Author: Philip Longworth Publisher: Macmillan + ORM ISBN: 1429916869 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 886
Book Description
Through the centuries, Russia has swung sharply between successful expansionism, catastrophic collapse, and spectacular recovery. This illuminating history traces these dramatic cycles of boom and bust from the late Neolithic age to Ivan the Terrible, and from the height of Communism to the truncated Russia of today. Philip Longworth explores the dynamics of Russia's past through time and space, from the nameless adventurers who first penetrated this vast, inhospitable terrain to a cast of dynamic characters that includes Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, and Stalin. His narrative takes in the magnificent, historic cities of Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg; it stretches to Alaska in the east, to the Black Sea and the Ottoman Empire to the south, to the Baltic in the west and to Archangel and the Artic Ocean to the north. Who are the Russians and what is the source of their imperialistic culture? Why was Russia so driven to colonize and conquer? From Kievan Rus'---the first-ever Russian state, which collapsed with the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century---to ruthless Muscovy, the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century and finally the Soviet period, this groundbreaking study analyses the growth and dissolution of each vast empire as it gives way to the next. Refreshing in its insight and drawing on a vast range of scholarship, this book also explicitly addresses the question of what the future holds for Russia and her neighbors, and asks whether her sphere of influence is growing.
Author: Nancy Shields Kollmann Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199280517 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures.
Author: Kees Boterbloem Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0742568407 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
This clear and focused text provides an introduction to imperial Russian and Soviet history from the crowning of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 to Vladimir Putin’s new term. Through a consistent chronological narrative, Kees Boterbloem considers the political, military, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments and crucial turning points that led Russia from an exotic backwater to superpower stature in the twentieth century. The only text designed and written specifically for a one-semester course on this four-hundred-year period, it will appeal to all readers interested in learning more about the history of the people who have inhabited one-sixth of the earth’s landmass for centuries.
Author: Robert Service Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 696
Book Description
Russia has had an extraordinary history in the twentieth century. As the first Communist society, the USSR was both an admired model and an object of fear and hatred to the rest of the world. How are we to make sense of this history? A History of Twentieth-Century Russia treats the years from 1917 to 1991 as a single period and analyzes the peculiar mixture of political, economic, and social ingredients that made up the Soviet formula. Under a succession of leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, various methods were used to conserve and strengthen this compound. At times the emphasis was upon shaking up the ingredients, at others upon stabilization. All this occurred against a background of dictatorship, civil war, forcible industrialization, terror, world war, and the postwar arms race. Communist ideas and practices never fully pervaded the society of the USSR. Yet an impact was made and, as this book expertly documents, Russia since 1991 has encountered difficulties in completely eradicating the legacy of Communism. A History of Twentieth-Century Russia is the first work to use the mass of material that has become available in the documentary collections, memoirs, and archives over the past decade. It is an extraordinarily lucid, masterful account of the most complex and turbulent period in Russia's long history.
Author: Geoffrey A. Hosking Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674004733 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 776
Book Description
Chronicles the history of the Russian Empire from the Mongol Invasion, through the Bolshevik Revolution, to the aftereffects of the Cold War.
Author: Masha Gessen Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 159463453X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 530
Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Author: Maureen Perrie Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521811449 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 17
Book Description
This is a definitive new history of Russia from early Rus' to the successor states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Volume I encompasses developments before the reign of Peter I; volume II covers the 'imperial era', from Peter's time to the fall of the monarchy in March 1917; and volume III continues the story through to the end of the twentieth century. At the core of all three volumes are the Russians, the lands which they have inhabited and the polities that ruled them, while other peoples and territories have also been given generous coverage for the periods when they came under Riurikid, Romanov and Soviet rule. The distinct voices of individual contributors provide a multitude of perspectives on Russia's diverse and controversial millennial history. This first volume of the Cambridge History of Russia covers the period from early ('Kievan') Rus' to the start of Peter the Great's reign in 1689. It surveys the development of Russia through the Mongol invasions to the expansion of the Muscovite state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and deals with political, social, economic and cultural issues under the Riurikid and early Romanov rulers. The volume is organised on a primarily chronological basis, but a number of general themes are also addressed, including the bases of political legitimacy; law and society; the interactions of Russians and non-Russians; and the relationship of the state with the Orthodox Church. The international team of authors incorporates the latest Russian and Western scholarship and offers an authoritative new account of the formative 'pre-Petrine' period of Russian history, before the process of Europeanisation had made a significant impact on society and culture. Book jacket.
Author: Michael Khodarkovsky Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 135009143X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
Michael Khodarkovsky's innovative exploration of Russia's 20th century, through 100 carefully selected vignettes that span the century, offers a fascinating prism through which to view Russian history. Each chosen microhistory focuses on one particular event or individual that allows you to understand Russia not in abstract terms but in real events in the lives of ordinary people. Russia's 20th Century covers a broad range of topics, including the economy, culture, politics, ideology, law and society. This introduction provides a vital background and engaging analysis of Russia's path through a turbulent 20th century. A representative sample of chapters in the book includes: 1902: Peasants 1903: The Pogrom 1906: The Tsar's Speech 1908: Church 1910: Tolstoy's Death 1913: The Romanovs 1916: Rasputin 1922: USSR 1927: Orphans into Communists 1931: Palace of the Soviets 1935: Manufacturing Heroes 1939: Hitler's Ally 1941: Moscow on the Brink 1945: Rape of Germany 1949: Atomic Project 1954: Nuclear War Exercise “Snowball” 1955: Empire of Nations 1960: Virgin Lands 1969: The Soviet Dr. Seuss 1971: The Soviet Bob Dylan 1972: Nixon in Moscow and Kiev 1977: USSR, Less than a Sum of its Parts 1980: Moscow Olympic Games 1984: “Iron Maiden” Behind the Iron Curtain 1985: Vodka 1990: Soviet Nationalisms and Ethnic Wars 1997: Russian Fascism 1998: Return of the KGB The historical mosaic of Russia's 20th Century provides a unique examination of modern Russian history one snapshot at a time, prompting us to reflect on a larger picture of Russia's past and its place in the world today.
Author: Philip Longworth
Author: Nancy Shields Kollmann
Author: Maureen Perrie
Author: Kees Boterbloem
Author: Robert Service
Author: Geoffrey A. Hosking
Author: Masha Gessen
Author: Maureen Perrie
Author: Vasiliĭ Osipovich Kl~inotuchevskiĭ
Author: Michael Khodarkovsky