Moldova: Arena of International Influences brings international perspective to Moldova’s foreign relations since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Eighteen chapters analyze the policy toward Moldova of selected international actors: Belarus, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the European Union, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the unrecognized breakaway state of Transnistri...

From the ashes of former Yugoslavia an independent Croatian state has arisen, the fulfillment, in the words of President Franjo Tudjman, of the Croats' "thousand-year-old dream of independence." Yet few countries in Europe have been born amid such bitter controversy and bloodshed: the savage war between pro-independence forces and the Yugoslav army left about one-third of the country in ruins and resulted in the flight of a quarter of a million of the country's Serbian minority.I...

Based on previously sealed war archives and rare witness records of the survivors, Khatyn is a heart wrenching story of the people who fought for their lives under the Nazi occupation during World War II. Through the prism of the retrospect perception as narrated by the novel’s main character Flyora – a boy who matures during the war – author Ales Adamovich beholds genocide and horrific crimes against humanity. The former teen partisan goes back in time and remembers atrocities of 1943. Th...

This book fills a significant gap in the study of the establishment of communist rule in Poland in the key period of 1944–1950. It shows that nationalism and nationality policy were fundamentally important in the consolidation of communist rule, acting as a crucial nexus through which different groups were both coerced and were able to consent to the new unfolding social and political order.Drawing on extensive archival research, including national and regional archives in Poland, ...

In A Short History of Russia Mary Platt Parmele takes the reader on a survey of Russia’s rich past, from the state’s early dramatic beginnings to its struggle to control society, the transformation of the empire into a multi-ethnic empire, and beyond.

Six chapters in the book, like six stars in one constellation, contain the names Maria, Emma, Valentina, Gennady, Larissa and John. Maria, a Russian beauty, is a symbol of love, determination and devotion to the family- a stronghold and a real survivor through the Russian turmoil. Emma, Maria's eldest daughter, wounded during the second World War at age 7, carried her grief through her whole life. Valentina, Maria's second daughter, optimistic by nature, made her life roads in her own way....

Russia's rich history is full of secrets: there's not another country in the world with so many skeletons in its closet. Vladimir Medinskiy's new book offers the reader the opportunity to get better acquainted with some myths about Russia in an quick, easy and entertaining way. The book covers some of the most interesting, colourful and controversial debates in Russian history and the most popular myths about Russia: vodka and its role in some incredible adventures, Russia's problems (apar...

This WWII memoir tells the remarkable story of a Ukrainian girl's perilous adventures and coming of age amid the chaos of war.Born in Kiev to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Sophia Williams chose to be identified as Jewish when she became eligible for a Soviet passport at age sixteen. She had no way of realizing the life-changing consequences of her decision. When Germany invaded Russia the following year, Sophia left Kiev and embarked on daring journey into...

War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power examines the history of the Pedagogical Institute, located in the USSR's Kirov region from 1941 to 1952. Holmes reveals a tangled and complex relationship of local, regional, and national agencies. While it recognizes the immense strength of the center, it emphasizes a contentious diffusion, although not a confusion, of authority. In so doing, it departs from traditional models of Soviet power with their neatly drawn vertical and horizontal lines ...

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier.Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on t...

The Slovaks lived under Hungarian rule for centuries, with no clear sense of political separateness, preserving Slovak as their spoken language, but using Czech as their written language. In the last decades of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, the efforts made by clerical intellectuals to develop a language more closely attuned to Slovak needs led to the rise of Slovak nationalism.The Slovak National Awakening describes the three major stages in the devel...

In the summer of 1980, the eyes of the world turned to the Gdansk shipyard in Poland which suddenly became the nexus of a strike wave that paralyzed the entire country. The Gdansk strike was orchestrated by the members of an underground free trade union that came to be known as Solidarnosc [Solidarity]. Despite fears of a violent response from the communist authorities, the strikes spread to more than 800 sites around the country and involved over a million workers, mobilizing its working ...