How a home for Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1920's became a deadly trap.In 1920's Kharkiv, when the city was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a group of Ukrainian writers championed the construction of an apartment complex that would be dedicated to housing members of the Ukrainian intellectual community. However, the initial promise of a home for Ukrainian writers and poets soon gave way to tragedy.Entrapment: Ukraine’s...

2024 Winner, Kjetil Hatlebrekke Memorial Book Prize, King's College Centre for the Study of IntelligenceThis book focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the moveme...

Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind th...

**WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZEWinner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize • Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize****A "riveting history" (Wall Street Journal) of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia—and beyond“A book about a past time that is very much a book for our time. . . . A story from which we all stand to learn as we face a new wave of authoritariani...

Essays on how chaos, totalitarianism, and trauma have shaped Ukraine's culture: "A milestone of the scholarship about Eastern European politics of memory." —Wulf Kansteiner, Aarhus UniversityIn a century marked by totalitarian regimes, genocide, mass migrations, and shifting borders, the concept of memory in Eastern Europe is often synonymous with notions of trauma. In Ukraine, memory mechanisms were disrupted by political systems seeking to repress and control the ...

The Russian president's landmark speeches, interviews and policies borrow heavily from great Russian thinkers past and present, from Peter the Great to Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. They offer powerful visions of strong leaders and the Russian nation: they value conservatism and the Slavic spirit. They root morality in Orthodoxy, and Russian identity in the historic struggle with the West. Today, Putin manages and manipulates those same ideas in his 'defense' of 130 million ethnic Russians ...

"Terry Martin looks at the nationalities policy of the early Soviet period and offers an insightful, detailed analysis of a problem that Soviet leaders grappled with throughout the twentieth century. As he points out, it was a problem that eventually helped to usher in the end of the USSR."— Amanda Wood Aucoin, New Zealand Slavonic JournalThe Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promot...

In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as...

Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned autho...

There are few more divisive names in modern history than that of the diehard revolutionary Leon Trotsky. To some he was a hypocritical totalitarian, while to many others he was a revolutionary liberator, an idealist determined to crush an outdated, oppressive dynasty in order to replace it with a proletarian socialist commonwealth. But one thing is agreed: his impact as a leader in the Russian Revolution and his widely read polemical books and articles make Trotsky one of the most influent...

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and “actually-existing” socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical c...

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multireligious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of "foreignness" and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Genoci...