Russia Books

Great detailed coverage of why the pogrom occurred, what led to it occurring, what happened while it was going on, and what the outcome was for both the victims and perpetrators. The book is a pretty small one, but it encompasses everything you need to know about this specific event in Russian history. The history of the city is given as well as the reason for why Jews were such a large part of the population. How the town was mainly run by anti-Semites and what they did to help push people over the edge and create violence toward the Jewish members of the city. Starting with the blood libel from another town which was disproved to have been the work of Jews but nonetheless held up as fact within Kishinev's newspapers which increased feelings against Jews and ending with all out violence that went unchecked until the second day when the military was given all power to handle the situation. A large portion of the city was damaged and men, women, and children were killed, raped, robbed, beaten, etc. Questions about how much was the government really involved are never clearly answered, there is evidence to support both arguments that it was and wasn't. But both are presented and the reader is given the choice of deciding on his/her own. Overall an excellent book, a quick read, and very informational and detailed.

This book offered an in depth look at how to travel through Europe by train. It's informative and very decisive. It helped with many desicion's that saved not only money but more importantly, time.

I have long been interested in finding a thorough yet broad source of eastern European history, and this book finally granted my wishes! Crampton has organized the book beautifully and sensibly into five time periods in the twentieth century, and in each section he devotes attention to individual countries. This book also contains a section on eastern Europe before the twentieth century, maps, and abbreviations of various organizations. Any serious student of eastern European history OR curious novice would benefit from taking a look at this book!

This small book is a very useful guide to understand the reasons and origins of the collapse of the state-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. Particularly the sections on the "international debt crisis" and the negative impact of the IMF and the World Bank on the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe are thougt-provoking and very helpful. In this way, the book prepares the ground for a complicated argument in which long-term/ sytemic factors intermingle with the short-term factors, like Gorbachov's comimg to power in the SU, and presents a very readable and interesting account for the students of this important question of modern European history.

And excellent example of a regional study where politics and economics cannot be separated, and thus have been successfully analyzed in the context of each other. D'Anieri does a good job of combining general overview of the Ukrainian-Russian relations and their development throughout history with the detailed and in-depth study of the political and economic issues that Ukraine is currently facing as a result of a deep interdependence with Russia. I particularly enjoy the way this study ties the history of broken trust and fear of imperialistic aspirations into the process of decision making by Ukrainian leadership. The astute identification of essential areas of problems and the thoroughness in explaining their causes makes this book a great help for those interested in the future prospects of the region.

This is a big book that I might not have read unless I searched for it and found it after reading an article by the author which struck me as truthful in the sense that one says, "this guy is telling the truth," regardless of whatever literary or personal foibles he may have. To say that I was surprised is an understatement. This is on my list of the top 50 must reads. To understand how a large part of the civilized world has been hoodwinked by both the academic and political / economic powers that be in this world, one deserves to read something like this work. I suppose the author could have found no better title for it, for in a way he intended it to be autobiography. But it isn't really. Or it is besides something else; a lot of personal venting about historical facts that are well known to him and should be better known to the rest of the world. Doubtless some have already come to the conclusions this author has reached.

He should be read in any course dealing with Soviet history, Soviet-American relations, political science or Russian history.

Anyone after reading this work who honestly has the courage to call him/herself a communist, socialist or social idealist, including most of the talking heads in the media or those who manage to get their voices heard there, should be consigned (openly and in public) to even greater fusillades of ridicule and scorn until they and their opinions vanish from the public scene, unless of course they want to share responsibility for the murder of hundreds of millions of human beings, more in one century (the 20th just past, the bloodiest in history) than they claim for all the religious wars in all of history put together, which they wont since they are mostly cowards.

Hats off to Lev Navrozov! May he succeed in getting his next work published and may all the world (civilized that is) read it with appreciation.

Ronald Bergan shows that although Eisenstein was committed to the Bolshevik cause and contributed to its development, his films must, in no way, simply be dismissed as propaganda. Eisenstein pioneering visual techniques, explorations in montage and lyrical representations have earned him an indisputable position as among film makers.
The culminating scenes in `Strike!', for instance, are built on an alternating sequence of shots that show soldiers chasing and shooting the strikers while a butcher is slitting the throat of farm animals in the slaughterhouse. This allegorical interpretation of the Czar as a butcher wa not fully understood by a large portion of the viewing public, as Eisenstein himself witnessed when the film was shown in the rural areas throughout the country. Indeed, many farmers were unable to grasp the metaphor of the slaughtered beasts as an association of the Czar as a criminal, a butcher, a murderer of innocents because for farmers the killing of an animal did not constitute a crime.

The rally to arms in `Alexander Nevsky' culminated in the battle on ice scene (which runs for almost a third of the film). The scene, which Eisenstein duly prepared with the aid of sketches, appears as if inspired by the paintings of the Italian renaissance artist P. Uccello, as both show the violent clash of armor, horses, arrows, spears and iron.

this book is aimed at young readers, and it tells the story of Ekaterina Gordeeva and her late husband Sergei Grinkov's first meeting, first success as a pairs team, Olympic glory and to her life now without Sergei. An interesting topic and well worth reading as Gordeeva is talented and strong minded young women that young people can admire.

St. Sebastian lived an extraordinary life under extremely difficult circumstances. Fascinating reading here, with lots of eye witness accounts.

The book proposes a number of sophisticated theoretical statements on the sources of the protraction or partial failure of Russia's transition so far. One of its basic claims is that Russia has entered the road of democratization without yet being a fully "modern" state. This implies that it does not yet have a rule of law, an effective civil society, and mechanisms to hold politicians accountable between elections and even through them. The positive effect of the introduction of electoral procedures - though being by themselves more or less meaningful - is thus diminished by the context in which the candidates and voters interact. That is what is meant by "Russia's challenge to Vladimir Putin." Such a proposition constitutes an adequate and lucid diagnosis though I doubt that the term "modern" is the most appropriate one to conceptualize the issue at hand here. ("Modernity" is, in general, such a diffuse concept that it might be better to avoid it in focused social analysis.) Still, the substance of Rose's and Munro's argument is certainly relevant. One would wish Putin, his assistants and Russian politicians in general would read the book because it so refreshingly clearly states what Russia's major problem today seems to be.
This is one of the general advantages of this text. The authors' opinions are stated explicitly, and their critique of Russian practices sometimes borders to what Russians might consider "politically incorrect." For instance, the authors affirmatively quote S.E. Finer who judged Ivan the Terrible's rule to have been "the most extreme example of arbitrary and capricious despotism to be found anywhere" (as quoted on p. 17). When Rose and Munro deal with the pathologies of the post-Soviet Russian political structure by way of not lamenting the absence of a real party system, as is often done, but introducing the idea that there are four party systems producing "a system of floating parties" they can be envied for finding original ways to decipher one of the major paradoxes of post-Soviet Russian politics.
I found reading Rose's and Munro's thus to be fun and a challenge at the same time. We learn a lot about Russia. The opinions of the authors on many issues in her politics and society are well-informed. But the range of issues dealt with is too broad, and the amount of numbers and percentages sometimes overwhelming (at least, for those among us not trained in memorizing and computing large amounts of numerical data). A narrower focus of the study, presentation of less survey results, and use of more qualitative data might have made the argument clearer.