A picture is also given of political conditions in Russia during the reign of the last Romanovs. The story is illustrated with the magnificent coronation costumes and regalia designed by Faberge, personal objects relating to the family lives of Nicholas and Alexandra, and icons and religious objects demonstrating the role of Church and State during this period.

    Alexander II was Russia's Lincoln -- he freed the serfs, promised a new, more liberal state for everyone, yet was brought down by a determined group of terrorist anarchists who tried to kill him six times before finally, fatefully, succeeding. His story proves the timeless lesson that in Russia, it is dangerous to start reforms, but even more dangerous to stop them. It also shows that the traps and dangers encountered in today's war on terrorists were there 150 years ago.

    They were the men and women of the Red Army, a ragtag mass of soldiers who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. Sixty years have passed since their epic triumph, but the heart and mind of Ivan -- as the ordinary Russian soldier was called -- remain a mystery. We know something about hoe the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought.Drawing on previously closed military and secret police archives, interviews with veterans, and private letters and diaries, Catherine Merridale presents the first comprehensive history of the Soviet Union Army rank and file. She follows the soldiers from the shock of the German invasion to their costly triumph in Stalingrad, where life expectancy was often a mere twenty-four hours. Through the soldiers' eyes, we witness their victorious arrival in Berlin, where their rage and suffering exact an awful toll, and accompany them as they return home full of hope, only to be denied the new life they had been fighting to secure.A tour de force of original research and a gripping history, Ivan's War reveals the singular mixture of courage, patriotism, anger, and fear that made it possible for these underfed, badly led troops to defeat the Nazi army. In the process Merridale restores to history the invisible millions who sacrificed the most to win the war.

    After the 1917 revolution, this view was discredited by many leading scholars, politicians, and cultural figures, but none were more intimately involved in the dismantling of the old imperial identity and its historical narrative than the eminent Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934).Hrushevsky took an active part in the work of Ukrainian scholarly, cultural, and political organizations and became the first head of the independent Ukrainian state in 1918. Serhii Plokhy's "Unmaking Imperial Russia" examines Hrushevsky's construction of a new historical paradigm that brought about the nationalization of the Ukrainian past and established Ukrainian history as a separate field of study. By showing how the 'all-Russian' historical paradigm was challenged by the Ukrainian national project, Plokhy provides the indispensable background for understanding the current state of relations between Ukraine and Russia.

    Kevin Murphy’s writing, based on exhaustive research, is the most thorough investigation to date on working-class life during the revolutionary era, reviving the memory of the incredible gains for liberty and equality that the 1917 revolution brought about.

    Sophisticated yet untamed, lively but dangerous, Russia's warm water port for trade flirted coquettishly with the West. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the city had become a volatile modern metropolis with an ethnically diverse population and a growing middle class. Known as the little Paris of the tsarist empire, Odessa was distinctly un-Russian in manner and disposition and strikingly unlike other imperial cities. Tales of Old Odessa reveals the inner life of this remarkable city in the years before World War I from the perspective of the people who lived there. How did Odessans understand the city and their place in it? What cultural influences flavored their sensibilities and shaped their communities? What did modernization mean in Odessa?

    This book publishes for the first time ever KGB files on Sakharov that became available during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. The documents reveal the untold story of KGB surveillance of Sakharov from 1968 until his death in 1989 and of the regime’s efforts to intimidate and silence him. The disturbing archival materials show the KGB to have had a profound lack of understanding of the spiritual and moral nature of the human rights movement and of Sakharov’s role as one of its leading figures.

    Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

    Rising out of revolutionary-era citizen militias, it aspired to the greatness needed to confront its Cold War adversaries but was woefully unprepared to change with the times. In this first comprehensive study of the Soviet officer corps, Roger Reese traces the history of the Red Army from Civil War triumph through near-decimation in World War II and demoralizing quagmire in Afghanistan to the close scrutiny it came under during Gorbachev's reform era. Reese takes readers inside the Red Army to reconstruct the social and institutional dynamics that shaped its leadership and effectiveness over seventy-three years. He depicts the lives of these officers by revealing their class origins, life experiences, party loyalty, and attitudes toward professionalism. He tells how these men were shaped by Russian culture and Soviet politics--and how the Communist Party dominated every aspect of their careers but never allowed them the autonomy they needed to cultivate a high level of military effectiveness. Despite its struggle to develop and maintain professionalism, the officer corps was often hampered by factors inextricably intertwined with the Soviet state: Marxist theory, revolutionary ideology, friction between party and non-party members, and the influence of the army's political administration organs. Reese shows that by rejecting the Western bourgeois model of military professionalism the state greatly limited its officer corps' ability to develop a more effective military. While a sense of group identity emerged among officers after World War II, it quickly lost relevance in the face of postwar challenges, especially the war in Afghanistan, which underscored fatal flaws in command leadership. "Red Commanders" offers new insight into the workings of a military giant and also restores Leon Trotsky to his rightful place in Soviet military history by featuring his ideas on building a new army from the ground up. It is an important look behind the scenes at a military establishment that continues to face leadership challenges in Russia today.

    From the mid-1930s until its forced demise in the mid-1990s, the studio had produced more than 1,500 films. Yeltsin felt it important that Soiuzmul'tfil'm be restored to its former glory, and even proposed keeping its original name, a nationally famous acronym made from the three Russian words for "union" (soiuz), "animation" (mul'tiplikatsiia) and "film" (fil'm). But the union referred to had vanished in 1991. Was reviving the studio a nostalgic paean to communism?" David MacFadyen reveals that Soiuzmul'tfil'm, upon reopening, continued doing what it had since its inception in 1936, when it was the only Russian studio able to take cartoons from sketchbook to the silver screen. In a historical and theoretical reassessment of animated cinema in Russia since World War Two, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges examines a large number of Soviet cartoons to decipher what about them allowed them to survive under communism and continue to survive with equal success under capitalism.

    Drawing on original archival materials and theoretically informed, the essays in this volume examine ways in which Soviet citizens sought to align their private lives with the public nature of Soviet experience by taking the Revolution "inside." Topics discussed include the new sexuality, family loyalty during the Terror, the advertisement of Soviet commodities, the employment of domestic servants, children's toys and Pioneer camps, and narratives of self, ranging from diaries to secret police statements to monologues on the Soviet screen and stage. Bringing into dialogue essays by scholars in history, literature, sociology, art history, and film studies, this interdisciplinary volume contributes to the growing understanding of the Soviet Union as part of the history of modernity, rather than its totalitarian "other."

    It became the first of a series of bloody landmarks that would come to define Stalinism. This revelatory book presents—with analysis and commentary—the most important primary Soviet documents dealing with the brutal economic and cultural subjugation of the Russian peasantry. Drawn from previously unavailable and in many cases unknown archives, these harrowing documents provide the first unimpeded view of the experience of the peasantry during the years 1927-1930.The book, the first of four in the series, covers the background of collectivization, its violent implementation, and the mass peasant revolt that ensued. For its insights into the horrific fate of the Russian peasantry and into Stalin’s dictatorship, The War Against the Peasantry takes its place an as unparalleled resource.