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A timely study of the "new Russia" at the end of the twentieth century.
An introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the worlds largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today.
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
A comprehensive account of the influence of occult beliefs and doctrines on intellectual and cultural life in twentieth-century Russia.
Russia’s use of its vast energy resources for leverage against post-Soviet states such as Ukraine is widely recognized as a threat. Yet we cannot understand this danger without also understanding the opportunity that Russian energy represents. From corruption-related profits to transportation-fee income to subsidized prices, many within these states have benefited by participating in Russian energy exports. To understand Russian energy power in the region, it is necessary to look at the entire value chain—including production, processing, transportation, and marketing—and at the full spectrum of domestic and external actors involved, from Gazprom to regional oligarchs to European Union regulators. This book follows Russia’s three largest fossil-fuel exports—natural gas, oil, and coal—from production in Siberia through transportation via Ukraine to final use in Germany in order to understand the tension between energy as threat and as opportunity. Margarita M. Balmaceda reveals how this dynamic has been a key driver of political development in post-Soviet states in the period between independence in 1991 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. She analyzes how the physical characteristics of different types of energy, by shaping how they can be transported, distributed, and even stolen, affect how each is used—not only technically but also politically. Both a geopolitical travelogue of the journey of three fossil fuels across continents and an incisive analysis of technology’s role in fossil-fuel politics and economics, this book offers new ways of thinking about energy in Eurasia and beyond.
This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.
As shopping has been transformed from a chore into a major source of hedonistic pleasure, a specifically Russian consumer culture has begun to emerge that is unlike any other. This book examines the many different facets of consumption in today’s Russia, including retailing, advertising and social networking. Throughout, emphasis is placed on the inherently visual - not to say spectacular - nature both of consumption generally, and of Russian consumer culture in particular. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which brands, both Russian and foreign, construct categories of identity in order to claim legitimacy for themselves. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how consumer culture is being reinvented in Russia today, in a society which has one, nostalgic eye turned towards the past, and the other, utopian eye, set firmly on the future. Borrowing concepts from both marketing and cultural studies, the approach throughout is interdisciplinary, and will be of considerable interest, to researchers, students and practitioners wishing to gain invaluable insights into one of the most lucrative, and exciting, of today’s emerging markets.
The first history of modern Russia from 1991 to the present day by one of the leading historians of the 20th century USSR and Russia. In 1991, in a huge experiment with a people and in a state of euphoria, Boris Yeltsin abolished the USSR and recreated the Russian nation. At the point of its declaration is was in a state of economic and social disarray and yet there were high hopes. Hopes which have subsequently been dashed. Robert Service brings to bear his vast knowledge of the people and the country to put the recent upheavals into context and he shows that not everything changed for the worst 1991. The Gorbachev years have allowed the Russian people to give a priority to living a private life and shutting the door on the state. They could think what they liked. The could enjoy intellectual and religious freedom, and indulge in recreations their income would allow. Gays and Lesbians could come 'out'. The Youth culture could finally be loosed from contraints. This is a broad political, social and cultural history of one of the newest nations ever to be formed.
In recent years there have been alarming reports of rapid decreases in life expectancy in the New Independent States (former members of the Soviet Union). To help assess priorities for health policy, the Committee on Population organized two workshopsâ€"the first on adult mortality and disability, the second on adult health priorities and policies. Participants included demographers, epidemiologists, public health specialists, economists, and policymakers from the NIS countries, the United States, and Western Europe. This volume consists of selected papers presented at the workshops. They assess the reliability of data on mortality, morbidity, and disability; analyze regional patterns and trends in mortality rates and causes of death; review evidence about major determinants of adult mortality; and discuss implications for health policy.
St. Petersburg's Winter Palace was once the supreme architectural symbol of Russia's autocratic government. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became the architectural symbol of St. Petersburg itself. The story of the palace illuminates the changing relationship between monarchs and their capital city during the last century and a half of Russian monarchy. In The Winter Palace and the People, Susan McCaffray examines interactions among those who helped to stage the ceremonial drama of monarchy, those who consumed the spectacle, and the monarchs themselves. In the face of a changing social landscape in their rapidly growing nineteenth-century capital, Russian monarchs reoriented their display of imperial and national representation away from courtiers and toward the urban public. When attacked at mid-century, monarchs retreated from the palace. As they receded, the public claimed the square and the artistic treasures in the Imperial Hermitage before claiming the palace itself. By 1917, the Winter Palace had come to be the essential stage for representing not just monarchy, but the civic life of the empire-nation. What was cataclysmic for the monarchy presented to those who staffed the palace and Hermitage not a disaster, but a new mission, as a public space created jointly by monarch and city passed from the one to the other. This insightful study will appeal to scholars of Russia and general readers interested in Russian history.