In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of ...embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as the world's preeminent antifascist power because of its sacrifices during the Second World War while it has also emphasized how opponents to the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe collaborated with Nazi Germany. Laruelle closely analyzes accusations of fascism toward Russia, soberly assessing both their origins and their accuracy. By labeling ideological opponents as fascist, regardless of their actual values or actions, geopolitical rivals are able to frame their own vision of the world and claim the moral high ground. Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.
In eighteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, bread was a dietary staple-truly grain was the staff of economic, social, and political life. Early on Tsar Peter the Great founded St. ...Petersburg to export goods from Russia's vast but remote interior and by doing so to drive Russia's growth and prosperity. But the new city also had to be fed with grain brought over great distances from those same interior provinces. In this compelling account, Robert E. Jones chronicles how the unparalleled effort put into the building of a wide infrastructure to support the provisioning of the newly created but physically isolated city of St. Petersburg profoundly affected all of Russia's economic life and, ultimately, the historical trajectory of the Russian Empire as a whole.Jones details the planning, engineering, and construction of extensive canal systems that efficiently connected the new capital city to grain and other resources as far away as the Urals, the Volga, and Ukraine. He then offers fresh insights to the state's careful promotion and management of the grain trade during the long eighteenth century. He shows how the government established public granaries to combat shortages, created credit instruments to encourage risk taking by grain merchants, and encouraged the development of capital markets and private enterprise. The result was the emergence of an increasingly important cash economy along with a reliable system of provisioning the fifth largest city in Europe, with the political benefit that St. Petersburg never suffered the food riots common elsewhere in Europe.Thanks to this well-regulated but distinctly free-market trade arrangement, the grain-fueled economy became a wellspring for national economic growth, while also providing a substantial infrastructural foundation for a modernizing Russian state. In many ways, this account reveals the foresight of both Peter I and Catherine II and their determination to steer imperial Russia's national economy away from statist solutions and onto a path remarkably similar to that taken by Western European countries but distinctly different than that of either their Muscovite predecessors or Soviet successors.
Circassia was a small independent nation on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea. For no reason other than ethnic hatred, over the course of hundreds of raids the Russians drove the Circassians ...from their homeland and deported them to the Ottoman Empire. At least 600,000 people lost their lives to massacre, starvation, and the elements while hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homeland. By 1864, three-fourths of the population was annihilated, and the Circassians had become one of the first stateless peoples in modern history.Using rare archival materials, Walter Richmond chronicles the history of the war, describes in detail the final genocidal campaign, and follows the Circassians in diaspora through five generations as they struggle to survive and return home. He places the periods of acute genocide, 1821-1822 and 1863-1864, in the larger context of centuries of tension between the two nations and updates the story to the present day as the Circassian community works to gain international recognition of the genocide as the region prepares for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the site of the Russians' final victory.
This is the third book on material studies in this series on medieval Novgorod and its territory, and deals with a substantial body of animal bones that has been recovered over the last decade. The ...zooarchaeological evidence is discussed by the editor and a number of other British and Russian specialists looking at the remains of mammals, birds and fish. Topics discussed include diet, butchery practices, the exploitation of fur and skins, mortality patterns of mammals, and metrical analyses of a wide range of species. Detailed data sets are provided to enable the reader to make comparisons with their own research, but the book is also suitable for those with a more general interest in medieval Russian archaeology.
Russia's Theatrical Past Jensen, Claudia R.; Maier, Ingrid; Shamin, Stepan ...
06/2021
eBook, Book
In the 17th century, only Moscow's
elite had access to the magical, vibrant world of the
theater.
In Russia's Theatrical Past , Claudia Jensen, Ingrid
Maier, Stepan Shamin, and Daniel C. Waugh mine ...Russian and Western
archival sources to document the history of these productions as
they developed at the court of the Russian tsar. Using such sources
as European newspapers, diplomats' reports, foreign travel
accounts, witness accounts, and payment records, they also uncover
unique aspects of local culture and politics of the time. Focusing
on Northern European theatrical traditions, the authors explore the
concept of intertheater, which describes transmissions between
performing traditions, and reveal how the Muscovite court's
interest in theater and other musical entertainment was strongly
influenced by diplomatic contacts.
Russia's Theatrical Past , made possible by an
international research collaborative, offers fresh insight into how
and why Russians went to such great efforts to rapidly develop
court theater in the 17th century.
This book takes readers to the village of Sheltozero in northern Russia. It highlights a tiny community of indigenous people called Veps, known colloquially as "the forest folk" for their intense ...closeness and affiliation with the forests in their ancestral territories. Davidov uses a tour of the local museum to introduce a cast of human and non-human characters from traditional Vepsian culture, while journeying through various eras under Russian, Finnish, Soviet, and post-Soviet rule. In the process, she explores how contemporary political struggles mesh with traditional beliefs, illustrating how Veps make meaning of their history and unfolding future.
Russia's Entangled Embrace traces the relationship between the Romanov state and the Armenian diaspora that populated Russia's territorial fringes and navigated the tsarist empire's metropolitan ...centers. By engaging the ongoing debates about imperial structures that were simultaneously symbiotic and hierarchically ordered, Stephen Badalyan Riegg helps us to understand how, for Armenians and some other subjects, imperial rule represented not hypothetical, clear-cut alternatives but simultaneous, messy realities. He examines why, and how, Russian architects of empire imagined Armenians as being politically desirable. These circumstances included the familiarity of their faith, perceived degree of social, political, or cultural integration, and their actual or potential contributions to the state's varied priorities. Based on extensive research in the archives of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yerevan, Russia's Entangled Embrace reveals that the Russian government relied on Armenians to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. Analyzing the complexities of this imperial relationship—beyond the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians—allows us to study the methods of tsarist imperialism in the context of diasporic distribution, interimperial conflict and alliance, nationalism, and religious and economic identity.
The American Jewish Communist movement played a major role in the politics of Jewish communities in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in many other ...centers, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Making extensive use of Yiddish-language books, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and other materials, Dreams of Nationhood traces the ideological and material support provided to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, located in the far east of the Soviet Union, by two American Jewish Communist-led organizations, the ICOR and the American Birobidzhan Committee. By providing a detailed historical examination of the political work of these two groups, the book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of twentieth century Jewish life in the United States.
In 2013, the United States suffered its worst terrorist bombing since 9/11 at the annual running of the Boston Marathon. When the culprits turned out to be U.S. residents of Chechen descent, ...Americans were shocked and confused. Why would members of an obscure Russian minority group consider America their enemy? Inferno in Chechnya is the first book to answer this riddle by tracing the roots of the Boston attack to the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia. Brian Glyn Williams describes the tragic history of the bombers' war-devastated homeland-including tsarist conquest and two bloody wars with post-Soviet Russia that would lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin-showing how the conflict there influenced the rise of Europe's deadliest homegrown terrorist network. He provides a historical account of the Chechens' terror campaign in Russia, documents their growing links to Al Qaeda and radical Islam, and describes the plight of the Chechen diaspora that ultimately sent two Chechens to Boston. Inferno in Chechnya delivers a fascinating and deeply tragic story that has much to say about the historical and ethnic roots of modern terrorism.
Akturk discusses how the definition of being German, Soviet, Russian and Turkish radically changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Germany's ethnic citizenship law, the Soviet Union's ...inscription of ethnic origins in personal identification documents and Turkey's prohibition on the public use of minority languages, all implemented during the early twentieth century, underpinned the definition of nationhood in these countries. Despite many challenges from political and societal actors, these policies did not change for many decades, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, when Russia removed ethnicity from the internal passport, Germany changed its citizenship law and Turkish public television began broadcasting in minority languages. Using a new typology of 'regimes of ethnicity' and a close study of primary documents and numerous interviews, Sener Akturk argues that the coincidence of three key factors – counterelites, new discourses and hegemonic majorities – explains successful change in state policies toward ethnicity.
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