History

Chicago native, political activist, and journalist Ernest Poole (1880-1950) provides a distinctive view of the Bolshevik Revolution in his work, The Village: Russian Impressions. This work is unusual in the library of American accounts of Revolutionary Russia because he addresses the world of the Russian peasants, far away from the revolutionary centers of Petrograd and Moscow. He associated with a...

This volume is a tribute to Theofanis G. Stavrou, Professor of Russian and Near Eastern History and Director of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Minnesota. A generous and penetrating scholar, as well as an award-winning teacher and mentor, Professor Stavrou is well known for his infectious enthusiasm for collaborative scholarship and wide-ranging expertise in Russian history and culture,...

Born in the White House in 1876, Julia Grant, granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant, had a life of adventure that included her marriage into the Cantacuzène family in 1900, and a move to Russia.  Her book gives the reader a firsthand account of Russia during World War I and recounts her travels across the empire, where she saw the...

“We envied the Russians their samizdat...and then we went a few steps further.”

– Adam Michnik

Duplicator Underground is the first comprehensive in-depth English-language discussion of Polish independent publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. This anthology provides wide-ranging analyses of uncensored publishing and printing in communist Poland between 1976 and 1989. It gives a...

Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State is one of several major works Henrik Birnbaum produced as part of his extensive research in this area, including a second book with Slavica in 1996 (Novgorod in Focus, still in print as of this writing). Two other books appeared with other publishers, so this...

Medieval Slavic Texts, Volume 1 is a collection of medieval texts, reprinted for students of Slavic philology, and representing a wide range of genres, language variants, and orthographic systems. As the title implies, the original intention was to continue the series with later texts, but this never actually happened. Nevertheless, this collection provides a selection of useful texts in accessible...

How did Russian workers develop the revolutionary outlook and the level of political consciousness and organizational experience that made them the crucial political and social force in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917? Creating a Culture of Revolution offers an alternative reading of the revolutionary workers’ movement, with circle activity and propaganda literature at the center of a developing “culture...

World War I’s Eastern Front was located in the midst of the Russian Pale of Settlement, where up to a third of the urban population was Jewish. The war resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and severe damage to the entire region’s economy. Urban populations suffered the worst from artillery shell-ing, requisitions, and outright robbery. In addition, each retreating army...

Workers and Unity examines the history of St. Petersburg workers, the Metalworkers’ Union, and Russian Social Democracy from 1906–14. Tracing the formation of workers’ associations and analyzing the activities of legal and SD activists inside Russia, the author rehabilitates not only Menshevism but also Liquidationism. She argues that at a time when Leninists had almost no links inside Russia, Menshevik...