Why, asks Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in this controversial book, has Russia been a country of suffering? Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries, ancient religious tracts emphasizing humility as the mother of virtues, the ......
The Age of Assassins describes in gripping detail Vladimir Putins ruthless rise to power in Russia from his earliest rise to power in 1991 as an insignificant former KGB officer in Berlin. He gained power over the entire country and its economy by determining elections through business deals and criminal intervention -- from sophisticated ......
The Hermitage Musuem in St Petersburg is possibly the greatest museum in the world. It began as a showcase for the art treasures of the Tsars and reflects their legendary extravagance. Imperial romances, marriages and murders all had an impact on the collection, as did the byzantine bartering of international politics. Nationalised by the ......
War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939-1945, Volume 3
Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world's three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is ......
Englishwoman Mary McAuley first arrived in Leningrad in the early 1960s, eager to study labor relations for her thesis. Staying at a hostel, she met a number of Soviet students, many born under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Over the half-century that followed, McAuley traced their varying paths and the changing face of the former imperial capital. ......
This title is filled with fine-scale drawings of Russian armoured fighting vehicles including: T-34 Model 1940; BA-64B Model 1943 Light Armoured Car; BT-7 (Model 1937 Fast Tank); SU-76i (on Pz III chassis); KV-8 flamethrower; ZIS-42 Halftrack; and dozens more.
In the eighteenth century, as modern forms of literature began to emerge in Russia, most of the writers producing it were members of the nobility. But their literary pursuits competed with strictly enforced obligations to imperial state service. Unique to Russia was the Table of Ranks, introduced by Emperor Peter the Great in 1722. Noblesse oblige ......
Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when ""Russian"" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic ""home"" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and ......
The earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel narrative in Arabic Mission to the Volga is a pioneering text of peerless historical and literary value. In its pages, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia. In this colorful documentary from the ......
