Download or read book Russia ABCs written by Ann Berge and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2004 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Privyet! Welcome to Russia! Come along on this ABC adventure through the biggest country on Earth. Read about diamond-studded eggs, the deepest lake in the world, and other fascinating facts.
Download or read book Russia written by Philip Longworth and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Russia in Decline written by S. Enders Wimbush and published by . This book was released on 2017-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia is in precipitous decline, which is unlikely to be reversed. This conclusion, based on the research of Russian and American experts, constitutes the bottom line of The Jamestown Foundation's project, Russia in Decline. Moreover, the tempo of Russia's decay is accelerating across virtually every fragment of its politics, economy, society and military, which renders Russia a poor candidate to survive globalization, let alone claim the mantle of a Great Power. This small volume details why Russia's spiraling into decline and disarray should keep strategists awake at night. It should also alert foreign policy, security and military planners, for whom Russia's decline will necessarily become the leitmotif of informed planning.
Download or read book Russia written by Gregory Carleton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war. While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride. War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.
Download or read book Putin s Russia written by Lilii︠a︡ Shevt︠s︡ova and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 31, 1999, ailing political maverick Boris Yeltsin abruptly handed the country's leadership over to the virtually unknown former intelligence officer Vladimir Putin. The new Kremlin boss represented both continuity and change. While he was linked with the past, he also signified a sharp break from it.With Putin's ascendancy to power, Russian leadership and Russia have changed dramatically. A pragmatic manager, Putin has tamed the Russian elite and arrogant tycoons, pushed forward economic reforms previously stalled under Yeltsin, and instituted a pro-Western foreign policy. He has accomplished all of this while maintaining an astonishing 70 percent approval rating.However, Russia's transformation under Putin remains a paradox. Outwardly he has proved his desire to modernize Russia, but he has also demonstrated a deep distrust of major democratic institutions and an open desire to keep tight control over society.In Putin's Russia, Lilia Shevtsova, one of Russia's top political analysts and award-winning journalists, examines how, under Putin, the country vacillates between optimism and anguish, hope and resentment. She examines the true nature of Putin's leadership and how far he is willing and capable to go with further transformation. Time will tell if he can combine his authoritarian ways with economic liberalism and pro-Western policy to define the Russia of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Russia in Search of Itself written by James H. Billington and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2004-03-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billington describes the contentious discussion occurring all over Russia and across the political spectrum. He finds conflicts raging among individuals as much as between organized groups and finds a deep underlying tension between the Russians' attempts to legitimize their new, nominally democratic identity, and their efforts to craft a new version of their old authoritarian tradition. After showing how the problem of Russian identity was framed in the past, Billington asks whether Russians will now look more to the West for a place in the common European home, or to the East for a new, Eurasian identity.
Download or read book Letters from Russia written by Marquis de Custine and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Marquis de Custine's unique perspective on a vast, fascinating country in the grip of oppressive tyranny In 1839, encouraged by his friend Balzac, Custine set out to explore Russia. His impressions turned into what is perhaps the greatest and most influential of all books about Russia under the Tsars. Rich in anecdotes as much about the court of Tsar Nicholas as the streets of St Petersburg, Custine is as brilliant writing about the Kremlin as he is about the great northern landscapes. An immediate bestseller on publication, Custine's book is also a central book for any discussion of 19th century history, as - like de Tocqueville's Democracy in America - it dramatizes far broader questions about the nature of government and society.
Download or read book War with Russia written by Stephen F. Cohen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is America in a new Cold War with Russia? How does a new Cold War affect the safety and security of the United States? Does Vladimir Putin really want to destabilize the West? What should Donald Trump and America’s allies do? America is in a new Cold War with Russia even more dangerous than the one the world barely survived in the twentieth century. The Soviet Union is gone, but the two nuclear superpowers are again locked in political and military confrontations, now from Ukraine to Syria. All of this is exacerbated by Washington’s war-like demonizing of the Kremlin leadership and by Russiagate’s unprecedented allegations. US mainstream media accounts are highly selective and seriously misleading. American “disinformation,” not only Russian, is a growing peril. In War With Russia?, Stephen F. Cohen—the widely acclaimed historian of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia—gives readers a very different, dissenting narrative of this more dangerous new Cold War from its origins in the 1990s, the actual role of Vladimir Putin, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis to Donald Trump’s election and today’s unprecedented Russiagate allegations. Topics include: Distorting Russia US Follies and Media Malpractices 2016 The Obama Administration Escalates Military Confrontation With Russia Was Putin’s Syria Withdrawal Really A “Surprise”? Trump vs. Triumphalism Has Washington Gone Rogue? Blaming Brexit on Putin and Voters Washington Warmongers, Moscow Prepares Trump Could End the New Cold War The Real Enemies of US Security Kremlin-Baiting President Trump Neo-McCarthyism Is Now Politically Correct Terrorism and Russiagate Cold-War News Not “Fit to Print” Has NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer? Why Russians Think America Is Attacking Them How Washington Provoked—and Perhaps Lost—a New Nuclear-Arms Race Russia Endorses Putin, The US and UK Condemn Him (Again) Russophobia Sanction Mania Cohen’s views have made him, it is said, “America’s most controversial Russia expert.” Some say this to denounce him, others to laud him as a bold, highly informed critic of US policies and the dangers they have helped to create. War With Russia? gives readers a chance to decide for themselves who is right: are we living, as Cohen argues, in a time of unprecedented perils at home and abroad?
Download or read book Russia on the Danube written by Victor Taki and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the goals of Russia’s Eastern policy was to turn Moldavia and Wallachia, the two Romanian principalities north of the Danube, from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and a springboard for future military operations against Constantinople. Russia on the Danube describes the divergent interests and uneasy cooperation between the Russian officials and the Moldavian and Wallachian nobility in a key period between 1812 and 1834. Victor Taki’s meticulous examination of the plans and memoranda composed by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite underlines the crucial consequences of this encounter. The Moldavian and Wallachian nobility used the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in order to preserve and expand their traditional autonomy. The comprehensive institutional reforms born out of their interaction with the tsar’s officials consolidated territorial statehood on the lower Danube, providing the building blocks of a nation state. The main conclusion of the book is that although Russian policy was driven by self-interest, and despite the Russophobia among a great part of the Romanian intellectuals, this turbulent period significantly contributed to the emergence, several decades later, of modern Romania.
Download or read book Russia and the New World Disorder written by Bobo Lo and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brookings Institution Press and Chatham House publication The Russian annexation of Crimea was one of the great strategic shocks of the past twenty-five years. For many in the West, Moscow's actions in early 2014 marked the end of illusions about cooperation, and the return to geopolitical and ideological confrontation. Russia, for so long a peripheral presence, had become the central actor in a new global drama. In this groundbreaking book, renowned scholar Bobo Lo analyzes the broader context of the crisis by examining the interplay between Russian foreign policy and an increasingly anarchic international environment. He argues that Moscow's approach to regional and global affairs reflects the tension between two very different worlds—the perceptual and the actual. The Kremlin highlights the decline of the West, a resurgent Russia, and the emergence of a new multipolar order. But this idealized view is contradicted by a world disorder that challenges core assumptions about the dominance of great powers and the utility of military might. Its lesson is that only those states that embrace change will prosper in the twenty-first century. A Russia able to redefine itself as a modern power would exert a critical influence in many areas of international politics. But a Russia that rests on an outdated sense of entitlement may end up instead as one of the principal casualties of global transformation.
Download or read book Imperial Russia written by Jane Burbank and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-22 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On the basis of the work presented here, one can say that the future of American scholarship on imperial Russia is in good hands." —American Historial Review " . . . innovative and substantive research . . . " —The Russian Review "Anyone wishing to understand the 'state of the field' in Imperial Russian history would do well to start with this collection." —Theodore W. Weeks, H-Net Reviews "The essays are impressive in terms of research conceptualization, and analysis." —Slavic Review Presenting the results of new research and fresh approaches, the historians whose work is highlighted here seek to extend new thinking about the way imperial Russian history is studied and taught. Populating their essays are a varied lot of ordinary Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries, from a luxury-loving merchant and his extended family to reform-minded clerics and soldiers on the frontier. In contrast to much of traditional historical writing on Imperial Russia, which focused heavily on the causes of its demise, the contributors to this volume investigate the people and institutions that kept Imperial Russia functioning over a long period of time.
Download or read book Assignment Russia written by Marvin Kalb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the cold war and the early days of television news Marvin Kalb, the award-winning journalist who has written extensively about the world he reported on during his long career, now turns his eye on the young man who became that journalist. Chosen by legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to become one of what came to be known as the Murrow Boys, Kalb in this newest volume of his memoirs takes readers back to his first days as a journalist, and what also were the first days of broadcast news. Kalb captures the excitement of being present at the creation of a whole new way of bringing news immediately to the public. And what news. Cold War tensions were high between Eisenhower's America and Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Kalb is at the center, occupying a unique spot as a student of Russia tasked with explaining Moscow to Washington and the American public. He joins a cast of legendary figures along the way, from Murrow himself to Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Richard Hottelet, Charles Kuralt, and Daniel Schorr among many others. He finds himself assigned as Moscow correspondent of CBS News just as the U2 incident—the downing of a US spy plane over Russian territory—is unfolding. As readers of his first volume, The Year I Was Peter the Great, will recall, being the right person, in the right place, at the right time found Kalb face to face with Khrushchev. Assignment Russia sees Kalb once again an eyewitness to history—and a writer and analyst who has helped shape the first draft of that history.
Download or read book Russia written by Yegor Gaidar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important Russian economist and politician takes a long view of economic history and Russia's development. It is not so easy to take the long view of socioeconomic history when you are participating in a revolution. For that reason, Russian economist Yegor Gaidar put aside an early version of this work to take up a series of government positions—as Minister of Finance and as Boris Yeltsin's acting Prime Minister—in the early 1990s. In government, Gaidar shepherded Russia through its transition to a market economy after years of socialism. Once out of government, Gaidar turned again to his consideration of Russia's economic history and long-term economic and political challenges. This book, revised and updated shortly before his death in 2009, is the result. Gaidar's account of long-term socioeconomic trends puts his country in historical context and outlines problems faced by Russia (and other developing economies) that more developed countries have already encountered: aging population, migration, evolution of the system of social protection, changes in the armed forces, and balancing stability and flexibility in democratic institutions. This is not a memoir, but, Gaidar points out, neither is it “written from the position of a man who spent his entire life in a research institute.” Gaidar's “long view” is inevitably informed and enriched by his experience in government at a watershed moment in history.
Download or read book Medieval Russia 980 1584 written by Janet Martin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-12-07 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a concise and comprehensive narrative history of Russia from 980 to 1584. It covers the history of the realm of the Riurikid dynasty from the reign of Vladimir 1 the Saint, through to the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who sealed the end of his dynasty's rule. Presenting developments in social and economic areas, as well as in political history, foreign relations, religion and culture, Medieval Russia, 980-1584 breaks away from the traditional view of Old Russia as a static, immutable culture, and emphasises the 'dynamic' and changing qualities of Russian society. Janet Martin develops clear lines of argument that lead to conclusions concerning how and why the states and society of the lands of the Rus' assumed the forms and characteristics that they did. Broadly accessible with informative and provocative interpretations, this book provides an up-to-date analysis of medieval Russia.
Download or read book No Place for Russia written by William H. Hill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The optimistic vision of a “Europe whole and free” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has given way to disillusionment, bitterness, and renewed hostility between Russia and the West. In No Place for Russia, William H. Hill traces the development of the post–Cold War European security order to explain today’s tensions, showing how attempts to integrate Russia into a unified Euro-Atlantic security order were gradually overshadowed by the domination of NATO and the EU—at Russia’s expense. Hill argues that the redivision of Europe has been largely unintended and not the result of any single decision or action. Instead, the current situation is the cumulative result of many decisions—reasonably made at the time—that gradually produced the current security architecture and led to mutual mistrust. Hill analyzes the United States’ decision to remain in Europe after the Cold War, the emergence of Germany as a major power on the continent, and the transformation of Russia into a nation-state, placing major weight on NATO’s evolution from an alliance dedicated primarily to static collective territorial defense into a security organization with global ambitions and capabilities. Closing with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, No Place for Russia argues that the post–Cold War security order in Europe has been irrevocably shattered, to be replaced by a new and as-yet-undefined order.
Download or read book Russia in Space written by Anatoly Zak and published by Apogee Books. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique attempt to visualise space exploration¹s future through the eyes of Russian space engineers and to describe that nation¹s plans in space. Based on actual documents, rather than on guesswork, it is the first comprehensive illustrated book dedicated to the Russian vision for the future of manned spaceflight from the dawn of manned spaceflight until today. Lavishly illustrated with images of unparalleled artistic quality and technical accuracy, the book: puts the development of the Russian manned spacecraft into political and historical context; uniquely describes the future of space exploration through the eyes of Russian space engineers and planners; introduces hitherto unrevealed systems developed for the Russian space program; describes past events and future plans in the historical context of the fall and rise of the Russian space program.
Download or read book Moscow in Movement written by Samuel A. Greene and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-20 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moscow in Movement is the first exhaustive study of social movements, protest, and the state-society relationship in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Beginning in 2005 and running through the summer of 2013, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between citizens and their state through a series of in-depth case studies, explaining how Russians mobilized to defend human and civil rights, the environment, and individual and group interests: a process that culminated in the dramatic election protests of 2011–2012 and their aftermath. To understand where this surprising mobilization came from, and what it might mean for Russia's political future, the author looks beyond blanket arguments about the impact of low levels of trust, the weight of the Soviet legacy, or authoritarian repression, and finds an active and boisterous citizenry that nevertheless struggles to gain traction against a ruling elite that would prefer to ignore them. On a broader level, the core argument of this volume is that political elites, by structuring the political arena, exert a decisive influence on the patterns of collective behavior that make up civil society—and the author seeks to test this theory by applying it to observable facts in historical and comparative perspective. Moscow in Movement will be of interest to anyone looking for a bottom-up, citizens' eye view of recent Russian history, and especially to scholars and students of contemporary Russian politics and society, comparative politics, and sociology.
