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Contemporary Russia is often viewed as a centralised regime based in Moscow, with dependent provinces, made subservient by Putin’s policies limiting regional autonomy. This book, however, demonstrates that beyond this largely political view, by looking at Russia’s regions more in cultural and social terms, a quite different picture emerges, of a Russia rich in variety, with different regional identities, cultures, traditions and memories. The book explores how identities are formed and rethought in contemporary Russia, and outlines the nature of particular regional identities, from Siberia and the Urals to southern Russia, from the Russian heartland to the non-Russian republics.
This book focuses on the evolution of federalism and intragovernmental relations in Russia for the period 1992-95 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Its main question is whether under conditions of democratisation and marketisation in Russia an authoritarian approach of 'transformation from above' is more favourable to one of granting more autonomy to local governments. The author suggests a scale of various reform implementation policies based on two pioneering case studies of Russian provinces.
A presentation of political, economic and demographic data on every territorial unit of the Russian Federation, its local government structure and electoral history. Each entry includes a profile of the president, governor or prime minister, and an overview of local trends.
Looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russia, surveying cultural discourse in journalism, literature, and film to analyze changing notions of nationalism, authenticity, and postimperial identity.
Several stark premises have long prevailed in our approach to Russian history. It was commonly assumed that Russia had always labored under a highly centralized and autocratic imperial state. The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was ultimately assigned to the profoundly agrarian character of Russian society. The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the nation's population, was considered a harsh world of cruel landowners and ignorant peasants, and a strong hand was required for such a crude society. A number of significant conclusions flowed from this understanding. Deep and abiding social divisions obstructed the evolution of modernity, as experienced "naturally" in other parts of Europe, so there was no Renaissance or Reformation; merely a derivative Enlightenment; and only a distorted capitalism. And since only despotism could contain these volatile social forces, it followed that the 1917 Revolution was an inevitable explosion resulting from these intolerable contradictions—and so too were the blood-soaked realities of the Soviet regime that came after. In short, the sheer immensity of its provincial backwardness could explain almost everything negative about the course of Russian history. This book undermines these preconceptions. Through her close study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century, Catherine Evtuhov demonstrates how nearly everything we thought we knew about the dynamics of Russian society was wrong. Instead of peasants ground down by poverty and ignorance, we find skilled farmers, talented artisans and craftsmen, and enterprising tradespeople. Instead of an exclusively centrally administered state, we discover effective and participatory local government. Instead of pervasive ignorance, we are shown a lively cultural scene and an active middle class. Instead of a defining Russian exceptionalism, we find a world recognizable to any historian of nineteenth-century Europe. Drawing on a wide range of Russian social, environmental, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, and synthesizing it with deep archival research of the Nizhnii Novgorod province, Evtuhov overturns a simplistic view of the Russian past. Rooted in, but going well beyond, provincial affairs, her book challenges us with an entirely new perspective on Russia's historical trajectory.
This book examines the contemporary communicational practices of journalists and media outlets and the consumption and reception patterns of audiences in Russia’s provinces with an emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of culture and memory. Investigating the interaction and issues of contemporary identity, culture, audiences and journalism in a rapidly changing and evolving Russia, this volume goes beyond the large metropolitan centres into the provincial regions of Russia to develop a more comprehensive overview. Despite a popular image that is often projected of Russia as a homogeneous, often threatening entity, its regions are very far from being uniform, with diverse, varied geographies, ethnicities, religions, cultures, resources and economic infrastructure. The perspectives offered by a range of scholars and practitioners explore the generational, political and regional diversities that exist across this vast country and analyse local and regional media. Covering topics not often discussed, this volume offers an important contribution for everyone interested in Russian politics, culture, journalism and history and the study of local and regional communication studies.
Subnational political units are growing in influence in national and international affairs, drawing increasing scholarly attention to politics beyond national capitals. In this book, leading Russian and Western political scientists contribute to debates in comparative politics by examining Russia’s subnational politics. Beginning with a chapter that reviews major debates in theory and method, this book continues to examine Russia’s 83 regions, exploring a wide range of topics including the nature and stability of authoritarian regimes, federal politics, political parties, ethnic conflict, governance and inequality in a comparative perspective. Providing both qualitative and quantitative data from 20 years of original research, the book draws on elite interaction, public opinion and the role of institutions regionally in the post-Soviet years. The regions vary on a number of theoretically interesting dimensions while their federal membership provides control for other dimensions that are challenging for globally comparative studies. The authors demonstrate the utility of subnational analyses and show how regional research can help answer a variety of political questions, providing evidence from Russia that can be used by specialists on other large countries or world regions in cross-national scholarship. Situated within broader theoretical and methodological political science debates, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Russian politics, comparative politics, regionalism and subnational politics.
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.
An Ordinary Marriage is the story of the Chikhachevs, middling-income gentry landowners in nineteenth-century provincial Russia. In a seemingly strange contradiction, the mother of this family, Natalia, oversaw serf labor and managed finances while the father, Andrei, raised the children, at a time when domestic ideology advocating a woman's place in the home was at its height in European advice manuals. But Andrei Chikhachev defined masculinity as a realm of intellectualism; the father could be in charge of moral education, defined as an intellectual task. Managing estates that often barely yielded a livable income was a practical task and therefore considered less elevated, though still vitally important to the family's interests. Thus estate management was available to gentry women like Natalia Chikhacheva, and the fact that it inevitably expanded their realm of influence and opportunity (within the limits of their estates), and that it increased their centrality to the family's material security relative to their social counterparts to the west, was accidental. An Ordinary Marriage examines the daily activities and ideas of the family based on multiple overlapping diaries and informal correspondence by the husband, wife, and son of the family, as well as the wife's brother. No such cache of intimate Russian family documents has ever previously been studied in such depth. The family's relative obscurity (with no pretensions to fame, wealth, or influence) and the presence of a woman's private documents are especially unusual in any context. The book considers the Chikhachevs' social life, reading habits, attitudes toward illness and death, as well as their marital roles and their reception of major ideas of their time, such as domesticity, Enlightenment, sentimentalism, and Romanticism.
This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery this challenge, was most prevalent in twelve provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, as well as to the Kingdom of Poland. At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist. The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, as well as the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.