To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of “late socialism” (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

    In Colossus Reborn he recounts the miraculous resurrection of the Red Army, which, with a dazzling display of military strategy and operational prowess, stopped the Wehrmacht in its tracks and turned the tide of war.A major achievement in the recovery and preservation of an entire nation's military experience, Colossus Reborn is marked by Glantz's unrivaled access to and use of Soviet archival sources. This allows him to illuminate not only Russian victories in the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, but also to rescue a host of major forgotten battles, many of which had been suppressed to preserve reputations and national pride. As he reveals in unprecedented detail, disastrous defeats vied with resounding victories throughout the early years of the conflict, as the Red Army struggled to find itself in the Great Patriotic War.Beyond the battles themselves, Glantz also presents an in-depth portrait of the Red Army as an evolving military institution. Assessing more clearly than ever before the army's size, strength, and force structure, he provides keen insights into its doctrine, strategy, tactics, weaponry, training, officer corps, and political leadership. In the process, he puts a human face on the Red Army's commanders and soldiers, including women and those who served in units--security (NKVD), engineer, railroad, auto-transport, construction, and penal forces--that have till now remained poorly understood.The world's top authority on the Soviet military, Glantz has produced a remarkable study that adds immeasurably to our understanding of the one part of World War II that's still struggling to emerge from the shadows of history.

    In a Europe remade by the First World War, his talents led him to different roles—intelligence operative, powerful statesman, underground activist, lifelong conspirator. Henryk Józewski directed Polish intelligence in Ukraine, governed the borderland region of Volhynia in the interwar years, worked in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground during the Second World War, and conspired against Poland’s Stalinists until his arrest in 1953. His personal story, important in its own right, sheds new light on the foundations of Soviet power and on the ideals of those who resisted it. By following the arc of Józewski’s life, this book demonstrates that his tolerant policies toward Ukrainians in Volhynia were part of Poland’s plans to roll back the communist threat.The book mines archival materials, many available only since the fall of communism, to rescue Józewski, his Polish milieu, and his Ukrainian dream from oblivion. An epilogue connects his legacy to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    I. Lenin at the Third Congress of the Communist International Willi Munzenberg Lenin and We Fritz Platten Lenin's Return Otto Grimlund On the Way to the Homeland Hugo Sillen Meetings with Lenin Kustaa Rovio How Lenin Was Hiding in the House of the Helsingfors Chief of Police John Reed Plunging Ahead Albert Rhys Williams Lenin-the Man and His Work Louise Bryant (Reed) My Acquaintance with Lenin Mihai Bujor Recollections of Meetings with Lenin Adam Egede-Nissen With Lenin in Smolny Robert Minor We Have Met Lenin Helena Bobinska Lenin in the Red Warsaw Regiment Laszlo Rudas Meeting with Lenin William T. Goode Lenin Isaac McBride In the Name of Emancipating Mankind Ivan Olbracht My Reminiscences of V. I. Lenin Bohumir Smeral From My Diary Antonin Zapotocky Reminiscences of Lenin Memory of Lenin William Gallacher Lenin Leader, Teacher and Friend Memorable Meetings Herbert G. Wells The Kremlin Dreamer A Truly Great Man Clare Sheridan Naked Truth Mirza Muhammed Yaftali Russia on the Road to Progress Thomas Bell Remembrances of Lenin Umberto Terracini Three Meetings with Lenin Paul Vaillant-Couturier Lenin William Z. Foster At Comintern Congresses Fritz Heckert "Well, Comrade Heckert, Tell Us About Your Heroic Exploits in Central Germany " Harry Pollitt Lenin and the British Labour Movement Tsui Tsu-Bo Lenin Manuel Diaz Ramirez Talk with Lenin in 1921 Wilhelm Pieck Reminiscences of Lenin Balingiin Tserendorzh Sacred Memory Sen Katayama With Comrade Lenin Walter Ulbricht Lenin-Friend of the GermanPeople Gaston Monmousseau Lenin and the French Trade-Union Movement He Looked Way Ahead Pierre Semard Talk with Lenin During the Second Congress of the Trade-Union International Martin Andersen Nexo I Saw Lenin Lenin's Influence on the Creative Forces of the West Brief Biographies of the Authors

    Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades, wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925. Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by examining objects produced by Constructivist artists between 1923 and 1925: Vladimir Tatlin's prototype designs for pots and pans and other everyday objects, Liubov' Popova's and Varvara Stepanova's fashion designs and textiles, Rodchenko's packaging and advertisements for state-owned businesses (made in collaboration with revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky), and Rodchenko's famous design for the interior of a workers' club. These artists, heeding the call of Constructivist manifestos to abandon the nonobjective painting and sculpture of the early Russian avant-garde and enter into Soviet industrial production, aimed to work as artist-engineers to produce useful objects for everyday life in the new socialist collective.Kiaer shows how these artists elaborated on the theory of the socialist object-as-comrade in the practice of their art. They broke with the traditional model of the autonomous avant-garde, Kiaer argues, in order to participate more fully in the political project of the Soviet state. She analyzes Constructivism's attempt to develop modernist forms to forge a new comradely relationship between human subjects and the mass-produced objects of modernity; Constructivists could imagine no possessions (as John Lennon's song puts it) not by eliminating material objects but by eliminating the possessive relation to them. Considering such Constructivist objects as flapper dresses and cookie advertisements, Kiaer creates a dialogue between the more famous avant-garde works of these artists and their quirkier, less appreciated utilitarian objects. Working in the still semicapitalist Russia of the New Economic Policy, these artists were imagining, by creating their comradely objects, a socialist culture that had not yet arrived.

    The eminent historian Leopold Haimson examines these radical shifts in political power and class identity in late Imperial Russia, offering new perspectives on crucial revolutionary figures and the events leading up to the Russian Revolution. The book focuses on two pivotal, interrelated developments: the last massive wave of labor unrest before World War I and the growing differences between two political figures, Lenin, the future head of the Soviet Union, and Iulii Martov, the leader of the democratic opposition to Bolshevism within Russian Social Democracy.Inspired by the 1912 massacre of two hundred striking miners in the gold fields of Lena, in eastern Siberia, the Russian working class crystallized as a self-aware and politically engaged movement in pursuit of its own rights and dignity. This new sense of class solidarity spread to industrial urban workers, who asserted their demands for better working conditions and became increasingly skeptical of outside groups using them for their own political gain. As Haimson demonstrates, both the Duma (Russia's parliament) and the revolutionary intelligentsia struggled to find an appropriate response to these developments.Drawing on publications and the private papers of Martov and Lenin, Haimson analyzes the differences between the revolutionaries regarding the realization of political goals and the role of the working class. He demonstrates how ideology and personal proclivities framed their actions as the revolutionary tide mounted. Thus, while Martov believed that the revolution should be allowed to create itself under the democratic guidance and leadership of workers, Lenin saw the state and political power as the key to historical transformation.

    Male and female workers in one of Russia's oldest, largest, and "reddest" manufacturing centers--the textile plants of the Ivanovo Industrial Region--actively resisted Stalinist policies that consigned them to poverty, illness, and hunger.In April 1932, 20,000 mill workers across the region participated in a wave of strikes. Seeing the event as a rebuke to his leadership, Stalin dispatched Lazar Kaganovich to quash the rebellion, resulting in bloodshed and repression. Moscow was forced to respond to the crisis on the nation's shop floors with a series of important reforms.Rossman uncovers a new dimension to the relationship between the Soviet leadership and working class and makes an important contribution to the debate about the nature of resistance to the Stalinist regime.

    Its contents include key documents relating to the every-day lives of the Red Army's soldiers, a full roster of the senior command cadre during wartime, a description of the army's weaponry and equipment, and an exhaustively detailed listing of the Red Army's and NKVD's order of battle at six crucial points from June 22, 1941, through December 31, 1943.

    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."