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Foreign Policy Best Book of 2023 Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2023 The “riveting” (The Economist), secret story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China.Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin's means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing “unprecedented” about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends. The Cold War started long before 1945. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is a “deeply researched and artfully crafted” (Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the US President) story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks being launched woefully unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of Eastern superpowers: Russia's past and present and the global ascendance of China. Mining hitherto secret archives in multiple languages, Calder Walton shows that the Cold War started earlier than commonly assumed, that it continued even after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, and that Britain and America's clandestine struggle with the Soviet government provided key lessons for countering China today. This “authoritative, sweeping” (Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize­–winning author of Embers of War) history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War and the unrolling conflict between the United States and China that will dominate the 21st century.

A groundbreaking history of Russia, from empire to the Soviet era, viewed through the lens of its money. Money seems passive, a silent witness to the deeds and misdeeds of its holders, but through its history intimate dramas and grand historical processes can be told. So argues this sweeping narrative of the ruble's story from the time of Catherine the Great to Lenin. The Russian ruble did not enjoy a particularly reputable place among European currencies. Across two hundred years, long periods of financial turmoil were followed by energetic and pragmatic reforms that invariably ended with another collapse. Why did a country with an industrializing economy, solid private property rights, and (until 1918) a near perfect reputation as a rock-solid repayer of its debts stick for such a prolonged period with an inconvertible currency? Why did the Russian gold standard differ from the European model? In answering these questions, Ekaterina Pravilova argues that politics and culture must be considered alongside economic factors. The history of the Russian ruble offers an opportunity to explore the political reasons behind the preservation of a supposedly backward financial system and to show how politicians used monetary reforms to block or enact political transformations. The Ruble is a history of Russia written in the language of money. It shows how economists, landowners, merchants, and peasants understood, perceived, and used financial mechanisms. In her sweeping account, Pravilova interprets the well-known political events of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries--wars, attempts at constitutional transformations, revolutions--through the ideas and politics of currency reforms and offers a new history of Russia's imperial expansion and collapse.

This edited volume explores the historical, cultural and literary legacies of Polish Britain, and their significance for both the British and Polish nations. The focus of the book is twofold. First, it investigates the history of Polish immigration and the ways in which Polish immigrants have conceptualised their own experiences and encounters with Britain and the British. Second, it examines how Poles and Poland have been represented by Anglophone writers in both fictional and non-fictional forms of discourse. Inevitably, these issues are intertwined. Polish experiences of Britain have been shaped, in part, by British ideas about Poland, just as British notions of Poland have been transformed by the emergence of large and culturally active Polish communities in the UK. By studying these issues together, this volume develops a wide-ranging and original analysis of Polish Britain.

The forgotten story of a surprising anti-imperial, nationalist project at the turn of the twentieth century: a grassroots movement of Russian Jews to racialize themselves.In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire of the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews grew increasingly concerned about their future. Jews spoke different languages and practiced different traditions. They had complex identities and no territorial homeland. Their inability to easily conform to new standards of nationality meant a future of inevitable assimilation or second-class minority citizenship. The solution proposed by Russian Jewish intellectuals was to ground Jewish nationhood in a structure deeper than culture or territory—biology.Marina Mogilner examines three leading Russian Jewish race scientists— Samuel Weissenberg, Alexander El'kind, and Lev Shternberg—and the movement they inspired. Through networks of race scientists and political activists, Jewish medical societies, and imperial organizations like the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, they aimed to produce “authentic” knowledge about the Jewish body, which would motivate an empowering sense of racially grounded identity and guide national biopolitics. Activists vigorously debated eugenic and medical practices, Jews'status as Semites, Europeans, and moderns, and whether the Jews of the Caucasus and Central Asia were inferior. The national science, and the biopolitics it generated, became a form of anticolonial resistance, and survived into the early Soviet period, influencing population policies in the new state.Comprehensive and meticulously researched, A Race for the Future reminds us of the need to historically contextualize racial ideology and politics and makes clear that we cannot fully grasp the biopolitics of the twentieth century without accounting for the imperial breakdown in which those politics thrived.

This book represents a new reading of a key moment in the history of East European Jewry, namely the period preceding the collapse of the Russian Empire. Offering a novel analysis of relations between the Russian army and Jews during the First World War, it points to the army and military authorities as the'gravediggers'of the Jews'fragile co-existence with the tsarist regime. It focuses on various aspects of the Russian army's brutal treatment of Jews living in or near the Eastern Front, where three quarters of European Jewry were living when the war began. At the same time, it shows the enormous harm this anti-Jewish campaign wreaked on the Russian empire's economy, finances, public security, and international status.

An illuminating account of Russia's attempts—and failures—to achieve great power status in Asia.Since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by opportunity to the East. Under the tsars, Russians colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii. The Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to Vladivostok. And Stalin looked to Asia as a sphere of influence, hospitable to the spread of Soviet Communism. In Asia and the Pacific lay territory, markets, security, and glory.But all these expansionist dreams amounted to little. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why, arguing that Russia's ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. With the core of the nation concentrated thousands of miles away in the European borderlands, Russia's would-be pioneers have always struggled to project power into Asia and to maintain public and elite interest in their far-flung pursuits. Even when the wider population professed faith in Asia's promise, few Russians were willing to pay the steep price. Among leaders, too, dreams of empire have always been tempered by fears of cost. Most of Russia's pivots to Asia have therefore been halfhearted and fleeting.Today the Kremlin talks up the importance of “strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping's China, and Vladimir Putin's government is at pains to emphasize Russian activities across Eurasia. But while distance is covered with relative ease in the age of air travel and digital communication, the East remains far off in the ways that matter most. Miller finds that Russia's Asian dreams are still restrained by the country's firm rooting in Europe.

Even as a country ceases to be a great power, the concept of it as a great power can continue to influence decision making and policy formulation. This book explores how such a process took place in Russia from 1917 through 1920, when the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 led to the creation of two regimes: the Bolshevik'Reds'and the anti-Bolshevik'Whites.'As Reds consolidated their one-party dictatorship and nursed global ambitions, Whites struggled to achieve a different vision for the future of Russia. Anatol Shmelev illuminates the White campaign with fresh purpose and through information from the Hoover Institution Archives, exploring how diverse White factions overcame internal tensions to lobby for recognition on the world stage, only to fail—in part because of the West's desire to leave'the Russian question'to Russians alone. In the Wake of Empire examines the personalities, institutions, political culture, and geostrategic concerns that shaped the foreign policy of the anti-Bolshevik governments and attempts to define the White movement through them. Additionally, Shmelev provides a fascinating psychological study of the factors that ultimately doomed the White effort: an irrational and ill-placed faith in the desire of the Allies to help them, and wishful thinking with regard to their own prospects that obscured the reality around them.

Jméno Leonida Pljušče (1939–2015), významného disidenta sovětské éry, je spojováno zejména s oběťmi politicky motivovaného zneužívání psychiatrie. Kniha Na karnevalu dějin vznikla na podnět pařížského nakladatelství Seuil, které se na L. Pljušče obrátilo s prosbou, aby pojednal o sobě a svém odporu vůči sovětskému režimu. Paměti autor sepsal v ruštině bezprostředně po svém odchodu do emigrace roku 1976. V knize L. Pljušč zaznamenal své dosavadní životní etapy: dětství a mládí, pedagogickou činnost, práci v akademickém ústavu, zájem o parapsychologii, telepatii, teorii her, dále odchod do „podzemí“, rozvíjení aktivit v samizdatu, pronásledování politickou policií, internaci v psychiatrické léčebně a odchod za hranice.

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.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina's timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

This handbook brings together recent and emerging research in the broad areas of women and gender studies focusing on pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Russian Federation. For the Soviet period in particular, individual chapters extend the geographic coverage of the book beyond Russia itself to examine women and gender relations in the Soviet ‘East'(Tatarstan), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Within the boundaries of the Russian Federation, the scope moves beyond the typically studied urban centres of Moscow and St Petersburg to examine the regions (Krasnodar, Novosibirsk), rural societies and village life. Its chapters examine the construction of gender identities and shifts in gender roles during the twentieth century, as well as the changing status and roles of women vis-a-vis men in Soviet political institutions, the workplaceand society more generally. This volume draws on a broad range of disciplinary and methodological approaches currently being employed in the academic field of Russian studies. The origins of the individual contributions can be identified in a range of conventional subject disciplines – history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies – but the chapters also adopt a cross- and inter-disciplinary approach to the topic of study. This handbook therefore builds on and extends the foundations of Russian women's and gender studies as it has emerged and developed in recent decades, and demonstrate the international, indeed global, reach of such research

This illuminating volume provides a new understanding of the subjective identity and public roles of Russia's Europeanized elite between the years of 1762 and 1825. Through a series of rich case studies, the editors reconstruct the social group's worldview, complex identities, conflicting loyalties, and evolving habits. The studies explore the institutions that shaped these nobles, their attitude to state service, the changing patterns of their family life, their emotional world, religious beliefs, and sense of time.The creation of a Europeanized elite in Russia was a state-initiated project that aimed to overcome the presumed'backwardness'of the country. The evolution of this social group in its relations to political authority provides insight into the fraught identity of a country developing on the geopolitical periphery of Europe. In contrast to postcolonial studies that explore the imposition of political, social, and cultural structures on colonized societies, this multidisciplinary volume explores the patterns of behavior and emotion that emerge from the processes of self-Europeanization. The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825, will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Russian history and culture, particularly in light of current political debates about globalization and widening social inequality in Europe.

The contributors in this interdisciplinary collection address the problem of interconnection between the study of the “Other,” either Russian or American, and the shaping of national identities in the two countries at different stages of US–Russian relations. The focus of research interests were typically determined by the political and social debates in scholars'native countries. In this book, leading Russian and American scholars analyze the problems arising from these intersections of academic, political, and sociocultural contexts and the implicit biases they entail. The book is divided into two parts, the first being a historical overview of past configurations of the interrelationship between fields and agendas, and the second covering the role of institutionalized area studies in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.In both parts the role of the “human factor” in the study of mutual representations is elucidating.

Russia played a fundamental role in the outcome of Napoleonic Wars; the wars also had an impact on almost every area of Russian life. Russia and the Napoleonic Wars brings together significant and new research from Russian and non-Russian historians and their work demonstrates the importance of this period both for Russia and for all of Europe.

Imperial Russia, is was said, had two capital cities because it had two identities: St. Petersburg was Russia's'window to Europe,'whereas Moscow preserved the nation's proud historical traditions. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by exploring how the tsarist regime actually tried to turn Moscow into a bridgehead of Europe in the heartland of Russia. Moscow in the eighteenth century was widely scorned as backward and'Asiatic.'The tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their state's internal security and their effort to make Russia European. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to construct a new Moscow, with European buildings and institutions, a Westernized'middle estate', and a new cultural image as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I? How were the lives of the inhabitants changed? Did a'middle estate'come into being? How similar was Moscow's modernization to that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon? Lastly, how were Moscow and its people imagined by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

Described by the sixteenth-century English poet George Turbervile as'a people passing rude, to vices vile inclin'd', the Russians waited some three centuries before their subsequent cultural achievements—in music, art and particularly literature—achieved widespread recognition in Britain. The essays in this stimulating collection attest to the scope and variety of Russia's influence on British culture. They move from the early nineteenth century—when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic sought to come to terms with the challenge of Pushkin—to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including the Crystal Palace and Earls Court. The collection looks at British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevskii and Chekhov, and finishes by shedding light on Britain's engagement with Soviet film. Edited by Anthony Cross, one of the world's foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, A People Passing Rude is essential reading for anyone with an interest in British and Russian cultures and their complex relationship.

From the time the word kul'tura entered the Russian language in the early nineteenth century, Russian arts and letters have thrived on controversy. At any given time several versions of culture have coexisted in the Russian public sphere. The question of what makes something or someone distinctly Russian was at the core of cultural debates in nineteenth-century Russia and continues to preoccupy Russian society to the present day.When Art Makes News examines the development of a public discourse on national self-representation in nineteenth-century Russia, as it was styled by the visual arts and popular journalism. Katia Dianina tells the story of the missing link between high art and public culture, revealing that art became the talk of the nation in the second half of the nineteenth century in the pages of mass-circulation press.At the heart of Dianina's study is a paradox: how did culture become the national idea in a country where few were educated enough to appreciate it? Dianina questions the traditional assumptions that culture in tsarist Russia was built primarily from the top down and classical literature alone was responsible for imagining the national community. When Art Makes News will appeal to all those interested in Russian culture, as well as scholars and students in museum and exhibition studies.

A major new history of the Russian conflict immortalized by Tolstoy in War and Peace Russia's expulsion of Napoleon's Grande Armée in 1812 is considered one of the most dramatic events in European history. However, Tolstoyan myth and an imbalance of British and French interpretations have clouded most Westerners'understanding of Russia's role in the defeat of Napoleon. Based on a fresh examination of Russian military archives, Russia Against Napoleon provides the first-ever history of the period told from the Russian perspective. In Dominic Lieven's account, Russia's victory in 1812 was just the beginning of what would be the longest military campaign in European history, marked by Russia's epic efforts to feed and supply half a million troops as they crossed an entire continent. Moving from the 1807 treaty signed by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I through the Russian army's improbable entry into Paris in 1814, Lieven provides suspenseful accounts of events, such as the burning of Moscow and the great battles of Leipzig and Borodino, as well as astute analyses of the great military strategists of the time. The result is a magisterial work sure to be eagerly anticipated by military and history buffs alike.

On the eve of World War I, Russia, not known as a nation of joiners, had thousands of voluntary associations. Joseph Bradley examines the crucial role of voluntary associations in the development of civil society in Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.Russians populated a growing public sphere with societies based on the model of the European enlightenment. Owing to the mission of such learned associations as the Free Economic Society, the Moscow Agricultural Society, and the Russian Geographical Society, civil society became inextricably linked to patriotism and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Although civil society and the autocratic state are often described as bitter rivals, cooperation in the project of national prestige and prosperity was more often the rule. However, an increasing public assertiveness challenged autocratic authority, and associations became a focal point of a contradictory political culture: they fostered a state-society partnership but at the same time were a critical element in the effort to emancipate society from autocracy and arbitrary officialdom.

Perched above the confluence of two great rivers, the Sava and Danube, Belgrade has been home to many civilizations: Celts, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars, Magyars, Ottomans and Serbs. A Turkish fortress, the focus for a Serbian principality, an intellectual and artistic center, the city grew until it became capital of Yugoslavia. Now it is one of the largest cities in south-eastern Europe and capital of the Republic of Serbia. Despite many challenges, Belgrade has resisted assimilation and created a unique cultural identity out of its many contrasting sides, sometimes with surprising consequences.

Journalism has long been a major factor in defining the opinions of Russia's literate classes. Although women participated in nearly every aspect of the journalistic process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female editors, publishers, and writers have been consistently omitted from the history of journalism in Imperial Russia. An Improper Profession offers a more complete and accurate picture of this history by examining the work of these under-appreciated professionals and showing how their involvement helped to formulate public opinion.In this collection, contributors explore how early women journalists contributed to changing cultural understandings of women's roles, as well as how class and gender politics meshed in the work of particular individuals. They also examine how female journalists adapted to—or challenged—censorship as political structures in Russia shifted. Over the course of this volume, contributors discuss the attitudes of female Russian journalists toward socialism, Russian nationalism, anti-Semitism, women's rights, and suffrage. Covering the period from the early 1800s to 1917, this collection includes essays that draw from archival as well as published materials and that range from biography to literary and historical analysis of journalistic diaries.By disrupting conventional ideas about journalism and gender in late Imperial Russia, An Improper Profession should be of vital interest to scholars of women's history, journalism, and Russian history.Contributors. Linda Harriet Edmondson, June Pachuta Farris, Jehanne M Gheith, Adele Lindenmeyr, Carolyn Marks, Barbara T. Norton, Miranda Beaven Remnek, Christine Ruane, Rochelle Ruthchild, Mary Zirin

Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey offer edited accounts of six English voyagers and their experiences in Muscovy Russia between 1553 and 1600. With modernized spelling and presentation, these accounts are accompanied by a glossary of Russian terms, introductions of their authors, and annotations that help put the travelers'narratives into perspective.

No European Devil can claim so long or so political a connection with Russian culture as Milton's Satan. Russian poets came to know him before they heard of Dante, Marlowe, Tasso, or of the devils of the Baroque era. This may explain why Milton's influence was so intensely felt by the Russians, especially during the Romantic age. In this, the first study in any language of Milton's reception in Russia, that influence is traced to an early translation of Paradise Lost uncovered by Valentin Boss in the Moscow archives.British radicals who professed to believe that Milton himself was of the Devil's party were, with the notable exception of Byron and Tom Moore, hardly known by Pushkin and his contemporaries. Russian literary Satanism, although derived from Milton, thus developed its own characteristics which tsarist censors considered morally subversive. A brilliant pleiade of poets from Zhukovsky to Lermontov gave Milton's outcast from Heaven some of his many modern masks. Towards the end of the nineteenth century these inspired the alarming paintings and sculptures of Mikhail Vrubel who, like Lermentov, was obsessed by the demonic. In cultural influence Goethe's Devil had by then eclipsed Milton's, but Goethe's did not survive 1917 with the same political authority. Boss concludes with a description of what happened to Milton's Satan after October 1917, when his connection with the English Revolution gave him an edge his German rival lacked.Lunacharsky, Lenin's Commissar for Education, who admired Milton's Arch-rebel, steered him past Left-wing Communists who continued to regard Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as Christian propaganda. Despite such attacks, Milton's Satan resurfaced under Brezhnev to bask in Soviet pedagogic approval as an Anti-Imperialist and'the embodiment of love of freedom.'Russian notions of good and evil changed before the Revolution and will change again under glasnost'and perestroika. But no literary character has reflected such changes more dramatically than Milton's Satan, who managed to be both a hero to Romantic poets and Marxist critics.

This 1996 book offers a fascinating investigation into the lives and careers of the British in eighteenth-century Russia and, more specifically, into the development of a vibrant British community in St Petersburg during the city's first century of existence as the new capital of an ever-expanding Russian empire. Based on an extremely wide range of primary sources from Britain and Russia, the book concentrates on the activities of the British within various fields such as commerce, the navy, the medical profession, science and technology, and the arts and ends with a broad survey of travellers and of travel literature, much of which is nowadays completely unknown. Also included are many attractive and unusual illustrations which help to demonstrate the variety and character of Russia's British community.