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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2021

        Outcasts: Punished by Space

        by Tamara Vronska, Olena Stiazhkina

        Minusnyky (outcasts) are a verbal and social creation of the Soviet state, which, through repression, discrimination and control, created communities of "friends" and "foes", branding the latter with punitive methods and forming a specific language to denote them. The book talks about a special category of citizens of the "Soviet country" who were recognized as "socially dangerous" and punished by a ban on settling in a number of areas of the USSR after forced "removal" from their places of permanent residence, as well as serving time in the Gulag system. The researchers analyze the process of constructing the Bolshevik concept of the geographical isolation of the "disloyal" and determine the logic of creating the Soviet space as a space of prohibitions. The regularity of the Soviet territories is analyzed not only as a manifestation of Stalin's repressive policy but also as an organic part of the functioning of the totalitarian mechanism which picked up momentum when the Bolsheviks seized power.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        2021

        Taste of the Soviet Union: Food and Eaters in the Art of Life and the Art of Cinema (mid-1960s - mid-1980s)

        by Olena Stiazhkina

        This book is about Soviet people - women, men, children - who ate at home, at work, on the road, in kindergartens and schools, in the system of the Soviet canteens. It describes those who fought for their food in long queues to the empty shops, at collective farm markets, gathered it in their own gardens, obtained it through bribes and barter exchanges and stole it at workplaces. It is about those who created the food surpluses in the system of the shadow economy and about those who refused food as a way of rebellion against the system and about those who managed to preserve national cuisine despite its deliberate extermination by the Bolsheviks and calling national dishes "simple nationalism." Food culture is considered not only as a sign of the late Soviet consumer revolution, but also as one of the powerful mechanisms of social engineering and (self) coercion. The real world of Soviet eaters is analysed together with the artistic world where filmmakers created and broadcasted the images of Soviet food, as an object representing repressive society in which taste was as problematic and almost unattainable as food and freedom associated with taste and choice.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & young adult: general non-fiction
        2020

        Union of Soviet Things

        by Petro Yatsenko

        The soviet realia are not entirely clear to modern adolescents. Childhood in the late Soviet Union was not like it is now. Back in those days, everything was different and even scary to some point: a premonition of the nuclear war, propaganda, shortages, and confusing household items. The main characters of the book, a teenage Matvii and his father Petro, go to Lviv to visit their grandmother. There are still heaps of Soviet things in her ceiling cabinet and they are good at telling stories. Paretns are good at this as well, if you ask them well. The book gives a reason to talk about feelings of nostalgia and values.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2025

        The Caucasus Emirate

        Ideology, identity, and insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus

        by Mark Youngman

        Insurgency has plagued the North Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between 2007 and 2015, rebels waged their struggle under the banner of the Caucasus Emirate (Imarat Kavkaz, IK). This book systematically examines the IK's ideology to explain what the group claimed to be fighting for and against and how it sought to mobilise people behind its cause. It reveals a group with a weakly developed political programme, which aligned itself with global jihadism but consistently prioritised local concerns. It demonstrates the priority rebel leaders afforded to shaping local identities, but also their failure to forge a unified movement or revitalise armed struggle. Re-evaluating the IK's ideology helps us better understand the past and future of armed struggle in the North Caucasus.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2000

        Churchill and the Soviet Union

        by David Carlton

        In the already vast literature on Churchill, no single work has focused on his changing attitude towards the Soviet Union. This is the first project to isolate just one major theme in Churchill's lifeExplores whether or not Churchill was consistent through forty years and examines the possibility that perceptions of domestic political advantage may have shaped his course more than high-monded and disinterested evaluations of evolving Soviet intentions and capabilitiesChurchill still arouses a great deal of general interest, and a work which challenges a number of preconceptions, as this book does, will undoubtedly appeal to the general readerA clearly argued, revisionist study of Churchill's views about and dealings with the Soviet Union. It will be part of the growing historical literature that seeks to reassess Churchill. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2024

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        Engaging in everyday struggle

        by Alexandrina Vanke

        Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2004

        President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism

        by John Dumbrell

        This major new study fills a significant gap in the academic literature on the Cold War by considering President Lyndon Johnson's policy towards the Soviet Union. The author examines the attitudes of Johnson and his leading advisers toward the Soviet leadership, taking into account the effects of Moscow's growing splits with Beijing, the impact on US-Soviet relations of nuclear issues, the Vietnam War, and clashes over Cuba, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The author's research is based on detailed scrutiny of archives in Britain and the United States, as well as recently published document collections. His study also examines the President's personal leadership qualities, his mistakes in Vietnam and his success as a peacemaker with Moscow. The book constitutes a major contribution to literature on President Johnson's foreign policy 'beyond Vietnam'. The book will be of interest to students of the Cold War, the Johnson Presidency and of US foreign relations. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2022

        Germany's Russia problem

        The struggle for balance in Europe

        by John Lough

        The relationship between Germany and Russia is Europe's most important link with the largest country on the continent. But despite Germany's unparalleled knowledge and historical experience, its policymakers struggle to accept that Moscow's efforts to rebalance Europe at the cost of the cohesion of the EU and NATO are an attack on Germany's core interests. This book explains the scale of the challenge facing Germany in managing relations with a changing Russia. It analyses how successive German governments from 1991 to 2014 misread Russian intentions, until Angela Merkel sharply recalibrated German and EU policy towards Moscow. The book also examines what lies behind efforts to revise Merkel's bold policy shift, including attitudes inherited from the GDR and the role of Russian influence channels in Germany.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2021

        The Red and the Black

        The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic

        by David Featherstone, Christian Høgsbjerg

        The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not just a world-historical event in its own right, but also struck powerful blows against racism and imperialism, and so inspired many black radicals internationally. This edited collection explores the implications of the creation of the Soviet Union and the Communist International for black and colonial liberation struggles across the African diaspora. It examines the critical intellectual influence of Marxism and Bolshevism on the current of revolutionary 'black internationalism' and analyses how 'Red October' was viewed within the contested articulations of different struggles against racism and colonialism. Challenging European-centred understandings of the Russian Revolution and the global left, The Red and the Black offers new insights on the relations between Communism, various lefts and anti-colonialisms across the Black Atlantic - including Garveyism and various other strands of Pan-Africanism. The volume makes a major and original intellectual contribution by making the relations between the Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic central to debates on questions relating to racism, resistance and social change.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2024

        The new politics of Russia

        by Andrew Monaghan

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        2014

        History of Ukraine from KGB Secret Files

        by Volodymyr Viatrovych

        The unknown and classified KGB history of the largest country in Europe - Ukraine is the history of people, events, documents and files. The files have answers to many questions. The most important of which - why did a war begin again in Europe? Why is it so important for Russia to conquer Ukraine? Why are Ukrainians putting up such a powerful resistance? Historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, who declassified the secret archives of the Soviet special services from the Cheka to the KGB, talks about the history of Ukraine, the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1918 to 1991. The reader, is offered, along with various heroes and traitors, those who thought they were in control of events, and those who thought they had no power over them, to recreate the nearly century-old chess game between the Ukrainian liberation movement and the creators of the "prison of nations." Described in reports and recreated by a historian, this work looks at the cunning “special operations”, deadly moves, information wars and complex games among several players that are all an attempt to find an answer to the question: what creates our destiny - human will or circumstances?

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Joseph Losey

        by Colin Gardner

        The career of Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey spanned over four decades and several countries. A self-proclaimed Marxist and veteran of the 1930s Soviet agit-prop theater, he collaborated with Bertholt Brecht before directing noir B-pictures in Hollywood. A victim of McCarthyism, he later crossed the Atlantic to direct a series of seminal British films such as "Time Without Pity," "Eve," "The Servant," and "The Go-Between," which mark him as one of the cinema's greatest baroque stylists. His British films reflect on exile and the outsider's view of a class-bound society in crisis through a style rooted in the European art house tradition of Resnais and Godard. Gardner employs recent methodologies from cultural studies and poststructural theory, exploring and clarifying the films' uneasy tension between class and gender, and their explorations of fractured temporality.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2006

        Securitising Russia

        The domestic politics of Vladimir Putin

        by Bettina Renz, Edwin Bacon, Julian Cooper

        Securitising Russia shows the impact of twenty-first-century security concerns on the way Russia is ruled. It demonstrates how President Putin has wrestled with terrorism, immigration, media freedom, religious pluralism, and economic globalism, and argues that fears of a return to old-style authoritarianism oversimplify the complex context of contemporary Russia. The book focuses on the internal security issues common to many states in the early twenty-first-century, and places them in the particular context of Russia. Detailed analysis of the place of security in Russia's political discourse and policy-making reveals nuances often missing from overarching assessments of Russia today. To characterise the Putin regime as the 'KGB-resurgent' is to miss vital continuities, contexts, and on-going political conflicts which make up the contemporary Russian scene. Securitising Russia draws together current debates about whether Russia is a 'normal' country developing its own democratic and market structures, or a nascent authoritarian regime returning to the past. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2023

        Charting space

        by Elize Mazadiego

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2024

        The renewal of post-war Manchester

        Planning, architecture and the state

        by Richard Brook

        A compelling account of the project to transform post-war Manchester, revealing the clash between utopian vision and compromised reality. Urban renewal in Britain was thrilling in its vision, yet partial and incomplete in its implementation. For the first time, this deep study of a renewal city reveals the complex networks of actors behind physical change and stagnation in post-war Britain. Using the nested scales of region, city and case-study sites, the book explores the relationships between Whitehall legislation, its interpretation by local government planning officers and the on-the-ground impact through urban architectural projects. Each chapter highlights the connections between policy goals, global narratives and the design and construction of cities. The Cold War, decolonialisation, rising consumerism and the oil crisis all feature in a richly illustrated account of architecture and planning in post-war Manchester.

      • Trusted Partner
        Historical fiction
        2021

        Faride

        by Irene Rozdobudko

        The beginning of the novel takes place in the 20s of the last century in the Crimea. Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Jews live peacefully in the village. We see a company of children of different ethnic backgrounds. Before World War II, these children graduated and were preparing for adult life. Young Crimean Tatar woman Faride works in a kindergarten. Crimea is occupied by the Nazis. They gather all the Jews to shoot them outside the village. Faride taught Jewish children from her kindergarten to say that they were Tatars, and gave them new Crimean Tatar names. The Nazis tortured her, but the children were saved. 50 years later she was awarded the title of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 1944, Crimea was liberated from the Nazis by the Soviet army. Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis and ordered their expulsion from the Crimea, even those who had fought in the Soviet army. One night they are all driven from their homes and taken for months in wagons, designed to transport cattle, to camps in Siberia. Half of them died on the way from starvation and disease. Faride manages to save her young son, leaving him in the village with neighbors, but she finds herself in a Stalinist concentration camp, where she works on cutting trees. After Stalin's death, Crimean Tatars were still not allowed to return home to Crimea; they were relocated to Uzbekistan, where they lived under police surveillance until 1989, when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. Faride returns, but her son did not come to meet her, and strangers live in her house. Faride returns forgotten, tortured by both the Nazis and the Soviet regime. The novel is based on real events, it shows the life story of one woman in parallel with the tragic history of the entire Crimean Tatar nation.

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