In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and
The First World War had a devastating impact on the Russian state, yet relatively little is known about the ways in which ordinary Russians experienced and viewed this conflict. Melissa Kirschke Stockdale presents the first comprehensive study of the Great War's influence on Russian notions of national identity and citizenship. Drawing on a vast array of sources, the book examines the patriotic and nationalist organizations which emerged during the war, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church, the press and the intelligentsia in mobilizing Russian society, the war's impact on the rights of citizens, and the new, democratized ideas of Russian nationhood which emerged both as a result of the war and of the 1917 revolution. Russia's war experience is revealed as a process that helped consolidate in the Russian population a sense of membership in a great national community, rather than being a test of patriotism which they failed.
In the aftermath of the Ukraine crises, borders within the wider post-Cold War and post-Soviet context have become a key issue for international relations and public political debate. These borders ar
On the 100th Anniversary of the murder of the Russian Imperial Family, Rappaport embarks on a quest to uncover the many international plots to save them, why they failed, and who was responsible.The m
The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the
This collection of essays explores the continuities and disruptions in the perceptions of criminality, its causes, and ways of fighting it in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It focuse
From Citizens to Subjects challenges the common assertion in historiography that Enlightenment-era centralization and rationalization brought progress and prosperity to all European states, arguing in
In 1943 the tide began to turn against Germany on the Eastern Front. Their summer offensive, Operation Citadel, was a failure and the Red Army seized the initiative, despite appallingly high losses. W
Stalin, to borrow Churchill’s phrase, is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. There are still heated arguments about how precisely we should judge the Georgian student p
This book is the first full-length study of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, exploring Soviet citizens’ views of constitutional democratic principles and their problematic relationship to the reality
Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish
Lilka Trzcinska was fourteen years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The daughter of an architect, Lilka was a high school student at the time. When schools were closed by the occupier, she,
This collection of thirteen essays examines reactions in Eastern Europe to the Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Countries covered include the Soviet Union and specific
The 20th century in the Baltic region had it all. The turbulent century did not spare the small territory and its population, which was visited by practically every calamity the modern era had to offe
This book is about a region on the fringes of empire, which neither Tsarist Russia, nor the Soviet Union, nor in fact the Russian Federation, ever really managed to control. Starting with the nineteen
"The proposed book takes one phenomenon, the reinvention of the idea of Central Europe in the mid-1980s, and demonstrates how its proponents developed a transnational set of practices connecting polit
