Download or read book Tiny Revolutions in Russia written by Bruce Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-01-10 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a large collection of anecdotes and jokes from different periods of the 20th century. Anecdotes and jokes were a hidden form of discursive communication in the Soviet era, lampooning official practices and acting as a confidential form of self-affirmation. They were not necessarily anti-Soviet, by their very nature both criticising existing reality and acting as a form of acquiescence. Above all they provide invaluable insights into everyday life, and the attitudes and concerns of ordinary people. The book also includes anecdotes and jokes from the post-Soviet period, when ordinary people in Russia continued to have to cope with rather grim reality, and the compiler provides extensive introductory and explanatory matter to set the material in context.
Download or read book Roads to the Temple written by Leon Aron and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Aron considers the “mystery of the Soviet collapse” and finds answers in the intellectual and moral self-scrutiny of glasnost that brought about a profound shift in values. Reviewing the entire output of the key glasnost outlets in 1987-1991, he elucidates and documents key themes in this national soul-searching and the “ultimate” questions that sparked moral awakening of a great nation: “Who are we? How do we live honorably? What is a dignified relationship between man and state? How do we atone for the moral breakdown of Stalinism?” Contributing both to the theory of revolutions and history of ideas, Aron presents a thorough and original narrative about new ideas’ dissemination through the various media of the former Soviet Union. Aron shows how, reaching every corner of the nation, these ideas destroyed the moral foundation of the Soviet state, de-legitimized it and made its collapse inevitable.
Download or read book The House of Government written by Yuri Slezkine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 1123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Download or read book A People s Tragedy written by Orlando Figes and published by Bodley Head Childrens. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vast in scope, based on exhaustive original research, and written with passion, narrative skill and human sympathy, this book offers an account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation.
Download or read book Revolutionary Russia 1891 1991 written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of A People's Tragedy, an original reading of the Russian Revolution, examining it not as a single event but as a hundred-year cycle of violence in pursuit of utopian dreams In this elegant and incisive account, Orlando Figes offers an illuminating new perspective on the Russian Revolution. While other historians have focused their examinations on the cataclysmic years immediately before and after 1917, Figes shows how the revolution, while it changed in form and character, nevertheless retained the same idealistic goals throughout, from its origins in the famine crisis of 1891 until its end with the collapse of the communist Soviet regime in 1991. Figes traces three generational phases: Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who set the pattern of destruction and renewal until their demise in the terror of the 1930s; the Stalinist generation, promoted from the lower classes, who created the lasting structures of the Soviet regime and consolidated its legitimacy through victory in war; and the generation of 1956, shaped by the revelations of Stalin's crimes and committed to "making the Revolution work" to remedy economic decline and mass disaffection. Until the very end of the Soviet system, its leaders believed they were carrying out the revolution Lenin had begun. With the authority and distinctive style that have marked his magisterial histories, Figes delivers an accessible and paradigm-shifting reconsideration of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.
Download or read book History of the Russian Revolution written by Leon Trotsky and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unparalleled account of one of the most pivotal and hotly debated events in world history.
Download or read book The Russian Revolution 1917 written by Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of the only full-length eyewitness account of the 1917 Revolution, Sukhanov was a key figure in the first revolutionary Government. His seven-volume book, first published in 1922, was suppressed under Stalin. This reissue of the abridged version is, as the editor's preface points out, one of the few things written about this most dramatic and momentous event, which actually has the smell of life, and gives us a feeling for the personalities, the emotions, and the play of ideas of the whole revolutionary period." Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Wall Street and the Russian Revolution written by Richard Spence and published by TrineDay. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wall Street and the Russian Revolution will give readers critical insight into what might be called the "Secret History of the 20th century." The Russian Revolution, like the war in which it was born, represents the real beginning of the modern world. The book will look not just at the sweep of events, but probe the economic, ideological and personal motivations of the key figures involved, revealing heretofore unknown or misunderstood connections. Was Trotsky, for instance, a political genius, an unprincipled egomaniac, or something of each? Readers should come away with not only a far deeper understanding of what happened in Russia a century ago, but also what happened in America and how that still shapes the relations of the twocountries today.
Download or read book The Russian Revolution written by Christopher Culpin and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories, settings, characters and issues the make the Russian Revolution such an extraordinarily important and popular topic are examined in the book.
Download or read book The Dilemmas of Lenin written by Tariq Ali and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The secret life of the man who reshaped Russia Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowledged the full magnitude of his intellectual and political achievements. But his legacy has been lost in misinterpretation; he is worshipped but rarely read. On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali explores the two major influences on Lenin’s thought—the turbulent history of Tsarist Russia and the birth of the international labour movement—and explains how Lenin confronted dilemmas that still cast a shadow over the present. Is terrorism ever a viable strategy? Is support for imperial wars ever justified? Can politics be made without a party? Was the seizure of power in 1917 morally justified? Should he have parted company from his wife and lived with his lover? In The Dilemmas of Lenin, Ali provides an insightful portrait of Lenin’s deepest preoccupations and underlines the clarity and vigour of his theoretical and political formulations. He concludes with an affecting account of Lenin’s last two years, when he realized that “we knew nothing” and insisted that the revolution had to be renewed lest it wither and die.
Download or read book The Crimean War written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note that the maps available in the print edition do not appear in the ebook. From "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians," (Financial Times) the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come. In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation; from the ordinary soldiers and nurses on the battlefields to the women and children in towns under siege.. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force whose depiction of ethnic cleansing and the West's relations with the Muslim world resonates with contemporary overtones. At once a rigorous, original study and a sweeping, panoramic narrative, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world..
Download or read book Humour and Social Protest written by Marjolein 't Hart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeen essays in this book examine the power of humour in framing social and political protest.
Download or read book Solovyovo written by Margaret Paxson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a small village beside a reed-lined lake in the Russian north, a cluster of farmers has lived for centuries -- in the time of tsars and feudal landlords; Bolsheviks and civil wars; collectivization and socialism; perestroika and open markets. Solovyovo is about the place and power of social memory. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in that single village, it shows how villagers configure, transmit, and enact social memory through narrative genres, religious practice, social organization, commemoration, and the symbolism of space. Margaret Paxson relates present-day beliefs, rituals, and practices to the remembered traditions articulated by her informants. She brings to life the everyday social and agricultural routines of the villagers as well as holiday observances, religious practices, cosmology, beliefs and practices surrounding health and illness, the melding of Orthodox and communist traditions and their post-Soviet evolution, and the role of the yearly calendar in regulating village lives. The result is a compelling ethnography of a Russian village, the first of its kind in modern, North American anthropology.
Download or read book Red October written by Douglas Boyd and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda pretended for several decades that it was ‘the will of the people’, but in reality the brutal rebellion, which killed millions and raised the numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power, was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered through a Swedish bank.The so-called ‘workers’ and peasants’ revolution’ had a cast of millions, of which the three stars were neither workers nor peasants. Nor were they Russian. Josef V. Djugashvili – Stalin – was a Georgian who never did speak perfect Russian; Leiba Bronstein – Trotsky – was a Jewish Ukrainian; Vladimir I. Ulyanov – Lenin – was a mixture of Tatar and other Asiatic bloodlines.Karl Marx had thought that the Communist revolution would happen in an industrialised country like Germany. Instead, German cash enabled Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Co. to destroy ineffective tsarist rule and declare war on the whole world. This is how they did it, told largely in the words of people who were there.
Download or read book To the Finland Station written by Edmund Wilson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a critical and historical study of European writers and theorists of Socialism in the one hundred fifty years leading to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and discusses European socialism, anarchism, and theories of revolution.
Download or read book Road to Revolution written by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of revolutionary movements in nineteenth- century Russia, ending with the great famine of 1891-92, by which time Marxism was already in the ascendant. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Politics of Punishment written by Bruce F. Adams and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.
