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'Close to a miracle... The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is an immensely readable overview of the entire history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, full of anecdotes and lively detail, but also meeting the highest academic standards'Slavoj ŽižekThe U.S.S.R. A nation that arrived in the world accidentally, and departed unexpectedly. Over a century after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. From revolution and Lenin to Stalin's Terror, from World War II to glasnost, this is an authoritative distillation of 75 years of communist rule, and the disintegration of an empire.Fitzpatrick charts the fate of countries often left out of Soviet histories, gives vivid portraits of key figures, and traces the aftermath of the regime's sudden collapse. She explores the rise of the oligarchs, the rebirth of the Church and the enigmatic figure of Vladimir Putin: a Soviet creation but no Soviet nostalgic. Lastly, she considers the future of Communism. Who still worships Marx and Lenin? What lessons has today's superpower, China, learned from yesterday's Soviet failure?

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale—the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history's most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society.This book is a lively and authoritative distillation of this complex history, told with vivid details, a grand sweep, and wry wit. The acclaimed historian Sheila Fitzpatrick chronicles the Soviet Age—its rise, reign, and unexpected fall, as well as its afterlife in today's Russia. She underscores the many ironies of the Soviet experience: An ideology that claimed to offer humanity the reins of history wrangled with contingency. An avowedly internationalist and anti-imperialist state birthed an array of nationalisms. And a vision of transcending economic and social inequality and injustice gave rise to a country that was, in its way, surprisingly normal.Moving seamlessly from Lenin to Stalin to Gorbachev to Putin, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union provides an indispensable guide to one of the twentieth century's great powers and the enduring fascination it still exerts.

The history of the Soviet Union has been charted in several studies over the decades. These depictions while combining accuracy, elegance, readability and imaginativeness, have failed to draw attention to the political and academic environment within which these histories were composed. Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work is aimed at understanding this environment. The book seeks to identify the significant hallmarks of the production of Soviet history by Soviet as well as Western historians. It traces how the Russian Revolution of 1917 triggered a shift in official policy towards historians and the publication of history textbooks for schools. In 1985, the Soviet past was again summoned for polemical revision as part and parcel of an attitude of openness (glasnost') and in this, literary figures joined their energies to those of historians. The Communist regime sought to equate the history of the country with that of the Communist Party itself in 1938 and 1962 and this imposed a blanket of conformity on history writing in the Soviet Union. The book also surveys the rich abundance of writing the Russian Revolution generated as well as the divergent approaches to the history of the period. The conditions for research in Soviet archives are described as an aspect of official monitoring of history writing. Another instance of this is the manner by which history textbooks have, through the years, been withdrawn from schools and others officially nursed into circulation. This intervention, occasioned in the present circumstance by statements by President Putin himself, in the manner in which history is taught in Russian schools, continues to this day. In other words, over the years, the regime has always worked to make the past work.Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka

The Military History of the Soviet Union and The Military History of Tsarist Russia treat Russian military history from the rise of the Muscovite state to the present, even peeking briefly into the future. The two volumes will cover Russia's land forces extensively, but will also cover the development of the Russian Navy, and the creation and development of the Russian Air Force, parts of the Russian military machine which are frequently neglected in general writings. The historical analysis will address the development and function of the Russian military whether in peace or in war, as well as the impact of war and changes in the military upon Russian society and politics.

Previous ed.: 1999.

This volume provides an introduction to the history of the Soviet armed forces from 1917 to 1991. The authors highlight the many facets of the Cold War, including the rise of the Soviet Navy after the Great Patriotic War and the collapse of the Soviet Union which marks its twentieth anniversary in 2011.

Certain aspects of American popular culture had a formative influence on early Soviet identity and aspirations. Traditionally, Soviet Russia and the United States between the 1920s and the 1940s are regarded as polar opposites on nearly every front. Yet American films and translated adventure fiction were warmly received in 1920s Russia and partly shaped ideals of the New Soviet Person into the 1940s. Cinema was crucial in propagating this new social hero. While open admiration of American film stars and heroes of literary fiction in the Soviet press was restricted from the late 1920s onwards, many positive heroes of Soviet Socialist Realist films in the 1930s and 1940s were partially a product of Soviet Americanism of the previous decade. Some of the new Soviet heroes in films of the 1930s and 1940s possessed traits noticeably evocative of the previously popular American film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Pearl White and Mary Pickford. Others cinematically represented the contemporary trope of the'Russian American,'an ideal worker exemplifying the Stalinist marriage of'Russian revolutionary sweep'with'American efficiency.'Russian Americans'in Soviet Film analyses the content, reception and underlying influences of over 60 Soviet and American films, the book explores new territory in Soviet cinema and Soviet-American cultural relations. It presents groundbreaking archival research encompassing Soviet audience surveys, Soviet film journals and reviews, memoirs and articles by Soviet filmmakers, and scripts, among other sources. The book reveals that values of optimism, technological skill, efficiency and self-reliance - perceived as quintessentially American - were incorporated into new Soviet ideals through channels of cross-cultural dissemination, resulting in cultural synthesis.

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence of musicians in the cultural elite? This is one of the questions that Kiril Tomoff seeks to answer in Creative Union, the first book about any of the professional unions that dominated Soviet cultural life at the time. Drawing on hitherto untapped archives, he shows how the Union of Soviet Composers established control over the music profession and negotiated the relationship between composers and the Communist Party leadership. Central to Tomoff's argument is the institutional authority and prestige that the musical profession accrued and deployed within Soviet society, enabling musicians to withstand the postwar disciplinary campaigns that were so crippling in other artistic and literary spheres.Most accounts of Soviet musical life focus on famous individuals or the campaign against Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth and Zhdanov's postwar attack on musical formalism. Tomoff's approach, while not downplaying these notorious events, shows that the Union was able to develop and direct a musical profession that enjoyed enormous social prestige. The Union's leadership was able to use its expertise to determine the criteria of musical value with a degree of independence. Tomoff's book reveals the complex and mutable interaction of creative intelligentsia and political elite in a period hitherto characterized as one of totalitarian control.

After the entry of the Red Army into Czechoslovak territory in 1945, Red Army authorities began to arrest and deport Czechoslovak citizens to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The regions most affected were Eastern and South Slovakia and Prague. The Czechoslovak authorities repeatedly requested a halt to the deportations and that the deported Czechoslovaks be returned immediately. It took a long time before these protests generated any response. Czechoslovak Diplomacy and the Gulag focuses on the diplomatic and political aspects of the deportations. The author explains the steps taken by the Czechoslovak Government in the repatriation agenda from 1945 to 1953 and reconstructs the negotiations with the Soviets. The research tries to answer the question of why and how the Russians deported the civilian population from Czechoslovakia which was their allied country already during the war. Key words: 1. World War, 1939–1945—Deportations from Czechoslovakia. 2. Forced labor—Soviet Union—History. 3. Labor camps—Soviet Union—History. 4. Czechs—Soviet Union—History. 5. Slovaks—Soviet Union—History. 6. Czechoslovakia—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 7. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—Czechoslovakia. 8. Czechoslovakia—Foreign relations—1945–1992. 9. Repatriation—Czechoslovakia—History.

This is a translated autobiography of applied mathematician N. N. Moiseev, providing an insider's view of the history of the Soviet Union from its founding in 1917 to its collapse in 1991, as well as a little of the aftermath.We see vividly the precariousness of life just after the October Revolution; his happy family life during the years 1921-28 of Lenin's New Economic Policy; the subsequent destruction of his family by Stalin's regime; his trials as a social outcast; his student days at Moscow State University; his experiences as a Soviet Air Force Engineer in World War II, including sorties as a gunner and a brush with an NKVD agent; post-war euphoria, marriage, and another round of ostracism; and then the vicissitudes of a highly varied academic career. Here we meet many famous Soviet and Western engineers and scientists. The last several chapters are devoted more to wide-ranging reflections on God, philosophy, science, communism, modelling the biosphere, and the threat ofnuclear winter. His thoughts concerning the impending and then final collapse of the USSR, as well as hopes for Russia's future, conclude the journey through Moiseev's life.

‘History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.'One day in 1988, an enigmatic priest knocks on Pieter Waterdrinker's door with an unusual request: will he smuggle seven-thousand bibles into the Soviet Union. Pieter agrees, and soon finds himself living in the midst of one of the biggest social and cultural revolutions of our time, working as a tour operator... with a sideline in contraband. Thirty years later, from his apartment on Tchaikovsky Street in Saint Petersburg, where he lives with his Russian wife and three cats, Pieter reflects on his personal history in the Soviet Union, as well as the century of revolutions that took place in and around his street. A master storyteller, he blends history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature, and love.

An authoritative account of Stalin as a wartime leader—showing how his paradoxical policies of mass mobilization and repression affected all aspects of Soviet society The Second World War was the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. With Stalin at the helm, it emerged victorious at a huge economic and human cost. But even before the fighting had ended, Stalin began to turn against the architects of success. In this original and comprehensive study, Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership cultivated a legacy that was to burden the Soviet Union and Russia to the present day.

'Masterfully told and compellingly reinterpreted.'The Moscow TimesStalinism at War tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two. Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens – Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime – to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan. In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949.

The final page in the political history of the Soviet Union was turned on March 19, 2019, when Nursultan Nazarbayev, the last former Chairman of a Soviet Republic who had managed to stay in power following the collapse of USSR, unexpectedly decided to resign. This edited book looks to analyse the political aspects of this event more specifically by trying to understand its political significance for the country's policies, the prospects of democratisation, the uniqueness of the transition compared with others that have previously occurred in the region and how it may play an influential part in future political transitions in this part of the world. This book will interest scholars of authoritarian politics, scholars of Central Asia, and those researching the Belt and Road Initiative.

Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism.Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.

Tracking the degeneration of the Russian RevolutionRed Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism.Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.

History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a'backwards'nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march towards the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state. In the process, they also recovered knowledge about the past that the Soviet Union had silenced. Borrowing the analytic lens of the chronotope from Bakhtin, Quijada argues that rituals have chronotopes which situate people within time and space. As they revived rituals, Post-Soviet Buryats encountered new historical information and traditional ways of being in time that enabled them to re-imagine the Buryat past, and what it means to be Buryat. Through the temporal perspective of a reincarnating Buddhist monk, Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, Buddhists come to see the Soviet period as a test on the path of dharma. Shamanic practitioners, in contrast, renegotiate their relationship to the past by speaking to their ancestors through the bodies of shamans. By comparing the versions of history that are produced in Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Buddhists, Shamans and Soviets offers a new lens for analyzing ritual, a new perspective on how an indigenous people grapples with a history of state repression, and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know about the past.

From the'show'trials of the 1920s and 1930s to the London Conference, this book examines the Soviet role in the Nuremberg IMT trial through the prism of the ideas and practices of earlier Soviet legal history, detailing the evolution of Stalin's ideas about the trail of Nazi war criminals. Stalin believed that an international trial for Nazi war criminals was the best way to show the world the sacrifices his country had made to defeat Hitler, and he, together with his legal mouthpiece Andrei Vyshinsky, maintained tight control over Soviet representatives during talks leading up to the creation of the Nuremberg IMT trial in 1945, and the trial itself. But Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg were unable to deal comfortably with the complexities of an open, western-style legal proceeding, which undercut their effectiveness throughout the trial. However, they were able to present a significant body of evidence that underscored the brutal nature of Hitler's racial war in Russia from 1941-45, a theme which became central to Stalin's efforts to redefine international criminal law after the war.Stalin's Soviet Justice provides a nuanced analysis of the Soviet justice system at a crucial turning point in European history and it will be vital reading for scholars and advanced students of the legal history of the Soviet Union, the history of war crimes and the aftermath of the Second World War.

How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these'historians'- be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state?To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.

The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who died in 1976, symbolizes one of the most notorious yet obscure episodes in the history of the Soviet Union. Emerging from provincial shadows in the Ukraine during the twenties, Lysenko achieved a meteoric career under Stalin's dictatorship, when ever greater claims were officially made for his'environmentalism'. Overlord and autocrat of all Soviet biology after the Second World War, Lysenko's doctrines were promulgated throughout the international communist movement - from Britain to Japan - as a specifically'proletarian'science, as opposed to mere bourgeois science. After Stalin's death, Lysenko soon plunged into discredit - although his agricultural recipes were to be approved again by Khruschev.Dominique Lecourt - author of the highly successful study Marxism and Epistemology - poses the question: what was the historical meaning of Lysenko? Was Lysenko no more than a brutal charlatan? Or did his ideas correspond - not to any canon of science - but to wider social forces at work in the USSR? Lecourt's sardonic and perceptive study provides a definitive critique of the follies of'anti-Mendelian'biology, and a materialist account of the reasons for its triumph in Russia during the rule of Stalin. An important afterword traces the original idea of a proletarian science to its source in Bogdanov.In a major introductory essay, Louis Althusser poses the acute political problems which the history of Lysenko still represents for Communists everywhere, and for the first time directly indicts political repression in the USSR today.

On its publication in 1985, this book offered a fresh analysis of the problems faced by the Soviet economy by focussing on the key issues in the economic planning system. David Dyker considers the available options for reform during the 1980s and the most likely developments. Discussing the origins of the Soviet economic planning system and the theories which founded it, previous attempts to reform the organisational structure and the particular problem of agriculture, Dyker presents a picture of an increasingly bleak future for the Soviet economy. This is a comprehensive title written by a renowned expert on the Soviet economy, which will be of particular value to students and academics researching the political and economic development and history of the Soviet Union.

In the Khrushchev era, Soviet citizens were newly encouraged to imagine themselves exploring the medieval towers of Tallinn's Old Town, relaxing on the Romanian Black Sea coast, even climbing the Eiffel Tower. By the mid 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens each year crossed previously closed Soviet borders to travel abroad. All this is your World explores the revolutionary integration of the Soviet Union into global processes of cultural exchange in which a de-Stalinizing Soviet Union increasingly, if anxiously, participated in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. Anne E. Gorsuch examines what it meant to be'Soviet'in a country no longer defined as Stalinist. All this is your World is situated at the intersection of a number of topics of scholarly and popular interest: the history of tourism and mobility; the cultural history of international relations, specifically the Cold War; the history of the Soviet Union after Stalin. It also offers a new perspective on our view of the European continent as a whole by probing the Soviet Union's relationship with both eastern and western Europe using archival materials from Russia, Estonia, Hungary, Great Britain, and the United States. Beginning with a domestic tour of the Soviet Union in late Stalinism, the book moves outwards in concentric circles to consider travel to the inner abroad of Estonia, to the near abroad of eastern Europe, and to the capitalist West, finally returning home again with a discussion of Soviet films about tourism.

This book brings together fascinating testimonies from thirty inhabitants of the'Kommunalka,'the communal apartments that were the norm in housing in the cities of Russia during the whole history of the Soviet Union.

Hitlers invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 precipitated a massive clash of arms that gave rise to destruction and suffering on an unprecedented scale. The outcome of this ruthless struggle on the Eastern Front was decisive for the course of the war in Europe. Yet the campaigns fought there still receive less attention than those fought by the Western Allies, and are less well understood. That is why this new survey of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, edited by David R. Stone, is so timely and significant.Stone has brought together a distinguished group of experts who give a penetrating reassessment of the Soviet war effort and economy. They offer a telling insight into the way in which enormous obstacles were overcome and sacrifices were made in order to achieve an overwhelming victory that changed the shape of Europe. Their wide-ranging analysis seeks to dispel myths and misperceptions that have distorted our understanding of the performance of the Red Army and the Soviet people.Editor David R. Stone is professor of history at Kansas State University. He is a leading authority on the military and political history of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. As well as writing numerous journal articles, he is the author of two major studies: A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya and Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union 1926–1933.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.“A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself. Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge'Soviet Detroits,'emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable'roadlessness.'In the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs, movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than car-crazy America. Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox practices that the state was helpless to combat. Deeply researched and engagingly told, this masterful and entertaining biography of the Soviet automobile provides a new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most iconic—and important—technologies and a novel approach to understanding the history of the Soviet Union itself.

Class Theory and History takes an ambitious and ground-breaking look at the entire history of the Soviet Union and presents a new kind of analysis of the history of the USSR: examining its birth, evolution, and death in class terms. Utilizing the class analytics they have developed over the last three decades, resnick and Wolff formulate the most fully developed economic theory of communism now available, and use that theory to answer the question: did communism ever exist in the USSR and if so, where, why and for how long? Their initial, and controversial, conclusion: Soviet industry never established a communist class structure. This conclusion then leads to the hypothesis that the USSR and provate capitalism in the United States to discuss the future of private capitalism, state capitalism and communism.

From one of our greatest historians, a magnificent reckoning with the modern world's most fateful idea.With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime's scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. Drawing on much new information, Richard Pipes explains the countryís evolution from the 1917 revolution to the Great Terror and World War II, global expansion and the Cold War chess match with the United States, and the regime's decline and ultimate collapse. There is no more dramatic story in modern history, nor one more crucial to master, than that of how the writing and agitation of two mid-nineteenth-century European thinkers named Marx and Engels led to a great and terrible world religion that brought down a mighty empire, consumed the world in conflict, and left in its wake a devastation whose full costs can only now be tabulated.

This book chronicles the final two decades in the history of the Soviet Union and presents a story that is often lost in the standard interpretations of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Although there were numerous reasons for the collapse of communism, it did not happen—as it may have seemed to some—overnight. Indeed, says Roman Szporluk, the root causes go back even earlier than 1917. To understand why the USSR broke up the way it did, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the two most important nations of the USSR—Russia and Ukraine—during the Soviet period and before, as well as the parallel but interrelated processes of nation formation in both states. Szporluk details a number of often-overlooked factors leading to the USSR's fall: how the processes of Russian identity formation were not completed by the time of the communist takeover in 1917, the unification of Ukraine in 1939–1945, and the Soviet period failing to find a resolution of the question of Russian-Ukrainian relations. The present-day conflict in the Caucasus, he asserts, is a sign that the problems of Russian identity remain.

The Russo-Ukraine War is a vital learning opportunity for military strategists across the globe. The first and clearest lesson to be gleaned from it is this: the soundness of a military's strategy and the nimbleness with which it can adapt to unforeseen circumstances are the two most important factors in deciding victory or defeat. The War for Ukraine analyzes the war through these twin lenses of strategy and adaptation, detailing how each army has succeeded or failed to plan for and adapt to this twenty-first century war. Author Mick Ryan examines the foundations of Ukrainian and Russian strategy for their ongoing war, looking back over several decades to reveal how both sides have evolved their military strategy and force structure. Each has undertaken institutional-level reforms of their military and national security enterprises in the decade leading up to this war. But because the emergent behavior of military forces after fighting begins cannot be fully predicted, these prewar reforms only constitute a starting point for adaptation during the war. Part I of the book covers the role of strategic leadership, with a focus on evolution of strategy since February 2022. From there, the second part of the book delves into how the Ukrainians and Russians have adapted their tactics, organizations, operational approaches, and strategic foundations for war-making throughout the conflict. Central to this discussion are the ways that, regardless of cutting-edge technology, human elements have remained a crucial deciding factor in Ukraine. Ryan shows how good leadership allows a nation to navigate the ambiguity and uncertainty of conflict, while poor leadership leaves it vulnerable to surprises. Likewise, The War for Ukraine offers case studies of the importance of an institution's ability to nurture and reward human learning as it relates to combat. The book provides strategists, policymakers, and military leaders with a basis from which to plan for constant adaption in military organizations. General readers of contemporary global conflict will also find The War for Ukraine of great interest.

Choice Outstanding TitleWar movies have long been the most influential genre in Russian cinema, so much so that in the Soviet Union's militaristic society,'cinema front'was used to describe the film industry itself. Denise J. Youngblood, an internationally recognized authority on Russian and Soviet cinema, provides the first comprehensive guide to this long-neglected genre.Youngblood explores more than 160 fiction films on Russian conflicts from World War I to Chechnya. These movies represent a wide range of cinematic styles and critical receptions. While not ignoring classic war films like Chapaev and The Cranes Are Flying, Youngblood introduces readers to the films that shaped and reflected Soviet views of war, like the rousing World War II favorite Two Warriors, the Thaw classic The Living and the Dead, and the Brezhnevian extravaganza Liberation. This remarkably humanistic body of work was often at odds with official policies and depicted the futility of war. Youngblood is especially insightful regarding the relationship between Stalinism, Socialist Realism, and filmmakers in creating the war film genre during an era marked by increasing militarization, conformism, and state terror and by the importance of cinema in the World War II propaganda effort. Stalin's obsession with movies led to the'revisioning'of his role in the Civil War and the'Great Patriotic War.'Yet, Youngblood argues, Soviet filmmakers were not mere puppets of repressive regimes. Indeed, some filmmakers subtly subverted official politics and history in the guise of art or Hollywood-style entertainment. She brings the story to the present by showing how post-Soviet Russian filmmakers have not only turned a critical eye on the recent wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya but are also revisiting the complex realities of World War II. Youngblood tells a fascinating story that will appeal equally to film aficionados and history buffs. By tracing the evolution of cinema through the twists and turns of both Soviet and post-Soviet society, she helps us understand the role movies played in 20th-century Russia, not only in the making and unmaking of political myths but also in the'writing'of history.

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's RussiaBeginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.Benjamin Nathans's vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin's Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

In 2022, Russia heightened its initial 2014 assault and launched its imperialist full-scale war against Ukraine. The Kremlin continued to perpetrate its denial of Ukrainians as a nation distinct from the Russians. Russia's Denial of Ukraine: Letters and Contested Memory explores the gradual and long-lasting integration of contested memory in the cultural memory of Ukraine. It emphasizes how narratives, which formed the contested memory in the nineteenth century, appeared to come to the fore with the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War. At the same time, it offers the theoretical premise for exploring contested memory, social forgetting, and remembering. The ambivalent nature of contested memory manifests in weakening national aspirations and strengthening resilience and resistance against violence. Contested memory nuances the discussion of undermining a metropolitan center and dismantling oppression. Letters reveal public discourses shaped by cultural and political developments centering on the Ukrainians'endeavors to remember themselves as a nation distinct from the Russians. Epistolary expressions by Mykola Hohol, Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko illustrate the circulation of contested memory sponsored and supported in many ways by Russia. Writers comment on their Ukrainianness and situate themselves in Ukraine's entangled past in which empires clash and fall apart.

Stalin and War, 1918-1953 is the first book to examine the patterns of radicalized internal violence that characterized the Stalinist regime across the whole of the dictator's rule, and it is one of the only works to connect patterns of internal violence to the dictator's perceptions of war and foreign threat. Discussion focuses on the crisis years 1928-1932, 1936-1939, the Great Fatherland War, and the last war crisis period, 1947-1953. Violent repressions under Stalin were cyclical. They peaked and ebbed but, in each case, they were linked to Stalin's expectation of war and invasion, to his perceived need for urgent internal mobilization, and to intense foreign policy activity. Stalin's behavior in each of these perceived war crises followed a pattern established during the dictator's experience as a military commander in the Russian revolutionary wars, and especially during the Polish war in 1919 and 1920. Together, these chapters trace a consistent and interconnected logic of war and repression throughout Stalin's political life.This book will be of interest to professional scholars of Soviet history, twentieth-century history, and World War II history, and it is approachable enough to be appreciated by general readers.

Get the Summary of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. In 1933, widespread hunger afflicted the Western world and Soviet Ukraine, with Stalin's Five-Year Plan causing mass starvation. Collectivization forced peasants into collective farms, leading to resistance and mass deaths. Stalin's policies, including grain requisitions and brutal searches, resulted in millions of deaths. The famine created a society of despair, with bodies disposed of by the state...

This book examines the meanings that were attached to the terms “parliament” and “parliamentarism” in the different historical and discursive contexts of the late Russian Empire, revolutionary and Soviet Russia, and the Soviet Union. It discusses those institutions referred to as parliaments by contemporaries, gives special attention to their functions, and traces the broader debates on parliamentarism within Russia and the Soviet Union, in Russian émigré circles, and among foreign observers. It highlights that only the late imperial and perestroika assemblies can be considered legislative institutions that expressed dissensus but argues that other assemblies, often referred to as “rubber-stamp” parliaments due to their lack of legislative competence and influence over other authorities, should not be dismissed. The Supreme Soviet, for instance, provided an integrative function binding society and elites in a top-down manner, while its deputies engaged in information acquisition and state micromanagement through interactions with their constituents. It also played an important role in interparliamentary relations and, as one of the first institutions of nominal parliamentarism in an autocratic single-party regime, of which there were many in the twentieth century, served as a model for numerous state socialist regimes. By addressing the role of parliaments in reassembling imperial spaces through political representation and the functions of nominal legislative institutions, the book explores the contribution of Russian and Soviet assemblies to global political modernity.

First Published in 1990, Moscow Graffiti is a unique and unprecedented look at the graffiti that began to appear for the first time on the walls of Moscow and other Soviet cities in the late 1970s. John Bushnell first traces the social and cultural changes that fostered the emergence of a multifaceted Soviet subculture and the appearance of graffiti. He explains the common graffiti argot of Russian slang, English, and pictographs, and then examines the disparate groups that produced it-adolescent gangs, heavy metal fans, pacifists, punks, hippies, and even the fans of a popular Soviet novel (Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita). Through graffiti these conflicting and alienated groups produce an explicit cultural alternative to the official culture they disdain.Fully illustrated with over eighty drawings and photos, Moscow Graffiti is a unique look at an underexplored area of Soviet society. The book will prove fascinating reading to all those interested in Soviet society, history, and popular culture.

The Red Pencil (1989) examines the many ways in which Soviet censorship interfered in the creative process – in the words of those who experienced it first hand. It helps to identify the ways in which Soviet artistic and intellectual production was shaped by the practices of Soviet censorship. The book goes beyond the simple recounting of banned books and taboo subjects to examine the more subtle issue of how Soviet writers attempted to strike a balance between accommodating the demands of government censorship while retaining for themselves a modicum of unfettered expression and intellectual integrity. Most of the contributing authors were active as writers, critics, editors, film and theatre specialists, or scientists prior to their departure from the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

At the height of the Great Terror in 1937, Joseph Stalin took a break from the purges to edit a new textbook on the history of the USSR. Published shortly thereafter, the Short History of the USSR amounted to an ideological sea change. Stalin had literally rewritten Russo-Soviet History, breaking with two decades of Bolshevik propaganda that styled the 1917 Revolution as the start of a new era. In its place, he established a thousand-year pedigree for the Soviet state that stretched back through the Russian empire and Muscovy to the very dawn of Slavic civilization. Appearing in million-copy print runs through 1955, the Short History transformed how a generation of Soviet citizens were to understand the past, not only in public school and adult indoctrination courses, but on the printed page, the theatrical stage, and the silver screen. Stalin's Usable Past supplies a critical edition of the Short History that both analyzes the text and places it in historical context. By highlighting Stalin's precise redactions and embellishments, historian David Brandenberger reveals the scope of Stalin's personal involvement in the textbook's development, documenting in unprecedented detail his plans for the transformation of Soviet society's historical imagination.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance. The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago – a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected. The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states.

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

This edited collection explores the problem of space under socialist regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together contributions from international scholars with expertise in the architectural, urban, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century socialism, the book includes examples from China, Africa, Mongolia, Eastern Europe and the USSR. The volume reflects on how developments in the field over the past two decades have altered our understanding of how such spaces were constructed (both literally and discursively), how they could become sites of contested meanings, and how they were perceived outside the socialist world. Moreover, the volume is concerned with how scholarly approaches associated with post-colonialism, global history, gender history, and the ‘temporal'and ‘sensory'turns have reconfigured our knowledge of, and approach to, the history of socialist space.

This book addresses the transformation of primary education in the former Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. It follows the overall transformation of education and school policy and offers original insights into the everyday life of the schools at that time. It also provides a unique perspective on the whole transformation process. The work discusses the school environment in the context of specific local characteristics, such as parents, community, regional institutions, and national and international contexts. The book specifically focuses on the changes in primary school management in terms of economics, organization, and personnel. The processes of pedagogical change are an essential theme of the book. They cover how teachers proceeded through the changes in their work at the time of the transformation and the reasons for their resistance to change, including the challenges that the transformation introduced into their work and personal lives. The book also monitors how the teachers navigated the selection and use of new textbooks and tools, such as digital tools. The work originates in historical-pedagogical research, based primarily on the oral history method and complemented by the study of contemporary documents.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion.The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022. It is not a new war, but the intensity of the warfighting revived many discussions about the conduct of inter-state warfare, which has not been seen in Europe for decades. This book does not aim to offer an exhaustive operational analysis of the war, but rather provides a preliminary systematic analysis across various domains of warfare using the concept of fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides. First, the book discusses the conceptual component and the post-Cold War adaptations of the Soviet strategic tradition by both the Ukrainian and the Russian Armed Forces. Following that, it gives an evaluation of the various aspects of warfighting in the land, air, maritime and cyber domains. Then, the book examines the role of international allied assistance, sanctions and weapons delivery in strengthening the resilience of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The book concludes with some comments on the role of inter-state warfare in the current strategic environment and future warfare.This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, defence studies, foreign policy, Russian studies and international relations.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

An original history of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics and rekindled the Cold War.Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance - a hubris that shaped how the West would treat Russia for the next two decades. But history wasn't over. Putin is a paradox. In the early years of his presidency, he appeared to commit himself to friendship with the West, suggesting that Russia could join the European Union or even NATO. He said he supported free-market democracy and civil rights. But the Putin of those years is unrecognisable today. The Putin of the 2020s is an autocratic nationalist, dedicated to repression at home and anti-Western militarism abroad. So, what happened? Was he lying when he proclaimed his support for freedom, democracy and friendship with the West? Or, was he sincere? Did he change his views at some stage between then and now? And if that is the case, what happened to change him?Putin and the Return of History examines these questions in the context of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics of aggression: the enduring terror of encirclement by outsiders, the subjugation of the individual to the cause of the state, the collectivist values that allow the sacrifice of human lives in battle, the willingness to lie and deceive, the co-opting of religion and the belief in Great Russia's mission to change the world.

Russia's vast Asian territories beyond the Urals, traditionally known as Siberia, have, despite their enormous size and the crucial role they played in the development of Russian state and society, attracted little attention from Western scholars.Drawing together the research of Western and Soviet historians, The History of Siberia (originally published in 1991) examines the ways in which the development of Siberia has been inextricably linked with the historical evolution of the Russian Empire as a whole. Among the topics discussed are Russia's early conquest, exploration and the colonial administration of Siberia and its indigenous people; the fate of Russian America; peasant migration and settlement; Siberia's role as a penal colony and its part in the Russian Revolution and Civil War. A final chapter evaluates Siberia's role in the twentieth century. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of history.

This book integrates Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history into a coherent whole by focusing on the culture, role models, habits and behavior patterns that provide continuity between various political regimes, systems, and rulers from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin.The unifying theme of all these periods is the central question of identity – how the Russians have defined themselves, their country, and their values. Why did the Bolsheviks try to erase any trace of Old Russia and with what did they try to replace it? Why did Stalin wipe out the kulaks and the old Bolsheviks? What were the political consequences of the Great Patriotic War on the Russians as people? When post-Stalin Russia slowly weakened and gave way to the humanism and Westernization that led to the collapse of the Soviet system, why did the 1990s generate a resurgence of anti-western nationalism? And how to explain the slow and steady break with the West under President Putin?This will be a core textbook for undergraduate and graduate students of Russian and European history, and a valuable text for all those interested in how the Russian past influenced and shaped current politics, and in the international East–West divide in particular.For YouTube discussions of the book, see:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvG1G1cax-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W3V6nb3h18&t=3s

This book is the first major study exploring archival and memorial practices of the Soviet unofficial culture. The creation of counter-archives was one of the most important forms of cultural resistance in the Soviet Union. Unofficial artists and poets had to reinvent the possibilities of maintaining art and literature that “did not exist”. Against the background of archival theories and memory studies, the volume explores how the culture of the Soviet underground has become one of the most striking cases of scholarly and artistic (self-)archiving, which – although being half-isolated from the outer world – reflected intellectual and artistic trends characteristic of its time. The guiding question of the volume is how Soviet unofficial culture (de)constructed social memory by collecting, archiving and memorizing tabooed culture of the past and present.

This book, available for the first time in paperback, looks at the liberalisation process in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during the period 1987–89, focusing on Gorbachev's initiative to encourage perestroika in all the fraternal regimes of CEE outside the Soviet Union. Archival materials, interviews and textual analysis identify a joint initiative among these fraternal communist parties to perpetuate the one-party system. For this purpose, fraternal parties were expected to follow the example of the CPSU in convening the national party conference, an all-party meeting on a similar scale to the five-yearly congress, and yet mysteriously, one which was barely described in the Party Statutes and rarely convoked. Gorbachev made use of CEE dependence on the Soviet Union for energy supplies to ensure that at least some fraternal parties followed his line. This book will be of interest to those studying the transition process in CEE, democratisation, comparative politics more generally and students of research methods.

This edited volume offers an original exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time were unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture.Grounding the analysis of Soviet temporalities in their material incarnations not only lends concreteness to discussions of temporal culture, but also draws out ways in which the specificities of Soviet things—and their planning, design, manufacture, and consumption—mediated and produced particular ways of experiencing, perceiving, and representing time. As such, Time and Material Culture turns a new page in the study of the temporal and material culture of Soviet socialism and, in doing so, contributes to broader debates on the changing experiences of time in the global twentieth century. The book integrates interdisciplinary perspectives as well as regional approaches sensitive to the multinational nature of the Soviet project. Time and Material Culture will be useful to academics, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students interested in twentieth-century cultures of time.