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This collection presents views on key aspects of Russian/Soviet history such as the non-Slavic sources of Russian statehood; tsarist penal systems; the pre-evolutionary technological level; the famine of 1931-3; patronage practices in Stalin's Russia; and the fall of the Soviet Union.
An authoritative history of Russia from early Rus' to the reign of Peter the Great.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.
Men Out of Focus charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period – often described as "The Thaw" – between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming increasingly suburbanized, rebellious, consumerist, household-oriented, and scientifically complex. The dramatic tension of 1960s cinema revolved around the male protagonists’ inability to navigate the challenges of postwar life. Selling over three billion tickets annually, the Soviet film industry became a fault line of postwar cultural contestation. By examining both the discussions surrounding the period’s most controversial movies as well as the cultural context in which these debates happened, the book captures the official and popular reactions to the dizzying transformations of Soviet society after Stalin.
Between 1934 and 1941 Stalin unleashed what came to be known as the 'Great Terror' against millions of Soviet citizens. The same period also saw the 'Great Retreat', the repudiation of many of the aspirations of the Russian Revolution. The response of ordinary Russians to the extraordinary events of this time has been obscure. Sarah Davies's study uses NKVD and party reports, letters and other evidence to show that, despite propaganda and repression, dissonant public opinion was not extinguished. The people continued to criticise Stalin and the Soviet regime, and complain about particular policies. The book examines many themes, including attitudes towards social and economic policy, the terror, and the leader cult, shedding light on a hugely important part of Russia's social, political, and cultural history.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.
This is a definitive new history of Russia from early Rus' to the successor states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Volume I encompasses developments before the reign of Peter I; volume II covers the 'imperial era', from Peter's time to the fall of the monarchy in March 1917; and volume III continues the story through to the end of the twentieth century. At the core of all three volumes are the Russians, the lands which they have inhabited and the polities that ruled them, while other peoples and territories have also been given generous coverage for the periods when they came under Riurikid, Romanov and Soviet rule. The distinct voices of individual contributors provide a multitude of perspectives on Russia's diverse and controversial millennial history. This first volume of the Cambridge History of Russia covers the period from early ('Kievan') Rus' to the start of Peter the Great's reign in 1689. It surveys the development of Russia through the Mongol invasions to the expansion of the Muscovite state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and deals with political, social, economic and cultural issues under the Riurikid and early Romanov rulers. The volume is organised on a primarily chronological basis, but a number of general themes are also addressed, including the bases of political legitimacy; law and society; the interactions of Russians and non-Russians; and the relationship of the state with the Orthodox Church. The international team of authors incorporates the latest Russian and Western scholarship and offers an authoritative new account of the formative 'pre-Petrine' period of Russian history, before the process of Europeanisation had made a significant impact on society and culture. Book jacket.
Since Russia has re-emerged as a global power, its foreign policies have come under close scrutiny. In Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin, Andrei P. Tsygankov identifies honor as the key concept by which Russia's international relations are determined. He argues that Russia's interests in acquiring power, security and welfare are filtered through this cultural belief and that different conceptions of honor provide an organizing framework that produces policies of cooperation, defensiveness and assertiveness in relation to the West. Using ten case studies spanning a period from the early nineteenth century to the present day - including the Holy Alliance, the Triple Entente and the Russia-Georgia war - Tsygankov's theory suggests that when it perceives its sense of honor to be recognized, Russia cooperates with the Western nations; without such a recognition it pursues independent policies either defensively or assertively.
Winner of the Cundill History Prize The House of the Dead tells the incredible hundred-year-long story of “the vast prison without a roof” that was Russia’s Siberian penal colony. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Russian Revolution, the tsars exiled more than a million prisoners and their families east. Here Daniel Beer illuminates both the brutal realities of this inhuman system and the tragic and inspiring fates of those who endured it. Siberia was intended to serve not only as a dumping ground for criminals and political dissidents, but also as new settlements. The system failed on both fronts: it peopled Siberia with an army of destitute and desperate vagabonds who visited a plague of crime on the indigenous population, and transformed the region into a virtual laboratory of revolution. A masterly and original work of nonfiction, The House of the Dead is the history of a failed social experiment and an examination of Siberia’s decisive influence on the political forces of the modern world.