Russia Books

So our first day in Moscow we lost our dictionary and our big travel guide and had to resort to this little thing I had picked up. It was full of everything we needed and got us through 2 weeks of trolling around Moscow and St. Pete on student budgets.

The train maps were extremely useful. I was constantly pulling this thing out of my back pocket to find out what exit we needed to take. The city maps are pretty good too.

All the suggestions were great and pretty easy to find. Thanks to this book, I was finally able to see a Russian circus with dancing bears and bears driving motorcycles with dogs on the back, which is really the only thing anybody ever wants to do over there.

The vocabulary section is kinda useful, but you may have to resort to just showing them the words. If you're ordering food, I reccommend the shotgun approach we took: just point to stuff on the menu. It'll all work out in the end.

I wouldn't say that this should be your only resource for preparing your trip, but it's definitely the only thing you'll need on you while you're actually walking around the country. That and your passport. Those Russian cops are crooks.

This was written by great grandpa who died just last week. And I never read it until now. And I love it. It helped close up the feeling of regret I had for not asking him sooner.
I love it!!

This wonderful cookbook by Sonja Uvezian ("The Cuisine of Armenia" and "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen") is a true gem. It focuses on the food of the Caucasus Mountains and the former Soviet Republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Even today, after the publication of books by Paula Wolfert and Darra Goldstein, the cuisine of this area is relatively unknown in the United States. That's a shame, because it's truly wonderful, alternately hearty and light, and always full of flavor. The Middle Eastern influences are there, but the combination of ingredients is uniquely Caucasian.
Uvezian does a very good job conveying the pleasures of this cuisine. One of the good things about the cookbook is that she often provides alternative ingredients or ways of spicing a dish. I've cooked a number of recipes from this book, and my one of my all-time favorite chicken recipes, a plain roast chicken with a knock-out walnut sauce, comes from here. Her lamb and fruit stews are good too.

This book was republished in 1976 as "Cooking from the Caucasus." If you see a copy under either title in a used book store, snap it up. You won't regret it.

Property rights sounds like a boring subject, but if you're interested in imperial Russia, this is a must read. The exploration of this seemingly narrow issue by Farrow opens up to a host of important and often surprising and novel observations and insights.

Three expert scholars and associate professors combine their knowledge of modern-day Russian politics in Between Dictatorship And Democracy: Russian Post-Communist Political Reform, a close scrutiny of the democratic reforms that have been launched to change Russia's political workings in the past two decades. From a comprehensive evaluation of how Vladimir Putin's ascension has changed the course of the nation, to extensive charts and references packed with hard data, to diagrams and detailed walkthroughs of the transformations Russian government has undergone, Between Dictatorship and Democracy offers a crystal-clear picture of Russia's turbulent recent past, their changing present, and the possibilities of the future. Highly recommended for academic and political studies collections.

Matvejevic has written other important books (Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape; Yugoslavism Today; I Signori della guerra), but this is a special case. His personal stake is palpable from the first page, when he makes it clear that his ideal reader, at least in the opening, is his father who lies ill in a Zagreb hospital. The cast of characters who appear and reappear throughout the book -- Danilo Kis, Bulat Okudzhava, Joseph Brodsky, et al. -- come to seem familiar and intimate by the end of the book, something like they must have been to the author, and thus their passing becomes even more poignant.

This appears to be a work of non-fiction at the beginning, but the more I read, the more I wonder to what extent this might not be an instance of experimental writing, an exercise of sorts, creative non-fiction at the least. The vehicle is the letter, whose virtues Matvejevic expands upon in the key passage "On Letters, Open and Closed," when he meets Viktor Shklovsky. He returns to the form of his book at the very end, once again suggesting that this book is something of an experiment, perhaps a kind of novel of apprenticeship, where the hero-narrator, naive and trusting at first, grows more and more disillusioned.

His disillusionment concerns the loss of a generation of like-minded friends and colleagues, but also a dramatic sea change in the political destiny of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as the author looks on, commenting (in a letter to Andrei Sinyavsky), "In the end, in the face of what's happening, I would like to find a role for myself other than that of gravedigger. But today's script appears to offer no better role than that." He too, of course, is one of the members of the intelligentsia that he sees passing from the stage of history.

There is a lot of interesting material here on Soviet and Yugoslav cultural politics, but also much that is personal and compelling in the author's own story and in the subtly insinuating manner he chose to convey it. Fascinating stuff.

This memoir is as compelling as a novel. It describes the author's stay in Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) as an English teacher in 1982, and in particular her romance with Kolya, a Russian living in St. Petersburg. She describes a return trip the following summer to see if the relationship had a future, and I was completely engrossed by the story. This is a very candid memoir, and Alberts is very honest about her own insecurities. In addition, the memoir is an accurate portrayal of life in the Soviet Union (at least according to my wife, who spent her first forty years there, and who also read the book).

This book is a long awaited,definitive treatment of the AEF intervention in Siberia at the end of WWI. Well written and authoritative, the work is especially relevant to our times, given the state of Russian-American relations. Military readers will recognize in this tale an excellent early example of what has become an increasingly important role for our armed forces to day; strategic deployment of military force where US interests are at stake but no actual declaration of war exists. Between War and Peace is a "must read" for those with an interest in international diplomacy, war powers, the presidency, and military history. Highly recommended.

The actions of states against their own people or sub-cultures within their own or conquered country has been the cause of more deaths, pain, suffering than most wars. All the more tragic because the victums have been the weakest members of society: women, children, the elderly.

This book talks about one such case where some 191,000 people were rounded up one night and were moved some 4,000 miles across the Soviet Union. For years no one knew why Stalin ordered this. The stated reason was for collaboration with the Germans. But this seemed unlikely. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union has the information come about that they might have interferred with one of Stalin's plans to attack Turkey.

This book is a well researched story of the movement as forced by the Government, and the gradual return of many of the remaining people to their ancestral homeland.

Since most studies of Russian industrialization tend to examine the capitalist system as a whole and downplay the role of individual firms, Jonathan Grant's Big Business in Russia fills an important niche. Originating from his Ph.D. dissertation (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), this in-depth study of the St. Petersburg-based Putilov Company, Imperial Russia's largest arms manufacturer, advances our understanding of Russian industrial history at the micro level. The few specialists who have explored business activity in Imperial Russia have focused either on firms established by foreigners or non-industrial firms (e.g. banking, publishing, or insurance). Grant, now an assistant professor of modern Russian history at Florida State University in Tallahassee, poses the question: "Did Russian businessmen conduct their affairs in a unique way based on an essentially different understanding of the market and state, or did they pursue strategies for growth that would have been intelligible to their contemporaries in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States?" (p. 1). Grant concludes that Putilov's market behavior did not differ from that of the key Western arms manufacturers such as Krupp, Skoda, Vickers, and Scneider-Creusot. Thus, Grant maintains, Russian business behavior was not "deviant." The board of directors at the Putilov Company followed expansionist strategies as aggressive as any of its Western counterparts, hesitating neither to jettison old product lines, nor to invent new ones based on market forecasts. Hence Grant's study shows that the state's role in the Putilov Company-still extant today as the Kirovsky Zavod--has been exaggerated.
The book is divided into seven chronological chapters: 1) "The Rise and Fall of a Rail Manufacturing Giant: N. I. Putilov and the Putilov Company, 1868-1885;" 2) "Engineering Growth: Locomotives, Artillery, and Diversification Strategies, 1885-1900;" 3)"The Russian Krupp: Putilov and the Artillery Business, 1900-1907; 4) "Banks, Boards, and Naval Expansion: The Question of Bank Dominance, 1907-1914;" 5) "Putilov at War, 1914-1917; 6) "Conclusion: Between State and Market;" and 7) "Epilogue: Putilov's Successors." Grant's Introduction skillfully reviews the scholarly literature on Russian industrial history.
Because the Putilov factory had experiences typical of other industrial enterprises in Late Imperial Russia, Grant's choice of a case study is ideal. Originally purchased and owned by Nikolai Ivanovich Putilov (1817-1880), the factory was dependent on the tsarist state, then sold out to foreign investors whence it became a joint-stock company (p. 4).
Grant's wide use of foreign archival documents contributes to the book's uniqueness. He draws extensively on the Putilov factory's correspondence with banks and government offices from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg, as well as its correspondence with the tsarist army and navy from the Russian State Archive of the Navy in St. Petersburg and from the Russian State Military-Historical Archive in Moscow. For the discussion of Putilov's armaments production in Chapters Two and Three, Grant used the records of the Main Artillery Administration (Glavnoe Artilleriiskoe Upravleniye), as well as British Admiralty intelligence reports located in the British Public Record Office (Kew, Surrey, United Kingdom). In addition, he found the company's published annual account books, housed at the Moscow-based Lenin Library, to be largely reliable, despite rumors by a Soviet scholar that they may have been falsified (p. 15).
While Grant defends admirably his argument about the Putilov Company, one wishes he had extended it a bit farther. If "the image of Russia as fundamentally exceptional in its economic development should be discarded," and if Russian capitalists before the Bolshevik Revolution were just as astute as their Western counterparts, what made Soviet Russia so vulnerable to the mythology of Marxist economic and political theory?
In any case, serious graduate students interested in Russian and European business history should read Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in conjunction with other key works such as Susan McCaffray's The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Thomas C. Owen's Entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire, 1861-1914 (M.E. Sharpe, 1996); and Ruth A. Roosa's and Thomas Owen's Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: the Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917 (M.E. Sharpe, 1997).---Johanna Granville, Ph.D., Stanford University