In Russia, food has a hugely important role in political, symbolic, and practical terms. In this illuminating history of Russian food in the modern age, Catriona Kelly – a leading cultural historian and keen amateur cook – reflects on this and an environment where what you eat (and drink) indicates how patriotic you are. Kelly argues that an expectation of 'feeding' is embedded in attitudes to the state as provider, and that rationing systems have traditionally replicated and even enforced social hierarchies. The book looks at how Russian food is intimately connected with family and friends, and was an important source of delight even in the Soviet period, when official culinary provision and practices ostensibly sought to promote nutrition above all, and food was often short. Russian Food since 1800 traces these complex and contradictory associations. It also examines various shifts in diet and cuisine over the last three centuries, including the ways in which old traditions such as pickling and jam-making sit alongside wider world influences from the vast imperial hinterland in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as Western Europe and America.

This timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and yet, by the time he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's independent media was crushed, while the few viable opposition figures were either imprisoned, exiled, or dead under mysterious circumstances. Eliot Borenstein looks at the manufactured cult of Putin, the competing models of Russianness put forth in the media, the obsession with nostalgia and the limits on imagining the future, the rise of aggressive patriotism and the myth of ancient Russian 'traditional' values, the significance of the fight against 'gay propaganda', and the absurdist strategies used by the opposition in the face of increasing restrictions on free speech. Though the book's title invokes Putin, Russian Culture under Putin does not cast the Russian leader as an all-knowing genius pursuing a master plan. The culture of the past twenty years, both official and independent, has been largely improvisational. 21st-century Russia, as Borenstein demonstrates so masterfully, has not been frog-marched into unfreedom, but has in fact lurched back and forth on a dimly-lit path.

For nearly two centuries readers all over the world have turned to the great canon of Russian literature. Love and death, war and peace, yes, even crime and punishment; readers across the globe have found in Russian writing a substantial measure of intellectual provocation, aesthetic pleasure, emotional resonance, and personal solace. Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature explores the familiar names of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to connect readers with these experiences. With a lively, jargon-free style and insightful analyses of thought-provoking texts, this concise volume helps you to understand more fully the pleasure to be found in reading, and re-reading. By identifying what readers seek and find in Russian books-from aesthetically pleasing descriptions to apt psychological renderings-Angela Brintlinger aims to enhance the gratification of reading, giving armchair travelers an excuse to embark on a series of fascinating journeys. Drawing on Brintlinger's experiences as a scholar, teacher, and reader of literature, the book is informed by a deep cultural understanding of Russia and Russians. It reveals this through engaging literary meditations that connect Russian literature to the losses, ironies, and ambiguities that define the human condition. Exploring authors' imagined readers as well as authors themselves, Brintlinger argues that it is these readers, from all over the world, who get to decide what literary works are worth reading. As a bonus, she offers an appendix with more names and titles, familiar and perhaps utterly new-books that show the ways in which Russian literature remains vital today.

In the first cultural and political history of the Russian nuclear age, Paul Josephson describes the rise of nuclear physics in the USSR, the enthusiastic pursuit of military and peaceful nuclear programs through the Chernobyl disaster and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ongoing, self-proclaimed 'renaissance' of nuclear power in Russia in the 21st century. At the height of their power, the Soviets commanded 39,000 nuclear warheads, yet claimed to be servants of the 'peaceful atom' – which they also pursued avidly. This book examines both military and peaceful Soviet and post-Soviet nuclear programs for the long durée – before the war, during the Cold War, and in Russia to the present – whilst also grappling with the political and ideological importance of nuclear technologies, the associated economic goals, the social and environmental costs, and the cultural embrace of nuclear power. Nuclear Russia probes the juncture of history of science and technology, political and cultural history, and environmental history. It considers the atom in Russian society as a reflection of Leninist technological utopianism, Cold War imperatives, scientific hubris, public acceptance, and a state desire to conquer nature. Furthermore the book examines the vital – and perhaps unexpected – significance of ethnicity and gender in nuclear history by looking at how Kazakhs and Nenets lost their homelands and their health in Russia in the wake of nuclear testing, as well as the surprising sexualization of the taming of the female atom in the Russian 'Miss Atom' contests that commenced in the 21st century.

Mark D. Steinberg explores the work of individuals he recognizes as utopians during the most dramatic period in Russian and Soviet history. It has long been a cliché to argue that Russian revolutionary movements have been inspired by varieties of 'utopian dreaming' – claims which, although not wrong, are too often used uncritically. For the first time, Russian Utopian digs deeper and asks what utopians meant at the level of ideas, emotions, and lived experience. Despite the fact that many would have resisted the 'utopian' label at the time because of its dismissive meanings, Steinberg's comprehensive approach sees him take in political leaders, intellectuals, writers, and artists (visual, material, and musical), as well as workers, peasants, soldiers, students and others. Ideologically, the figures discussed range from reactionaries to anarchists, nationalists (including non-Russians) to feminists, both religious believers and 'the militant godless'. This innovative text dissects the very notion of the Russian utopian and examines its significance in its various fascinating contexts.

The Russian internet is a hotbed for memes and viral videos: the political, satirical and simply absurd compete for attention in Russia while the West turns to it for an endless reserve of humorous content. But how did this powerful cyber community grow out of the repressive media environment of the Soviet Union? What does this viral content reveal about the country, its politics and its culture? And why are the memes and videos of today's Russia so popular, spreading so rapidly across the globe? Award-winning author Eliot Borenstein explores the explosive online movement and unpicks, for the first time, the role of mimetic content and digital activism in modern Russian history up to the present day.

This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations – in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

Discover the fascinating details of Russian history, culture and eating habits and enjoy the tasty delights of the vast country that spans through 11 time zones and brings together more than 180 ethnic groups. Detailing the evolution and development of traditional Russian cooking, this book gives a better understanding of the foods that are now known as classical Russian dishes. Through the words of native Muscovite, Maria Depenweiller, who was born and raised in Moscow before immigrating to Canada, Russian Cuisine: Traditional and Contemporary Home Cooking covers not only Russian cooking methods such as the Russian oven samovar, but also the impact of Russian politics on its food. Discover how: The Soviet Revolution impacted Russian eating habits. Or how the Russian tea drinking tradition got started. Learn about the home cooking of the Russian Empire and try schi and rasstegai. Delight your guests with marvelous assortment of zakuski or ant hill torte from the classical Soviet cuisine. Complete the experience with suggested reading from the literature Russian classics and music accompaniment to match the mood. From table settings, to backyard gardens and pantry items, this book teaches you everything you need to know about Russian food.

Ò . . . a marvelous source for the social history of Russian peasant society in the years before the revolution. . . . The translation is superb.Ó ÑSteven Hoch Ò . . . one of the best ethnographic portraits that we have of the Russian village. . . . a highly readable text that is an excellent introduction to the world of the Russian peasantry.Ó ÑSamuel C. Ramer Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia provides a unique firsthand portrait of peasant family life as recorded by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, an ethnographer and painter who spent four years at the turn of the twentieth century observing the life and customs of villagers in a central Russian province. Unusual in its awareness of the rapid changes in the Russian village in the late nineteenth century and in its concentration on the treatment of women and children, SemyonovaÕs ethnography vividly describes courting rituals, marriage and sexual practices, childbirth, infanticide, child-rearing practices, the lives of women, food and drink, work habits, and the household economy. In contrast to a tradition of rosy, romanticized descriptions of peasant communities by Russian upper-class observers, Semyonova gives an unvarnished account of the harsh living conditions and often brutal relationships within peasant families.