A Startling Journey Through Russia's Hidden Culture
An essential guide to the strange, sinister culture of contemporary Russia. Upon the invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Fink set out to uncover through interviews the real heart of Russia, and uncovered a country besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment. This eminently readable book ......
The Saga of a Russian-American Family Through War and Revolution
The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 had devastating consequences for millions of its subjects, many of whom fled from the violent chaos, becoming known as "White Russian" emigres. While their stories have been widely chronicled, less well known are the stories of the so-called Second Wave of Russian emigrants, who were swept across Europe ......
Recruitments, Exclusions, and Repressions Within the Soviet Communist Party, 1917-1941
The Soviet Communist Party faced a large-scale problem of regulating membership after the Russian Revolution of 1917. While recruitments were conducted mainly according to the internal Party rules, exclusion campaigns were periodically adopted to ensure ideological purity. In the decades before World War II, these reviews took various forms - from ......
The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism
Inspired by Richard Wagner's idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova's At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia-the physiological or figurative blending of senses-as a modernist phenomenon from its ......
Russian state propaganda has framed the invasion of Ukraine as a liberation mission by invoking the Soviet-era myth of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), in which the Soviet people, led by Russia, saved the world from the greatest evil of the twentieth century. At the same time, the Russian government has banned civil society institutions and ......
On September 29 and 30, 1941, in one of the largest mass murders of the Holocaust, German troops massacred 33,771 Jews at the vast gorge located near Kyiv known as Babi Yar (Babij Jar). During and after the war, the territory was modified, redesigned, and converted in order to remove the physical signs of genocide, including the exhumation and ......
Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of Dostoevsky, 1881-1917
Reading Faithfully reveals how Russian critics of the Silver Age (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) reread and remade Fyodor Dostoevsky for their era of religious renewal amid a broader political embrace of liberal reform and radical politics. Lindsay Ceballos argues that most Silver Age critics engaged in a mode of critique ......
Throughout Russian history, local craftsmen have shown remarkable skill in fashioning wood into items of daily use, from bridges and street paving to carts and boats to household utensils and combs. Russia has the largest forested zone on the planet, so its architecture was also traditionally made from timber. From homes to churches to forts, ......
As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender between 2000 and 2020, Vladimir Putin's Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments ......
