Russia Books

The best available and reader friendly book regarding Jews and Judaism in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

A profusely illustrated album from the vast collection of the Russian Museum. The beautiful reproductions of works of gold and silver are accompanied by a full catalogue and informative articles by experts on Russian applied art. Probably the best English-language album about Russian works in gold and silver covering religious objects, books, icons, dishes and objects of vertu from XV to beginning of the XX century. Highly recommend.

There are lots of lengthy academic tomes about Gorbachev and his time as Soviet leader, just as there are a fair number of readable but lightweight biographies. It is very refreshing to find a book which manages to be comprehensive and intelligent, but also accessible and even a pleasure to read. Short and sweet!

This is the only comprehensive analysis of Gorbachev's reform policies. The approach is historical. There is no faddish jargon. The writing is clear and elegant. The author explains very convincingly how Gorbachev struggled with elements of the Communist Party apparatus to institute his reforms. Highly recommended for courses in contemporary Russian history and on the Cold War era.

The "Hamlet" that Edward Gordon Craig directed in tandem with Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre has taken on mythic status in theatre studies in the West.
In this fascinating study, Laurence Senelick shows what went into the making of this event. The author makes extensive use of various previously untapped Russian sources and reveals the conflicts, both personal and artistic, underlying the mixed succes of this epoch-making production. The goings-on behind the scenes turn out to be at least as dramatic as the action on stage! Especially the story of Craig's assistant and interpreter Suler(zhitsky) is very poinant. The book provides a very detailed description of the eventual production with the famous screens and describes its impact.
In his "Hamlet", Gordon Craig aimed to create a highly personal, almost hermetic symbolist drama. Stanislavski directed the actors on the basis of what he believed Craig's wishes to be -- and this at a time when he was still feeling his way towards his "method", which was much more naturalistic. Perhaps their approaches could never be reconciled, but at least they made this valiant attempt...
Subsequently, both men proved to be seminal forces in 20th century theatre: Craig became the prophet of the director as the pivotal figure in stage production, three-dimensional and abstract set design, and proper stage lighting (instead of shadows painted on canvas backdrops). He also helped to get theatre history off the ground as a respectable occupation. Stanislavsky needs no introduction, of course.
This study is essential reading for anyone interested in the grass roots of 20th century theatre. Moreover, this is no dessicated academic study. In places, it's as entertaining as a Robertson Davies novel.

One of the "Translated Texts for Historians" series from Liverpool University Press, the book consists of seven chapters: Gregory Thaumaturgis' letter concerning the Pontic raids of the third century, Themistius' Orations 8 and 10 which concern the Goths, an overview of Gothic cemetaries, a martyrology of St. Saba, writings concerning the life of Ulfila, writings concerning the Gothic Bible, and selections from the Gothic Bible. None of the texts presented are otherwise available in English and this is an invaluable text for those with a sincere interest in the Goths.

In short, reading these texts and the very well presented critical notes which accompany them gives a much better impression and understanding of the Romans' views of the Goths. It leads to a more critical reading of Wolfram and the authors clearly point out where Wolfram erred in his "History of the Goths." It's a pity that this book is out of print since no one serious about German or Gothic studies in the later Roman Empire should be without it. The authors have provided a great resource worth searching for.

Book review by Ingeborg Wallner Smith, Western Springs, Illinois

We first meet Gottlob Lerch, the son, at age eleven, as he is lying in the grass, dreaming, herding cattle on his father's homestead on the Great Plains of North Dakota. He is unhappy with his fate. In Russia, from which the family has recently immigrated, the land was fenced in, and poorly paid farmhands were available to herd the cattle. The author, Mr. Urban, sets an idyllic scene with bees, honey, flowers and oxen.

After the birth of three daughters, Gottlob Lerch finally had a son. He was so happy that he cried out, "Praise God", (in German Gott Lob), and that, naturally, became the son's name. He was not named after his father, but to thank God that the son had finally appeared.

Now that he has emigrated from Russia and is homesteading in North Dakota, the welfare of his son and heir is the most important thing to Lerch. While sons-in-law can shift for themselves and make their own way, the son must have it easier than the father, and should start out with his own house on his own acreage. The free land available in North Dakota fit right in with Lerch's plans, and was one reason the family left Russia.

This is a homesteading story with a twist. This homesteader is not only an immigrant from Russia, but is the descendant of the German farmers invited to Russia by Catherine, the Great, to populate and cultivate her new southern lands. After numerous broken promises over the years, many Russian Germans left for the American Great Plains. A number of them went to North Dakota. The best-known descendants of these Russian Germans in the U.S. have been the bandleader, Lawrence Welk of North Dakota, and Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

"Lerch wa a proud countryman, massive and gnarled like an oak. He could count up his forefathers unto the fifth generation, and was convinced that man's destiny was to cultivate the land and to preserve it."

He not only has to cope with the usual problems of most homesteaders, he has the language problem and needs to get used to unfamiliar laws and customs, including a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages. No beer garden here. We get the flavor of the difficulties encountered on the prairie, with drought, hail, snow and disaster, not to mention misunderstandings within the family, and with the bank and the real estate salesman. We hear about the even harder struggles of earlier homesteaders; in South Dakota one heated with cow dung. North Dakota is lucky to have brown coal, or lignite.

Interwoven with the happenings on the farm and within the family, is the story of the founding of a Lutheran congregation together with the neighbors. There are many crises in both stories. Lerch shows himself to be a hothead and to have a great hunger for land. There are discussions about what to expect of a pastor, where to build the church and preacher's house, who will join and what about synods. We also hear about their arguments and irritations.

The author's prose is beautifully compact. It contains humor and is charming with an old-fashioned lilt. The farmers speak colloquially among themselves; with the preachers their language is more formal. The main character, Gottlob, Sr., is fully developed, his wife, Christine, less so; we are fairly well-acquainted with the son, Gottlob, Jr., but scarcely get to know the girls at all. We know the neighbors better than we know Dora, Jakobine and Marie.

Like many a man today, Lerch gets himself into hot water by overextending himself in land deals. As in all good stories, we have suspense, tragedy and near-tragedy. The plot resolves itself in a happy ending.

While this story seems to be about the elder Gottlob, the fates of both Gottlobs, father and son, are intertwined. Each has his crisis and overcomes it. In the end they "go off into the sunset together."

Sometimes a book about the olden days transports us back to simpler but harder times. Having hoed thistles in the cornfields of my father's Wisconsin hobby farm, I felt right at home with this story and found it fascinating. I would recommend it to both older and younger readers because of it univeral themes: family feeling, greed, competitiveness, ambition, piety. They obviously won't have any personal memories of the 19th century, but will enjoy the book because they like interesting stories from long ago. Gottlob Lerch, the book, is relevant today for its inward truths: "It is better to get rich slowly," and: "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." How true! Small acts cast long shadows.

This is a charming short piece, a novella, long out of print, probably found in someone's attic. It was written in Mr. Urban's native German, apparently in the late 1800's. He is obviously familiar with his subject. Perhaps, like Gottlob Lerch, he was also a "German from Russia."

Born Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, she married a Russian Grand Duke and converted to Orthodoxy. When her husband was assassinated, she founded the Martha and Mary Convent, took the veil, and devoted her life to the service of the poor. She rejected the efforts of her foreign royal relations to rescue her from Russia during the Revolution, feeling that she was needed in Russia and could not leave her work among the poor, and was murdered in 1918.

This book is a fascinating recounting of the Grand Duchess' life, and includes dozens of her letters-- to her grandmother, Queen Victoria; to her brother, the last Grand Duke of Hesse; and to several friends. The author relied on unpublished sources in two countries and published sources in four languages. The scholarship and passion the author put into researching her subject shows. The religious content of the work, considering the religious nature of the Grand Duchess and the central role religion played in her life, is entirely appropriate and even necessary. In any case, it is nowhere near as militant as the subtitle ("new martyr of the Communist yoke") might indicate. Quite simply, this is a well-researched and affectionate portrait of a fascinating and complex woman, one of the best biographies of her I have read.

This is an excellent, short treatment of the Peasant War, with an emphasis on Ukraine.

This book uses newly released information - it is one of the first of many books that will be written on this fascinating, important and inexplicably ignored part of history.

Approximately 7 million Ukrainians died in the 1932 famine, while millions more died in the years before. This book is one of the few in English that deals with this terrible holocaust, which has been ignored or denied by so many historians.

The author touches on the ethnic component of the war (which is very brave considering the climate of academe today), yet fails to spell things out clearly. This is extremely unfortunate, considering that ethnicity clearly coloured the events during the Peasant War and the later conflict known as World War II. If nothing else, the author should have compared the Peasant War's nature to previous conflicts before the Revolution, as many reading this book are ignorant of t! he nature of those peasant revolts.

Which is more terrifying? Stalin's 1936-38 terror, or Western liberals' inability to recognize it? Updating his original work "The Great Terror" with a vast amount of new data, Conquest scrupulously details and puts into context the purges themselves: the many players and defendants, the shifting political cross-currents, the rounds of trials and arrests.

And he does the same for the many Western observers - intellectuals, writers, journalists, and left activists - who were oblivious to it or actively sought to hush it up, even decades later when there were no longer any shreds of doubt. This is the equivalent of Holocaust denial.

And a Holocaust it was. While left-wing apologists pooh-poohed the numbers of purge deaths as in the thousands, the estimates of those killed politically in the people's progressive utopia are now solidly in the eight figures, with as many as 15 to 20 million arrested and executed, or worked to death in the camps, in the years up until Stalin's death in 1953. As many more died were starved by the Communists in the Ukraine to break the peasantry a few years earlier. Yet most people seem never to have heard of any of this.

In the Terror itself, Stalin and the NKVD prosecuted fictitious espionage, sabotage and subversion charges against millions of people. Those arrested would be tortured until they agreed to confess and implicate others. Most did, and quickly. It wound down only when the NKVD saw that, mathematically, every citizen of the nation would soon be implicated. But it flared up periodically until Stalin's death in 1953.

The purges served several purposes. They transformed the USSR from a dictatorship of the proletariat into Stalin's despotism. They removed most previous party members and high-ranking officials, suppressing alternate notions of what Communism was about, and replaced them with ruthless Stalinists. Those persecuted included those who had been non-Bolshevik leftists, even if they since had conformed; Bolsheviks who had subscribed to Lenin's agricultural compromise delaying collectivization to boost agricultural production; Trotskyites; and finally, Stalinists and the NKVD themselves, for no ostensible reason but merely to terrify and cow.

Stalin meanwhile could blame the country's Bolshevik-destroyed economy on the fictional sabotage "confessed to" in public trials, or to foreign spies. And he could blame the purge's excesses on the NKVD itself.

We see the breakdown of figures and how they were derived: those executed with or without trial, those deported to slave labor camps, those executed in the camps, and those merely worked to death within them. The death rate for those sent to slave labor camps was around 90 percent. There are some camps whose mere existence cannot be confirmed firsthand because no one is known to have survived them to give testimony.

This is an essential part of the anti-Communist canon, certainly on the top shelf. Conquest's work here confirms his original book and shows that its estimates, if off in any way, were too conservative.