Russia Books

Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978) starts by telling us of her childhood in pre-revolution Russia, in turn of the century St. Petersburg. Her father was also a dancer, Platon Karsavin, and the account of her childhood gives us a rare insight in middle class life of that epoch. There is a detailed description of life in the boarding school and the Imperial ballet. She writes with great tenderness about life at school and about one of the teachers, Christian Petrovich Johansson. In those days he was already in his nineties, a Swede who had turned grumpier with the years, but was one of the greatest teachers in the history of the school. It is with great pride and joy I read that she attributed so much to my compatriot! During the revolution and its aftermath, Karsavina remained in Russia till the bitter end. Then, she too, with her English-born husband and small son, decided to leave. The family escaped through the North of Russia on an English vessel - the famous ballerina and her husband on the crew list as stewardess and purser respectively. Safety was at last in sight in England where they made their home. The last sentence of her account is beautiful: "That night we arrived in Middlesbrough - The Maryinski and Theatre Street left behind for ever, these were the footlights of a new world". Anyone who has ever been to grimy Middlesbrough can only compare with the glitter of old St. Petersburg. The book was originally published in 1930; in the revised edition of 1981 there is an added chapter on Diaghilev which Karsavina wrote in 1947. This beautiful volume with its evocative illustra- tions would really merit 10 stars, but as five is the highest accolade, I have to limit myself. Maybe the finest dance biography written this century.

An absolutely enchanting book, encompassing so much. A funny and lyrical story of a farouche young girl who grows into a great artist. An intimate and fascinating portrait of Russian life before and after the Revolution. And for the lover of ballet history, a treasure: first-hand accounts of training in the Imperial Ballet School, the Maryinsky theater in the time of the Tsars, the early years of the Ballets Russes. She was in the center of one of the most volatile and important periods of art, and she reminisces of her collaborations with Diaghliev, Chaliapin, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Picasso, Bakst, and many more.

On a recent trip to Moscow I used this book, and found it very helpful. It is both intelligently writen and layed out. Although, it's section on St. Petersburg is very short compaired to that of the section covering Moscow, it is to the point, and helpful. There are so many differint beautiful places in Moscow this book really helps when deciding where to go. The metro maps really come in handy since they are in english. The information is not influenced by advertisers, so you know you can count on the opinions of the authors. You can't always count on the prices listed though, since they change regulary and are are higher if you are not Russian. (Though you get a genral idea) Overall this is a great book and I recomend it to any one considering visting Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Time Out guides are the best! Their reviews and write-ups are funny, entertaining but very true. I used to live in Moscow and the places they mentioned are top and are the places to BE. The sightseeing, essential info, restaurants and bars were all very well reviewd and described.

This is a well-researched book that gives a glimpse into the world of modern Russia. Told as a series of letters, emails and other documents, the book recounts the story of a family's struggle to adapt to a modern way of life in an vastly-changing environment.
A must-read for any student of modern day Russia. I found it particularly interesting as I am an American of Russian heritage. The book made me want to visit and look for my roots.

In late 1991, the USSR is falling apart, Gorbachev and perestroika is on the way out and Yeltsin is coming to power. These are tough times in Russia, inflation is rampant, consumer goods are in short supply, but there are economic opportunities for the people with the means and imagination. Boris Titov meets an old classmate of his, Grigory Albat. Albat, the owner of a bank in Kazan, has started a joint stock company. This company leases three ships that ship Larch lumber to Finland and return goods that are needed in Russia. Grigory hires Boris to help him run the company. This is the beginning of years of development, avoiding thiefs-in-law, unscrupulous Russian officials, moving accounts to Barbados and Florida, in order to keep their property and their rapidly growing profits. Much intrigue follows including assault and enslavement and Russian prostitution.

All of this is told through a series of letters and e-mails between members of the Titov family, G. Albat and other principals of the story. A sub-plot concerns Nina Titova, her boyfriend Vitaly, his close friend Stas, and Nina's close friend Olga. The reader follows the young people through their school years, marriage, and into the work world. Through the letters between members of the Titov family and friends that the reader becomes very attached to the characters.

As the story draws to a close, this reader could not turn the pages fast enough, wanting to know how the story ends. This is an unfamiliar format, but held the reader's interest and is easy to read.

Donald Purcell

Many of today's baby boomers grew up in the 1950's and recall President Eisenhower as an avuncular man typified by such snappy slogans as "I like Ike." What many of them did not know was that Ike was an active propagandist trying to win the hearts and minds of citizens not only behind the Iron Curtain, but also at home, in friendly nations, and everywhere else on the planet, taking advantage of new and ever more expansive and rapid communications technologies.

Prof. Osgood has written a penetrating history of Ike's propaganda campaigns, documenting how in a war of ideology, communications was often a more potent weapon than guns and bombs. With campaigns lauding not only the American good life, but also the American space and arms races, Eisenhower and his new Cold Warriors fought in an international arena of public opinion which they used to leverage negotiations to their advantage at home and abroad.

That governments and the powerful have always sought to shape public opinion is no surprise, and it should also be no surprise that Eisenhower, believing that the future of the free world was in the balance, fully utilized the tools of communications and propaganda to his own ends. Prof. Osgood's book reminds us that propaganda comes in many form and guises, and even when we try to justify the means of propaganda by the ends of freedom, truly free people must never accept any speech, especially by governments, at face value.

In the early 1980s, with the publication of Fred I. Greenstein's book, "The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader," a reappraisal of Ike's presidency began. This new work by Kenneth Osgood makes a critically important contribution to the brutal historiography of Eisenhower revisionism. It suggests that Eisenhower was much more than a smiling, golf playing figurehead, and instead understood well the stakes and the possibilities of cold war with the Soviet Union. Most important, he waged an aggressive psychological battle for hearts and minds worldwide; one that overall proved quite successful. Based on extensive documentary materials only recently declassified, this work marks a new path in Eisenhower studies. It is a major contribution to the field.

Turkestan Reunion is a compendium of letters written by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore to her family while traveling on her over one year honeymoon trip in Siberia, Turkestan and the Karakorum. These letters are arranged according to their date having been written at approximately fifteen day intervals. Each letter is forewarded by a brief resume of the happenings and is heralded by a nice drawing, which I believe is by the Author. It could be called an epistolary travel book and this is not common among travel literature. This very characteristic lends the book its grace and appeal, that emerge strikingly after all these years (it was assembled in 1934 from the journey which took place in 1927-28).
Why a companion book? Eleanor Lattimore was Owen Lattimore's wife and her husband is famous among students of politics and of the Eastern civilizations for his many contributions to the knowledge of those little known countries in those times. Owen wrote his own books on their original wedding trip, the Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary, that are famous in their own right, and probably Eleanor's book is often picked up because its mentioned in these other works.
However even if it describes events that are already known, Eleanor's outlook on these same occasions is completely different and orginal. A woman's sensibility? Probably, a woman that possesed courage, curiosity, wasn't afraid of disconforts and was able to relate herself with empathy towards her travel companions and the people she met.
The endurance of the great disconfort of the couple's trip assumes in the Author's prose almost a sense of liberation from the material preoccupations of the civilized world to go back to the essentials of living: protection from cold and heat, food, rest, traveling necessities such as carts and horses, good company.
The first part of the book contains the description of the seventeen day travel through Siberia, that Eleanor accomplished alone, while the rest narrates the common path through Chinese Turkestan and the five Karakorum Passes. Much attentions is dedicated to the nomads encountered during the journey, the Qazaks the Qirghiz and others.
The book can truely be defined ethnographic because it is first hand description of a traveling experience accomplished with curiosity and the desire to learn. "One can understand a little of how difficult a province is to rule when one relizes that it still contains flotsam and jetsam remnants of every variety of people who have passed through or conquered the land as well as the scamps and villains who have run away from Chinese law", is an example of the deeply empathic outlook on her experiences.
Another aspect I particularly love in travel books is the "spirit of place", the ability to make the reader feel inside a different reality. Eleanor Lattimore's Turkestan Reunion truely evokes this feeling, more than Owen Lattimore's High Tartary which is more scholarly and detailed.
As David Lattimore, the couple's son, affirms in the Biographical Note at the end of the book Eleanor and Owen's journey and love story deserve to be remembered because of their uniqueness and the sense of adventure and youth they are still capable of conveying.

Turkestan Reunion is a collection of the letters written by Eleanor Lattimore to her family in the United States documenting her honeymoon travels from Beijing, through Siberia, into East Turkestan, and over the Karakorum mountains into British Kashmir.

The route Lattimore takes is epic and ranging, crossing everything from arid deserts, Siberian tundra, and towering mountains. Such a journey would make fascinating reading regardless, yet an even greater part of the intrigue and charm of this book comes from its authorship by a woman in time when even hardy, professional male adventurers sometimes couldn't endure similar conditions. Ms. Lattimore is truly a trailblazer, in the literal sense of trekking across routes tread by the feet of very few, but also in the sense that her adventures in the early part of the 20th century very clearly run contrary to what where then very strong and revered concepts of female domesticity. In 1927, the idea of a traveling, white woman was so foreign and novel that many officials and friends who hosted the Lattimores, European or otherwise, were sometimes at a loss in deciding what kind of arrangements should be made for Eleanor. Not only does Lattimore shatter "womanly domesticity" just by traveling, she also consciously chooses to travel in the most down-to-earth way, reaching for the most authentic experiences. Often she chooses horseback over carriage (when physically possible; the weather in Turkestan often did no permit), she voices preference for the rundown accommodations and authentic food of the locals rather than the plusher European lodging and food that sometimes was available.

Beyond the gender angle, Turkestan Reunion additionally presents a sort of ethnographic experience much less condescending to locals than many travel writings and exploration writings of the time. Lattimore's writing inevitably retains an element of colonial privilege, for example, in the repeated tendency to bestow comical Western names on their guides rather than learning their real names. However, relative to other writers of the time, and to other Westerners in general of the 1920s, the Lattimores display a unique willingness and even desire to commune with locals and acknowledge the hardships of their existence. Eleanor Lattimore with a keen eye documents everyday proceedings of everyday villagers; games among herdsmen, a witch-curing ceremony, marriage and divorce, the arbitration of disputes, these and others are documented in Lattimores casual yet elegant prose. As white travelers in a China still mired in a pseudo-colonized position relative to the rest, there still are many instances where the Lattimores are regaled by obsequious officials and conniving businessmen with banquets and galas, but while these celebrations often compose the bulk of 19th and early 20th century travel writing, Lattimore's book is balanced by the ground-up perspective she is willing to describe. As such, there is a pre-ethnographic element to Lattimore's writing that anticipates the academic enlightenment which led to the understanding that the lives of locals are worth documenting and should be observed from more than just a colonial-overlord perspective.

What drew me to this book was the simple premise of it all; even in our intrepid modern times, young and energetic newly weds are more likely to choose Cabo San Lucas or Paris to celebrate their honeymoon, yet Owen and Eleanor Lattimore chose the foreboding deserts and towering, ice-capped peaks of East Turkestan to celebrate their marriage, and at a time when traveling through such extreme environments was not as easy as buying a bus ticket or boarding an airplane. However, Eleanor Lattimore's simple and descriptive writing style exceeds the novelty of this underlying premise, anticipating a sort of feminist traveling philosophy and capturing an ethnographic ethic to observe, and therefore understand the peoples of the places they visited.

This education guide presents an outline, including page numbers to the collected and selected works of Lenin's most important works. This class outline will help workers and students focus on Lenin's writings dealing with the road to political power. Labor struggles are beginning to break out with greater frequency today, pointing to the fact that our class doesn't have to be told to fight. We are not submissive when it comes to defending our interests. But what is not so easy is the confident resolve based on scientific understanding of the need to fight to win. We are taught by the misleaders and advisors of labor that we should fight "the good fight," overcome through love and nonviolence, and by all means honor the system. In other words, we are instilled with a spirit of losing. Lenin educates us in the exact opposite approach: the need for workers and farmers to seize power away from the enemies of humanity, institute a workers and farmers government, and move toward a dictatorship of the proletariat. In these writings he debates Karl Kautsky, whom he described as preaching to the workers to "fight, but not dare to win." Two short introductions to the study outlines will help you organize a lively series of classes on the struggle for power, the central question for workers today.

Ever wanted to delve into V.I. Lenin, the icon of the Russian Revolution? Here's your chance.

This booklet, distributed by Pathfinder Press, offers a clear and succinct approach on the "Class Forces and Strategy in the Russian Revolution (1902-1917)" and "Soviet Power and the Communist International (1918-1919)."

The first collection is a guide to Lenin on such topics as the rural question, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Russia, the revolutionary army and the proletariat. It draws a context for the Russian revolution by examining Lenin's thoughts on the 1789 French revolution and the 1848 revolution in Germany.

The second collection compiles Lenin's writing on subjects such as the constituent assembly, the Soviet constitution, bourgeois vs. proletarian democracy and the worker-peasant alliance. The study guide has compiled these topics to illustrate how Lenin attempted to explain that revolutionaries in other countries could draw upon the example of the Russian revolution.

good

What a fun book! The author tells of his life as a serf in the Imperial Russia of the early 19th Century. Admittedly, his was not the life of a typical serf--he was well educated, eventually being emancipated by his "owner" (and the description of this process is in itself fascinating). The great part of this book is in the details--the descriptions of the people, places, and interactions of his childhood; the reader cannot help sympathizing with his poor father who tries over and over again to make the best of his situation, yet is trapped by his social standing. This work is a great addition to the current understanding of life in Russia during the period.

I read this book from start to finish in a couple days it was so absorbing and fascinating. My heart was moved with compassion for this 'deeply disturbed' dancer. A great biography for anyone interested in human sociology and psychology!

More rubbish has been written about Vaslav Nijinsky than about any other dancer. Therefore it is sheer joy to read the biography by Peter Ostwald. He is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco and as such eminently able to analyze this severely troubled dancer. Nijinsky was born in 1890 and was enrolled as a child at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Peters burg. There he excelled in artistic subjects, but did badly in academic ones and behaved so badly that he was threatened with expulsion. As a person who was unaccustomed to sophisticated life he found it very difficult to adjust, furthermore he was by nature a rather shy and retiring young boy when he found himself patronized by people like Prince Pavel Lvov. Then followed his disastrous marriage to a Hungarian heiress and a series of unfortunate events like a fiasco in London, fracas during the first night of his ballet "Le sacre du printemps" and the outbreak of WW1. I! n those days there was not much the doctors could do for mental patients and when Nijinsky died in 1950 he had not been dancing for over thirty years. The tragic fate of this gifted dancer has been documented a number of times, but for the first time by a person who has insight in mental disorders. A handsome volume with interesting illustrations, two appendix of medical character, lavish notes and bibliograhy.

This work is primarily on the ideology of the wartime German sponsored Russian Liberation Movement. Its leadership, who had advanced under Stalin and had been captured by the Germans, attempted to combine Communist, Russian nationalist, and Western democratic beliefs, in a platform that would appeal to the majority of Russians, as well as to the United States. The main statements of the Movement, which the author examines, were devoid of Nazi ideology, and the Movement itself never received the full approval of Hitler and his highest subordinates. Because the leaders of the Russian Liberation Movement were able to express their views on the Stalinist system, without the constraints of the system, this analysis of their ideology, would be of great interest to students of Soviet internal politics before and during the Second World War.

Every so often a text appears which dispells the conventional wisdom of what we come to accept as history. Catherine Andreyev's "Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement" is such a work. This narrative tells the story of one of the strangest, yet most compelling episolds in the history of the second world war. In July of 1942, a Soviet Army general, Andrei Vlasov was captured by the invading German Army. He later came to lead a non-existant force known as the ROA, or Russian Liberation Army. Although this force had never exsted, he was in fact the ideological leader of an estimated 800 million Russians who were opposed to Stalin and served in various capacities during the war. Throughout the war it was clear that the movement was not, as their opponents had charged, blind collaboration with the Nazi forces but a political movement in its own right. The goal of Vlasov and his group was none other than a free and democratic Russian state. In the course of the movement, it was in fact the Nazis themselves that provided the strongest opposition to the goals of the ROA. They, in fact had desired to use Vlasov only for the purpose of propaganda against the Soviets. Andreyev's story tells the story of the various individuals in the movement and the tragic outcome of this movement. Particular emphisis is placed on different factions involved. In this story we learn about the soldiers themselves who were mostly russian prisoners of war, as well as the civilian emigre groups who supported the ROA. We also see the internal struggle between the Vlasov's group who sincerely wanted to liberate their homeland and the Nazi hierarchy who concidered the russians as being racially inferior and wanted to use them as puppets. In short this is an excellent story of an idealistic, but doomed group of people and their struggle.

Tom Pierce

This collection titled "Voices of Revolution" is a selection from the many letters, resolutions, requests, appeals, complaints and invective sent to various state organs and important politicians from the period of the Russian Revolution by 'regular people'. Farmers, soldiers, deserters, workers, and so on all came together in that period to elect their own representatives and form their own councils, and these councilmembers in turn responded to the many confused events of those days with letters and resolutions supporting or opposing specific policies or politicians. Equally, individual farmers, laborers etc. wrote letters, requests, insults or even poetry to popular newspapers as well as party leaders in the hope of getting their voices heard.

In between all these documents, translated into English but also available online in their Russian originals, the editor Mark Steinberg provides a short but effective history of the period to give context to the many voices of the revolution. He does this fairly and accurately, and the many-sidedness of popular opinion in those days belies any one-sided view of the revolution. Of course it is never entirely clear how representative these individual and collective letters and appeals are, but judging by the various election results and the repetition of the same complaints and issues in the letters, the two match quite well. That makes this book an invaluable insight into the views of the common man in Russia, 1917.

A remarkable collection of documents and interpretations giving one an understanding of the revolution from below. By the way, I notice that the original Russian texts of the documents are available at http://www.yale.edu/annals/Steinberg/golosa.htm