With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia.

Co-authored by Russian, Ukrainian, and American critics, Dialogues/Dialogi is the first fully collaborative and comparative study of American and (ex)Soviet women writers. Truly a dialogue, the book juxtaposes fiction by American and Soviet women from the 1960s to the present to reveal their similarities and differences and to show how questions of gender, race, and ethnicity are enacted in the societies and psyches each text represents. Begun in the early days of glasnost and com...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.In 1917 the world changed forever. One of the most influential and contentious events in recent history, the Russian Revolution unleashed the greatest political experiment ever conducted, one which continues to influence both Eastern and Western politics today.The Russian Revolution: History in an Hour neatly covers all the major facts and events giving you a clear and straightforward overview: from the circumstances beh...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEThe first full account of how the Cold War arms race finally came to a close, this riveting narrative history sheds new light on the people who struggled to end this era of massive overkill, and examines the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today.Drawing on memoirs, interviews in both Russia and the US, and classified documents from deep inside the Kremlin, David E. Hoffman examines the...

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the YearFrom the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics.No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Sta...

Originally published as Deathride, this is the true story of the Eastern Front in World War II, emphasizing how close Germany came to winning and the USSR to losing; the severity of the Soviet losses, which have been minimized due to Soviet propaganda; and the importance of the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily, among other factors, in forcing Hitler to re-deploy troops, saving the Soviets from disaster.The German invasion of the Soviet Union on ...

The truth of the enduring mystery of Anastasia's fate-and the life of her most convincing impostor The passage of more than ninety years and the publication of hundreds of books in dozens of languages has not extinguished an enduring interest in the mysteries surrounding the 1918 execution of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The Resurrection of the Romanovs draws on a wealth of new information from previously unpublished materials and unexplored sources to probe t...

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army. After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early ...

On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared its independence, becoming the seventh state to emerge from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. A tiny country of just two million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians, Kosovo is central-geographically, historically, and politically-to the future of the Western Balkans and, in turn, its potential future within the European Union. But the fate of both Kosovo, condemned by Serbian leaders as a "fake state" and the region as a whole, remains uncert...

The Idiot is anything but, yet that is how his fellow boarders at Mrs. Smithers Pedagog's home for single gentlemen see him. His brand of creative thought is dismissed as foolishness. And yet, it starts to get under their skin, because when you are beneath contempt, you can say what you please. Funny, clever, poignant and as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago, this is the first of John Kendrick Bangs' "Idiot" books.

A woman's true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: "Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it."— The New York Times Book ReviewIn the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin's reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist...

The Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria was the first 20th century conflict fought between the regular armies of major powers, employing the most modern means – machine guns, trench warfare, minefields and telephone communications.The battle of Mukden in March 1905 was the largest clash of armies in world history up to that date. Events were followed by many foreign observers; but the events of 1914 in Western Europe suggest that not all of them drew the correct conclu...