modernization and professionalization.

    And after Russia, it is the largest and most important of the post-Soviet states. Yet it is a country about which most westerners know very little, subsumed as it was for decades beneath the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Ukrainian Politics and Society is the first comprehensive study of politics in post-Soviet Ukraine, and is therefore vital reading for anyone concerned with European security, or with politics in the former Soviet Union.The authors’ extensive experience in Ukraine allows them to explain the paradoxes of Ukrainian politics that have led to so many false predictions concerning the future of the Ukrainian state. Their examination of nationality politics shows why ethnic and regional differences have tended to recede rather than to spin out of control, as they have elsewhere in the region. At the same time, these differences hamstring the country’s political system, and the authors show how difficult a task it is for democratic institutions to provide effective government in a country with little consensus. By viewing economic reform in its profoundly political context, the authors expose the chasm between the theory and practice of economic reform. Understanding of how to make profits has not been lacking, but government regulation to ensure that profit-seeking behavior leads to functioning markets has been conspicuously absent.By examining in detail how Ukrainian politics has followed theoretical expectations and where it has contradicted them, the authors arrive at conclusions with implications well beyond Ukraine. Ukraine must first build a state and a nation before it can successfully reform its economy or build a genuine democracy. For Ukraine and its people, the task is daunting. For the west, whose security increasingly relies on stability in Ukraine, this book provides the knowledge necessary to approach the problem, as well as good reason not to ignore it.

    Only if you are not typical -- if your choose to be a "weed that floats upstream" -- you may want to know the secret by which Russian Christianity survived through a thousand years of suffering.

    This thought-provoking volume includes more than 200 photographs, all, says author Leah Bendavid-Val, "generated by governments for causes that were shared by the photographers who took the pictures, the authorities who funded them, and the publishers who disseminated them." These photographs all offer impactive realism, but it is "mingled [with] romance...in varying ways and degrees."

    It challenges both the Russian cult of the Great Patriotic Struggle and the distorted Western version created during the Cold War, arguing that the clash was caused by the struggle for the mastery of Europe.