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Gerbi examines the fascinating reports of the first Europeans to see the Americas. These accounts provided the basis for the images of strange and new flora, fauna, and human creatures that filled European imaginations. Chapters include the writings of Columbus, Vespucci, Cortes, Verrazzano, and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. Gerbi contends that Oviedo was a major, though overlooked, authority on the culture, history, and conquest of the New World.

Duhamel examines the KGB at its pinnacle of power during the anticorruption campaigns of 1982-1987, when it sought to break the Communist Party’s stranglehold on Moscow’s two largest trade organizations, which were built on a foundation of bribery and favoritism.

When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. This thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the late eighteenth century and is far from extinct today. The Dispute of the New World is the definitive study of this debate.

The first English-language account of the changing role of children in the Russian workforce, from the onset of industrialization until the Communist Revolution of 1917, and an examination of the laws that would establish children’s labor rights.

The essays in this collection chronicle the responses of the Soviet state and society to a variety of disabled groups and disabilities.

The first scholarly account of BAM (the Baikal-Amur Railway), Russia’s most ambitious public construction project to be attempted in the final decades leading up to the collapse of the USSR. This is a rich social history based on a combination of original scholarly research and interviews with many of those who worked on BAM.

This book exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, Kaganovsky examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body. She views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.

The editors of this volume contend that transnational actors have exerted a powerful influence in postcommunist transitions. They demonstrate that transitions to democracy, capitalism, and nation-statehood, which scholars thought were likely to undermine one another, were facilitated by the integration of Central and East European states into an international system of complex interdependence. Transnational actors turn out to be the “dark matter” that held the various aspects of the transition together. Leading scholars debate the role and impact of transnational actors and present a promising new research program for the study of this rapidly transforming region.

In 1920, Aleksandr Antonov led an insurgency that became the largest armed peasant revolt against the Soviets during the civil war. Yet by 1921, the revolt had been crushed, and popular support for the movement had all but disappeared. Until now, details of this conflict have remained hidden. Erik Landis mines recently opened provincial and central Soviet archives and international collections to provide a depth of detail and historical analysis never before possible in this definitive account of the uprising.

The “Silver Age” (c. 1890-1917) has been one of the most intensely studied topics in Russian literary studies, and for years scholars have struggled with its precise definition. Firmly established in the Russian cultural psyche, it continues to influence both literature and mass media. Rylkova analyzes writings by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak and Victor Erofeev to reveal how the construct of the Silver Age was perpetuated and ingrained.

By exploring controversies such as the veracity of the Black Legend, the location of Christopher Columbus’s mortal remains, and the survival of indigenous cultures, this study shows how recorded history became implicated in the struggles over empire.

Intimate Enemies examines the transformation of Bolshevik Party ideology, language, and power relations during the crucial period leading up to Stalin’s seizure of power. Igal Halfin uncovers this evolution in the language of Bolshevism. This language defined the methods for judging true party loyalty-in what Halfin describes as an examination of the ‘hermeneutics of the soul,’ and became the basis for prosecuting the Party’s enemies, particularly the “intimate enemies” within the Party itself.

Winner of the 2008 First Place/Book Prizefrom the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies

Examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in post-Soviet Latvia. Views the country’s responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development.

Examines debates over women’s rights in the first half of the twentieth century, to show how Czechs gradually turned away from democracy and established the separation of state and domestic issues, at the expense of personal freedoms.

This book argues that economic success and failure in the developing world is not determined solely by a nation’s economic policy but also by how they were influenced by colonialism, military aggression, international markets, and foreign aid.