|9780822956099|From the Collections of Vuk Karadzic| In the early nineteenth century, Vuk Karadzic, a Serb scholar and linguist, collected and eventually published transcriptions of the traditional oral poetry of the South Slavs. It was a monumental and unprecedented undertaking. Karadzic gathered and heard performances of the rich songs of Balkan peasants, outlaws, and professional singers and their rebel heroes. His four volumes constitute the classic anthology of Balkan oral poetry, treasured for nearly two centuries by readers of all literatures, and influential to such literary giants as Goethe, Merimee, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Sir Walter Scott.This edition of the songs offers…

|9780822985846|The Making of an Industrial Working Class| Kenneth Straus weaves together many threads in Russian social history to develop a new theory of working-class formation in the years of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. In so doing, he addresses a long-standing debate among historians by suggesting new answers to an old question: Was there social support for the Stalin regime among the Soviet working class during the 1930s, and if so, why? Straus argues that the keys for interpreting Stalinism lie in occupational specialization, on the one hand, and community organization, on the other. He focuses on the daily life…

|9780822956556|Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905|Examines how peasant migration—the movement of males to cities for wage labor—affected villages before the Bolshevik revolution. New Russian sources are utilized.| Jeffrey Burds| Russian and East European Studies| History / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union History / General

|9780822985853| A comprehensive, original, and innovative analysis of the social, economic, and political factors affecting contemporary Russian reform, the book is organized around the central question of the role of the state and its effect on the course of Russian agrarian reform. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, contemporary conventional wisdom holds the the Russian state is “weak.” Stephen Wegren feels that the traditional approach to the weak/strong state suffers from measurement and circular logic problems, believing that the Russian state, thought weaker than in its Soviet past, is still relatively stronger than other actors. The state’s…

|9780822985877|Historians have long claimed Czechoslovakia between the world wars as an island of democracy in a sea of dictatorships. The reasons for the survival of democratic institutions in the Czechoslovak First Republic, with its profound divisions, have never been fully explained, partly because for years critical research was thwarted by the communist state. Drawing on information from European archives, Miller pieces together the story of the party and its longtime leader, Antonín Svehla- the “Master of Compromise,” who had an extraordinary capacity to mediate between political parties, factions, and individual political leaders. Miller shows how Svehla’s official and behind-the-scenes activities…