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Iwan Grożny, twórca Cywlizacji Turańskiej (bardzo wyra....jpg

Russia - Iwan Grożny, twórca Cywlizacji Turańskiej bardzo wyrażne euro-azjatyckie rysy twarzy.jpg

Catherine Merridale - Ivan's War, Life and Death in th....jpg

Russia - Catherine Merridale - Ivans War, Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 2006.jpg

They died in vast numbers, eight million men and women d ...

They died in vast numbers, eight million men and women driven forward in suicidal charges, shattered by German shells and tanks. They were the soldiers of the Red Army, an exhausted mass of recruits who confronted Europe's most lethal fighting force and by 1945 had defeated it. For sixty years, their experiences were suppressed, replaced by patriotic propaganda. We know how the soldiers died, but nearly nothing about how they lived, how they saw the world, or why they fought. In this ambitious, revelatory history, Catherine Merridale uncovers the harrowing story of who these soldiers were, and how they lived and died during the war.

Jonathan Frankel - Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jew....jpg

Russia - Jonathan Frankel - Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews 2008.jpg

This collection of essays examines the politicization an ...

This collection of essays examines the politicization and the politics of the Jewish people in the Russian empire during the late tsarist period. The focal point is the Russian revolution of 1905, when the political mobilization of the Jewish youth took on massive proportions, producing a cohort of radicalized activists - committed to socialism, nationalism, or both - who would exert an extraordinary influence on Jewish history in the twentieth-century in Eastern Europe, the United States, and Palestine. Frankel describes the dynamics of 1905 and the leading role of the intelligentsia as revolutionaries, ideologues, and observers. But, elsewhere, he also looks backwards to the emergent stage of modern Jewish politics in both Russia and the West and forward to the part played by the veterans of 1905 in Palestine and the United States.

Karl W. Ryavec - The Russian Bureaucracy, Power and Pa....jpg

Russia - Karl W. Ryavec - The Russian Bureaucracy, Power and Pathology 2005.jpg

This unique study provides an original, nitty-gritty vie ...

This unique study provides an original, nitty-gritty view of the true nature and operation of Russia's state bureaucracy from the imperial period to the present, including the Putin presidency. The only book-length exploration of the problems and deficiencies of Russian bureaucracy since tsarist times, this detailed work sheds important new light on Russian public administration, an often-overlooked but key barrier to Russian normalization and democratization.

M. Goldman - The Piratization of Russia, Russian Refor....jpg

Russia - M. Goldman - The Piratization of Russia, Russian Reform Goes Awry 2003.jpg

A good picture of the club of greedy criminals who have ...

A good picture of the club of greedy criminals who have hijacked an entire country and wrecked it Since this is one of the great economic changes of the 20th century, and robbery on a scale that has few if any precedents, Goldman's book is very valuable and important. He is candid about the monumental errors his colleagues made as advisers (ignoring those who dipped into the honey pot and made, by professorial standards, fortunes). He has interviewed countless people and made the arcane clear. Authoritative, well-written, an excellent piece of work. In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union claiming ownership some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires. These self-styled oligarchs were accused of using guile, intimidation, and occasionally violence to reap these rewards. This revelatory work examines the structure of the Russian economy and considers why it collapsed in 1998 and why it began its recovery in 1999. It also provides a close examination of the Russian oil industry and the oligarchs who control it and who have now decided to go "legitimate".

John Alexander Armstrong - Soviet Partisans in World W....jpg

Russia - John Alexander Armstrong - Soviet Partisans in World War II 1964.jpg

When the Wehrmacht rolled into the Soviet Union in World ...

When the Wehrmacht rolled into the Soviet Union in World War II, it got more than it bargained for. Notwithstanding the Red Army's retreat, Soviet citizens fought fiercely against German occupiers, engaging in raids, sabotage, and intelligence gathering--largely without any oversight from Stalin and his iron-fisted rule. Kenneth Slepyan provides an enlightening social and political history of the Soviet partisan movement, a people's army of irregulars fighting behind enemy lines. These insurgents included not only civilians--many of them women--but also stranded Red Army soldiers, national minorities, and even former collaborators. While others have documented the military contributions of the movement, Slepyan is the first to describe it as a social phenomenon and to reveal how its members were both challenged and transformed by the crucible of war. By tracing the movement's origins, internal squabbles, and evolution throughout the war, Slepyan shows that people who suddenly had the autonomy to act on their own came to rethink the Stalinist regime. He assesses how partisan initiative and self-reliance competed with and countered the demands of state control and how social identities influenced relations among partisans, as well as between partisans and Soviet authorities. Slepyan has tapped newly opened Soviet archives, as well as wartime radio broadcasts and Communist Party publications and memoirs, to depict the partisans as agents actively pursuing their own agendas. His book gives us a picture of their day-to-day struggle that was previously unknown to all but those few who personally survived the experience, paying special attention to questions of nationality, ethnicity, and gender to illuminate the sociopolitical relations within this diverse group. Through these varied accounts, he demonstrates that Soviet citizens reinterpreted Stalinism and the Soviet experience in the context of total war.

Jennifer I. Considine, William A. Kerr - The Russian O....jpg

Russia - Jennifer I. Considine, William A. Kerr - The Russian Oil Economy 2002.jpg

‘This impressive intellectual endeavour tells you everyt ...

‘This impressive intellectual endeavour tells you everything your wanted to know about the Russian oil industry but were afraid to ask. Even for those of us, who haven’t been afraid to ask, it has a wealth of information for anyone who wants to follow this interesting industry through the vagaries of its convoluted past.’ - Carol Dahl, Colorado School of Mines ‘A timely review of the sometime triumphs and repeated failures of Russian oil industry planning. As this comprehensive volume makes clear, the interaction between Russia and global oil markets has often been critical. Over the last century, Russia has played a leading role in oil economics, and as the authors demonstrate, Russia’s untamed power may yet bring turmoil to western oil companies and middle-eastern governments. Despite the spottiness of economic reforms in the 1990s and the incomplete privatization of the oil industry described by Considine and Kerr, the ascendancy of Putin is leading to another surge in Russian oil exports and OPEC’s effort to stabilize prices appears to hang in the balance. The Russian Oil Economy is one of the few studies that puts these events into perspective while offering insights into the outcome.’ - Adam Siemenski, Deutsche Bank Securities ‘In the old days we used to discuss international oil and energy in terms of WOCA, the World Outside the Communist Areas. This was because no-one knew what was happening within the USSR (or China). Now, Jennifer Considine and William Kerr have provided us with a book that tells us more than we could ever have imagined we would ever know about the Oil Economy of Russia. The final nail, it might be said, in the coffin of WOCA.’ - Ian Skeet, Oxford Energy Forum, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, UK

Allen C. Lynch - How Russia is Not Ruled, Reflections ....jpg

Russia - Allen C. Lynch - How Russia is Not Ruled, Reflections on Russian Political Development 20051.jpg

As Russia tries to establish the foundations of a stable ...

As Russia tries to establish the foundations of a stable and productive market-based economic system, it must determine the importance of the state to its prospects. What kind of political order corresponds to the challenges that Russia faces in the post-Soviet period? This analysis argues that geography matters a great deal and the state remains central in compensating for the austere implications of economic geography for Russia's economic prospects under market circumstances.

Joel M. Ostrow, Georgiy A. Satarov, Irina M. Khakamada....JPG

Russia - Joel M. Ostrow, Georgiy A. Satarov, Irina M. Khakamada -... Russia, An Inside View of the Demise of Democracy 2007.JPG

The still-prevailing notion among Western powers, includ ...

The still-prevailing notion among Western powers, including the United States, is that Russia is a democracy, or at least that it remains in the process of democratization. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Ostrow, Satarov, and Khakamada demonstrate in The Consolidation of Dictatorship in Russia. Journalists critical of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship, such as Anna Politkovskaya, are murdered. Nearly 100 investigative journalists, an average of two per month, have been murdered since Putin took power, and not one person has been charged or convicted of those crimes. Others critical of or in opposition to Putin often meet the same fate, as in the suspicious poisoning in London of Aleksandr Litvinenko. How did Russia manage to transition from dictatorship to dictatorship, when the hopes for democracy were so great and when Western conventional wisdom assumed for so long that democracy was inevitable there? The Consolidation of Dictatorship in Russia answers that question. Georgiy A. Satarov was President Boris Yeltsin's chief political counselor for much of the 1990s, and in that capacity was inside the Kremlin and present when most of the decisions this book details were made. Irina M. Khakamada was a Deputy in the Russian State Duma, a Deputy Speaker in the parliament, held a cabinet-level position in the government, and most recently was Putin's main liberal opponent in the 2004 presidential election. These individuals are among Russia's most prominent democratic activists and were participants in the events that led Russia away from the path of democratization. They share a unique perspective and knowledge of what happened and why. The authors seek to explain not just what Russia did and the consequences of those decisions, but why Russia's leaders made the choices that undermined democratic political development, something no book has done until now.

Ben Shepherd - War in the Wild East, The German Army a....jpg

Russia - Ben Shepherd - War in the Wild East, The German Army and Soviet Partisans 1985.jpg

In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a sa ...

In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army's eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime's annihilation policies.

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