The Russian Revolution and Civil War - as never seen before! Packed with jaw-dropping, at times blood-curdling images, Russia Accursed! showcases the reaction of Ivan Vladmirov (1869-1947) to the human suffering and Bolshevik barbarity he observed as an artist-reporter during the years 1917-25. Some of his paintings and watercolours appeared in magazines and periodicals, including London weekly The Graphic (Vladimirov's mother was English). But other scenes - featuring point-blank executions, passers-by cutting chunks of meat from a dead horse or dogs gnawing at a human corpse - were deemed too shocking for publication and had to be secretly exported from the USSR by American relief workers. Selected from private collections, Russian museums and the Hoover Library at Stanford University, California, most of the 160 Vladimirov images in this majestic 324-page volume are published here for the first time. Placed in their historic context by scholarly essays, contemporary photographs and eye-witness quotes, they revolutionize our understanding of the beginnings of the Soviet Union.

The ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals. Here, Young offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists.

In Putin's Labor Dilemma, Stephen Crowley investigates how the fear of labor protest has inhibited substantial economic transformation in Russia. Putin boasts he has the backing of workers in the country's industrial heartland, but as economic growth slows in Russia, reviving the economy will require restructuring the country's industrial landscape. At the same time, doing so threatens to generate protest and instability from a key regime constituency. However, continuing to prop up Russia's Soviet-era workplaces, writes Crowley, could lead to declining wages and economic stagnation, threatening protest and instability. Crowley explores the dynamics of a Russian labor market that generally avoids mass unemployment, the potentially explosive role of Russia's monotowns, conflicts generated by massive downsizing in "Russia's Detroit" (Tol'yatti), and the rapid politicization of the truck drivers movement. Labor protests currently show little sign of threatening Putin's hold on power, but the manner in which they are being conducted point to substantial chronic problems that will be difficult to resolve. Putin's Labor Dilemma demonstrates that the Russian economy must either find new sources of economic growth or face stagnation. Either scenario—market reforms or economic stagnation—raises the possibility, even probability, of destabilizing social unrest.

Russia's interactions with the West have been a perennial theme of Slavic Studies, and of Russian culture and politics. Likewise, representations of Russia have shaped the identities of many western cultures. No longer providing the 'Evil Empire' of 20th American popular consciousness, images of Russia have more recently bifurcated along two streams: that of the impoverished refugee and that of the sinister mafia gang. Focusing on film as an engine of intercultural communication, this is the first book to explore mutual perceptions of the foreign Other in the cinema of Russia and the West during, and after, communism. The book's structure reflects both sides of this fascinating dialogue: Part 1 covers Russian/Soviet cinematic representations of otherness, and Part 2 treats western representations of Russia and the Soviet Union. An extensive Introduction sets the dialogue in a theoretical context. The contributors include leading film scholars from the USA, Europe and Russia.

An expert historian and former ambassador to Moscow unlocks fact from fiction to reveal what lies at the root of the Russian story. Churchill remarked that Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That has become an excuse for intellectual laziness. Russia is not all that different from anywhere else. But you have to disentangle the facts from the myths created both by the Russians themselves and by those who dislike them. In this dynamic new history, Rodric Braithwaite—Russia expert and former ambassador to Moscow—does exactly that, unpicking fact from fiction to discover what lies at the root of the Russian story. Russia is the largest country in the world, with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Over a thousand years this multifaceted nation of shifting borders has been known as Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. Thirty years ago it was reinvented as the Russian Federation. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They, too, omit episodes of national disgrace in favor of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality. Russia is not an enigma, but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and always complicated.

No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war. While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride. War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.

This collection serves as an introduction to the great variety of approaches being used by Slavicists and historians to situate music and literature in the Russian cultural imagination. Part I focuses on music in art. The nine essays in this section explore the complex interaction of literary and musical texts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors discuss such writers as Pushkin, Chekhov, and Pasternak, and composers including Musorgsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Blok. Part II centers on music in life. Its five essays address music as a cultural form, as presented and enjoyed in the home, the theater, and the opera house. This book provides a unique window on The musical, literary, and social interactions that have been typical of modern Russian culture.Contributing to this volume are Thomas P. Hodge, Caryl Emerson, Jennifer Fuller, Justin Weir, Alexander Burry, James Morgan, Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Tim Langen, Jesse Langen, Richard Stites, Ilya Vinitsky, Julie Buckler, Rosamund Bartlett, Boris Gasparov, Nicholas Glossop, and Amy Nelson.

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long before Peter the Great’s opening to the West. Examining a broad range of writings, G. M. Hamburg shows why Russia’s enlightenment constituted a precondition for the explosive emergence of nineteenth-century writers such as Fedor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev.

This publication includes the continuation of "Bulletins of the Russian liberation committee" under the heading "Facts and documents".