front cover of Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception
Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception
Yuri Tsivian
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Early Cinema in Russia chronicles one of the great lost periods in cinema history, that of Pre-Revolutionary Russia. In contrast to standard film histories, Yuri Tsivian focuses on reflected images: it features the historical film-goer and early writings on film as well as examining the physical elements of cinematic performance.

"Tsivian casts a probing beam of illumination into some of the most obscure areas of film history. And the terrain he lights up with his careful assembly and insightful reading of the records of early film viewing in Russia not only changes our sense of the history of this period but also . . . causes us to re-evaluate some of our most basic theoretical and historical assumptions about what a film is and how it affects its audiences."—Tom Gunning, from the Foreword

"Early Cinema in Russia . . . reveals Tsivian's strengths very well and demonstrates why he is . . . the finest film historian of his generation in the former Soviet Union."—Denise Y. Youngblood, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television

"A work of fundamental importance."—Julian Graffy, Recent Studies of Russian and Soviet Cinema
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Eastern Europe 1740-1985
Feudalism to Communism
Robin Okey
University of Minnesota Press, 1987

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Eco-Nationalism
Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine
Jane I. Dawson
Duke University Press, 1996
Eco-nationalism examines the spectacular rise of the anti-nuclear power movement in the former Soviet Union during the early perestroika period, its unexpected successes in the late 1980s, and its substantial decline after 1991. Jane I. Dawson argues that anti-nuclear activism, one of the most dynamic social forces to emerge during these years, was primarily a surrogate for an ever-present nationalism and a means of demanding greater local self-determination under the Soviet system. Rather than representing strongly held environmental and anti-nuclear convictions, this activism was a political effort that reflected widely held anti-Soviet sentiments and a resentment against Moscow’s domination of the region—an effort that largely disappeared with the dissolution of the USSR.
Dawson combines a theoretical framework based on models of social movements with extensive field research to compare the ways in which nationalism, regionalism, and other political demands were incorporated into anti-nuclear movements in Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Tatarstan, and Crimea. These comparative case studies form the core of the book and trace differences among the various regional movements to the distinctive national identities of groups involved. Reflecting the new opportunities for research that have become available since the late 1980s, these studies draw upon Dawson’s extended on-site observation of local movements through 1995 and her unique access to movement activists and their personal archives.
Analyzing and documenting a development with sobering and potentially devastating implications for nuclear power safety in the former USSR and beyond, Eco-nationalism’s examination of social activism in late and postcommunist societies will interest readers concerned with the politics of global environmentalism and the process of democratization in the post-Soviet world.
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The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600-1725
Richard Hellie
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In this extraordinary and definitive study of the Russian economy from 1600-1725, Richard Hellie offers a glimpse of the material life of the people of Muscovy during that tumultuous period—how they lived, what they ate, how they were taxed, what their wages allowed them to enjoy. Making these determinations required more than a decade of work and analysis of over 107,000 records. The resulting book devotes chapters to each category of consumer goods, in which transactions involving the product are summarized. Hellie further provides notes and commentary on the transactions to locate their place in the full Russian economy.

Impressive in scope and data analysis, Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600-1725 will be an invaluable resource and reference work for all readers interested in economic history and the history of material culture. Since there is no comparable one-volume work for any other society at any other time in history, Hellie's is a truly unique and profound achievement.

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Eleven Winters of Discontent
The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan
Sherzod Muminov
Harvard University Press, 2022

The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan.

In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home.

The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state.

Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives—including memoirs and survivor interviews—to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.

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The Elusive Empire
Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671
Matthew P. Romaniello
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

In 1552, Muscovite Russia conquered the city of Kazan on the Volga River. It was the first Orthodox Christian victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, a turning point that, over the next four years, would complete Moscow’s control over the river. This conquest provided a direct trade route with the Middle East and would transform Muscovy into a global power. As Matthew Romaniello shows, however, learning to manage the conquered lands and peoples would take decades.
    Russia did not succeed in empire-building because of its strength, leadership, or even the weakness of its neighbors, Romaniello contends; it succeeded by managing its failures. Faced with the difficulty of assimilating culturally and religiously alien peoples across thousands of miles, the Russian state was forced to compromise in ways that, for a time, permitted local elites of diverse backgrounds to share in governance and to preserve a measure of autonomy. Conscious manipulation of political and religious language proved more vital than sheer military might. For early modern Russia, empire was still elusive—an aspiration to political, economic, and military control challenged by continuing resistance, mismanagement, and tenuous influence over vast expanses of territory.

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Empire of the Periphery
Russia and the World System
Boris Kagarlitsky
Pluto Press, 2007

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history. Encompassing all key periods in Russia's dramatic development, the book covers everything from early settlers, through medieval decline, Ivan the Terrible - the 'English Tsar', Peter the Great, the Crimean War and the rise of capitalism, the revolution, the Soviet period, finally ending with the return of capitalism after 1991.

Setting Russia within the context of the 'World System', as outlined by Wallerstein, this is a major work of historical Marxist theory that is set to become a future classic.

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The End of Peasantry?
The Disintegration of Rural Russia
Grigory Ioffe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

The End of Peasantry? examines the dramatic recent decline of agriculture in post-Soviet Russia. Historically, Russian farmers have encountered difficulties relating to the sheer abundance of land, the vast distances between population centers, and harsh environmental conditions. More recently, the drastic depopulation of rural spaces, decreases in sown acreage, and overall inefficiency of land usage have resulted in the disruption and spatial fragmentation of the countryside. For many decades, rural migration has been a selective process, resulting in the most enterprising and self-motivated people leaving the rural periphery. The new agricultural operators representing nascent but aggressive Russian agribusiness have difficulty co-opting traditional rural communities afflicted by profound social dysfunction. The contrast between agriculture in proximity to large cities and in their hinterlands is as sharp as ever, and some vacant niches are increasingly occupied by ethnically non-Russian migrants. All of these conditions existed to some degree in pre-Soviet times, but they have been exacerbated since Russia took steps toward a market economy.

Understudied and often underestimated in the West, the crisis facing Russian agriculture has profound implications for the political and economic stability of Russia. The authors see hope in the significant increase in land use intensity on vastly diminished farmland. The lessons gathered from this thoroughly researched study are far-reaching and relevant to the disciplines of Slavic and European studies, agriculture, political science, economics, and human geography.

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Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy
Richard Hellie
University of Chicago Press, 1971

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Entangled Far Rights
A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the Twentieth Century
Marlene Laruelle
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Since the rise of Putin, many have puzzled by the strange affinity of the far right in the West for today's authoritarian Russia. Entangled Far Rights explores the deep roots of this phenomena and reveals it to be a running thread through the entire history of the long 20th century and present regardless of the changing political character of Russia's regimes. 
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Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region
Sea Changes
William Wheeler
University College London, 2021
Presents a political ecology of life amid overlapping environmental and political upheaval.
 
Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea dried into an unrecognizable fraction of its size during a period of dramatic political change. Through the experiences of local fisheries across the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region explores the diverse ways people in different socioeconomic contexts understand environmental change. In this book, William Wheeler offers a rigorous political ecology of life amid overlapping upheavals, attentive both to the legacies of Sovietism and the possibilities of transnationalism. 
 
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Epic Revisionism
Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda
Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution—figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov—Epic Revisionism tells the fascinating story of these individuals’ return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. 

    An inherently interdisciplinary project, Epic Revisionism features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources—newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories—to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history.

“These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system.”—David L. Hoffmann, Slavic Review
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Equality and Revolution
Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917
Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
On July 20, 1917, Russia became the world’s first major power to grant women the right to vote and hold public office. Yet in the wake of the October Revolution later that year, the foundational organizations and individuals who pioneered the suffragist cause were all but erased from Russian history. The women’s movement, when mentioned at all, is portrayed as meaningless to proletariat and peasant women, based in elitist and bourgeoisie culture of the tsarist era, and counter to socialist ideology. In this groundbreaking book, Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild reveals that Russian feminists in fact appealed to all classes and were an integral force for revolution and social change, particularly during the monumental uprisings of 1905–1917.

Ruthchild offers a telling examination of the dynamics present in imperialist Russia that fostered a growing feminist movement. Based upon extensive archival research in six countries, she analyzes the backgrounds, motivations, methods, activism, and organizational networks of early Russian feminists, revealing the foundations of a powerful feminist intelligentsia that came to challenge, and eventually bring down, the patriarchal tsarist regime.

Ruthchild profiles the individual women (and a few men) who were vital to the feminist struggle, as well as the major conferences, publications, and organizations that promoted the cause. She documents political party debates on the acceptance of women’s suffrage and rights, and follows each party’s attempt to woo feminist constituencies despite their fear of women gaining too much political power. Ruthchild also compares and contrasts the Russian movement to those in Britain, China, Germany, France, and the United States. Equality and Revolution offers an original and revisionist study of the struggle for women’s political rights in late imperial Russia, and presents a significant reinterpretation of a decisive period of Russian—and world—history.
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Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia
The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev's Sanin
Otto Boele
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
Banned shortly after its publication in 1907, the Russian novel Sanin scandalized readers with the sexual exploits of its eponymous hero. Wreaking havoc on the fictional town he visits in Mikhail Artsybashev’s story, the character Sanin left an even deeper imprint on the psyche of the real-life Russian public. Soon “Saninism” became the buzzword for the perceived faults of the nation. Seen as promoting a wave of hedonistic, decadent behavior, the novel was suppressed for decades, leaving behind only the rumor of its supposedly epidemic effect on a vulnerable generation of youth.
    Who were the Saninists, and what was their “teaching” all about? Delving into police reports, newspaper clippings, and amateur plays, Otto Boele finds that Russian youth were not at all swept away by the self-indulgent lifestyle of the novel’s hero. In fact, Saninism was more smoke than fire—a figment of the public imagination triggered by anxieties about the revolution of 1905 and the twilight of the Russian empire. The reception of the novel, Boele shows, reflected much deeper worries caused by economic reforms, an increase in social mobility, and changing attitudes toward sexuality.
    Showing how literary criticism interacts with the age-old medium of rumor, Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia offers a meticulous analysis of the scandal’s coverage in the provincial press and the reactions of young people who appealed to their peers to resist the novel’s nihilistic message. By examining the complex dialogue between readers and writers, children and parents, this study provides fascinating insights into Russian culture on the eve of World War I.
 
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Erotic Utopia
The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle
Olga Matich
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline. What made them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death both by metaphysical and physical means. They intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender. In Erotic Utopia, Olga Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical utopian proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence.

2006 Winner, CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Titles, Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
 
Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association

“Offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of new information on early Russian modernism. . . . It is required reading for anyone interested in fin-de-siècle Russia and in the history of sexuality in general.”—Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Slavic and East European Journal

“Thoroughly entertaining.”—Avril Pyman, Slavic Review
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Eternal Russia
Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy
Jonathan Steele
Harvard University Press, 1994

Here is an eyewitness account of the six years of turbulent change from the Soviet Union to Russia. Jonathan Steele’s three decades as a journalist covering that eternal nation have given him a keen and deeply informed perspective on the democratic revolution and the issues still threatening the new nation. What does the future hold for Russian democracy under Yeltsin? Can market reform work? Under all the news and confusion, how much has the country really changed?

Eternal Russia draws on Steele’s interviews with key figures, including Gorbachev and the former Communist Party Politburo, as well as senior members of the Yeltsin inner circle.

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Eurasian Environments
Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History
NIcholas B. Breyfogle
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written. 
 
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Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia
Select Documents, 1772–1914
Edited by ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Jay M. Harris
Brandeis University Press, 2013
This book makes accessible—for the first time in English—declassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life stories—reflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinary—the sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772–1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.
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Everything Has Already Been Written
Moscow Conceptualist Poetry and Performance
Gerald Janecek
Northwestern University Press, 2019
 
Innovative poets such as Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, and Dmitry Prigov are among the most prominent literary figures of Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, yet they are virtually unknown outside Russia. The same is true of the numerous active Russian performance art groups, especially the pioneering Collective Actions group led by the brilliantly inventive Andrei Monastyrsky. Everything Has Already Been Written strives to make Moscow Conceptualism more accessible, to break the language barrier and to foster understanding among an international readership by thoroughly discussing a broad range of specific works and theories. Janecek’s study is the first comprehensive analysis of Moscow Conceptualist poetry and theory, vital for an understanding of Russian culture in the post‑Conceptualist era.
 
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Exile and Identity
Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II
Katherine R. Jolluck
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
Using firsthand, personal accounts, and focusing on the experiences of women, Katherine R. Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939.

Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions. In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens—only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland—were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences.

Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival.

Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.
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Exodus and Its Aftermath
Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior
Albert Kaganovitch
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
During World War II, some two million Jewish refugees relocated from the western regions of the USSR to the Soviet interior. Citizens in the Central Asian territories were at best indifferent—and at worst openly hostile—toward these migrants. Unpopular policies dictated that residents house refugees and share their limited food and essentials with these unwelcome strangers. When the local population began targeting the newcomers, Soviet authorities saw the antisemitic violence as discontentment with the political system itself and came down hard against it. Local authorities, however, were less concerned with the discrimination, focusing instead on absorbing large numbers of displaced people while also managing regional resentment during the most difficult years of the war. Despite the lack of harmonious integration, party officials spread the myth that they had successfully assimilated over ten million evacuees.

Albert Kaganovitch reconstructs the conditions that gave rise to this upsurge in antisemitic sentiment and provides new statistical data on the number of Jewish refugees who lived in the Urals, Siberia, and Middle Volga areas. The book’s insights into the regional distribution and concentration of these émigrés offer a behind-the-scenes look at the largest and most intensive Jewish migration in history.
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The Experimental Group
Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes
Matthew Jesse Jackson
University of Chicago Press, 2010

A compelling study of unofficial postwar Soviet art, The Experimental Group takes as its point of departure a subject of strange fascination: the life and work of renowned professional illustrator and conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov.

Kabakov’s art—iconoclastic installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—delicately experiments with such issues as history, mortality, and disappearance, and here exemplifies a much larger narrative about the work of the artists who rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. By placing Kabakov and his conceptualist peers in line with our own contemporary perspective, Matthew Jesse Jackson suggests that the art that emerged in the wake of Stalin belongs neither entirely to its lost communist past nor to a future free from socialist nostalgia. Instead, these artists and their work produced a critical and controversial chapter in the as yet unwritten history of global contemporary art.

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Explorations in Political Psychology
Shanto Iyengar and William J. McGuire, eds.
Duke University Press, 1993
Mapping the territory where political science and psychology intersect, Explorations in Political Psychology offers a broad overview of the the field of political psychology—from its
historical evolution as an area of inquiry to the rich and eclectic array of theories, concepts, and methods that mark it as an emerging discipline.
In introductory essays, editors Shanto Iyengar and William J. McGuire identify the points of exchange between the disciplines represented and discuss the issues that make up the subfields of political psychology. Bringing together leading scholars from social psychology and political science, the following sections discuss attitude research (the study of political attitudes and opinions); cognition and information-processing (the relationship between the structures of human information-processing and political and policy preferences); and decision making (how people make decisions about political preferences).
As a comprehensive introduction to a growing field of interdisciplinary concern, Explorations in Political Psychology will prove a useful guide for historians, social psychologists, and political scientists with an interest in individual political behavior.

Contributors. Stephen Ansolabehere, Donald Granberg, Shanto Iyengar, Robert Jervis, Milton Lodge, Roger D. Masters, William J. McGuire, Victor C. Ottati, Samuel L. Popkin, William M. Runyan, David O. Sears, Patrick Stroh, Denis G. Sullivan, Philip E. Tetlock, Robert S. Wyer, Jr.

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