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According to Marx, the family is the primal scene of the division of labor and the "germ" of every exploitative practice. In this insightful study, Jacob Emery examines the Soviet Union's programmatic effort to institute a global siblinghood of the proletariat, revealing how alternative kinships motivate different economic relations and make...

A significant political figure in twentieth-century Russia, Alexander Yakovlev was the intellectual force behind the processes of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) that liberated the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from Communist rule between 1989 and 1991. Yet, until now, not a single full-scale biography has been devoted to...

The Eurasianist movement was launched in the 1920s by a group of young Russian emigres who had recently emerged from years of fighting and destruction. Drawing on the cultural fermentation of Russian modernism in the arts and literature, as well as in politics and scholarship, the movement sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the...

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roger Martin du Gard was one of the most famous writers in the Western world. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937, and his works, especially Les Thibault, a multivolume novel, were translated into English and read widely. Today, this close friend of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, and Andre Malraux is...

How did enlightened Russians of the eighteenth century understand society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality and justice with the authoritarian political structures in which they lived? Historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how...

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to...

"Doesn't an educated person-simple and working, sick and with a sick child-doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?" Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her...

Sofia Petrovna Svechina (1782-1857), better known as Madame Sophie Swetchine, was the hostess of a famous nineteenth-century Parisian salon. A Russian emigre, Svechina moved to France with her husband in 1816. She had recently converted to Roman Catholicism, and the salon she opened acquired a distinctly religious character. It quickly became...

The inhabitants of Vilnius, the present-day capital of Lithuania, have spoken various languages and professed different religions while living together in relative harmony over the years. The city has played a significant role in the history and development of at least three separate cultures-Polish, Lithuanian, and Jewish-and until very...

A prince in one of Russia's most exalted noble families, Grigorii N. Trubetskoi was a unique and contradictory figure during World War I. A lifelong civil servant and publicist, he began his diplomatic career in Constantinople, where he served as first secretary of the embassy there for several years. He became one of the leaders of an...

The author is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. In this title, his story radiates out, relaying the poet's personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin.

In 1996 the author left the relative stability of the United States for the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, and stayed. In this book, each chapter is an episode - spanning from several hours to several days - of his journeys to the far North, Moscow, the Ural Mountains, the Solovetsky Islands, and a southern stretch of the Volga River.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was a key figure in Imperial Russia and one of its foremost soldiers. At the outbreak of World War I, Nicholas II appointed him Supreme Commander of the Russian Army. Based on archival research in seven countries, this biography covers the Grand Duke's entire life, examining both his private life and his professional career.

Suitable for scholars and general readers alike, this title presents a perspective on the Soviet Union through the history of a sport closely tied to the homeland.

Let's go!" With that, the boyish, grinning Yuri Gagarin launched into space on April 12, 1961, becoming the first human being to orbit the earth. This book relates this twentieth century icon's remarkable life while exploring the fascinating world of Soviet culture.

By the mid-1990s, shuttle trade - a practice in which individual peddlers travel abroad and then return with foreign merchandise in their suitcases for resale-constituted the backbone of Russian consumer trade and was a substantial source of revenue. This book assesses the reasons why women were attracted to this business.

What drove Russia to its disastrous war with Japan in 1904? This book attempts to find the answer in Russia's erratic and confused diplomacy. It explains how the key to understanding tsarist involvement in East Asia lies in the ideologies of the Russians who competed to impose their visions of imperial destiny on the East.

Alexander I was a ruler with high aspirations for the people of Russia. Cosseted as a young grand duke by Catherine the Great, he ascended to the throne in 1801 after the brutal assassination of his father. This biography focuses on the complex forces that shaped Alexander's tumultuous reign.

The metaphor of the nomad may at first seem surprising for Russia given its history of serfdom, travel restrictions, and strict social hierarchy. This book traces the image of the nomad and its relationship to Russian national identity through the debates and discussion of works by writers like Karamzin, Pushkin, Goncharov, and Dostoevsky.

From the time the word kul-tura entered the Russian language in the early nineteenth century, Russian arts and letters have thrived on controversy. This book examines the development of a public discourse on national self-representation in nineteenth-century Russia, as it was styled by the visual arts and in popular journalism.

From 1505 to 1689, Russia's Tsars chose their wives through an elaborate ritual: the bride-show. Alongside accounts of sordid boyar plots against brides and the multiple marriages of Ivan the Terrible, this book offers an analysis of the show's role in the complex politics of royal marriage in early modern Russia.

Analyzes the ideas and activities of the parish clergy serving in St Petersburg, the capital of imperial Russia, in order to discover how the Russian Orthodox Church responded theologically and pastorally to the profound social, economic, and cultural changes that transformed Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Explores the attempts to define and control sexual behavior in the years following the Russian Revolution. This book examines Soviet "sexual enlightenment," a program of popular health and lifestyle advice intended to establish a model of sexual conduct for the men and women who would build socialism.

This work traces the construction of Russia's cultural landscape, showing how 19th-century representations of nature reflected and shaped Russians' ideas about themselves and their nation. It should appeal to those who are interested in landscape history and in Russian art and culture.

Consisting of a rare memoir and also a diary, this title provides a glimpse into the domestic life of Russia's nobility in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Labzina's accounts of her spiritual development and her social sphere offers insights into male and female sensibilities of the time.