History

Foreign accounts of Muscovy have long been recognized as fundamental historical sources. Generally speaking, they relate two kinds of evidence for those interested in early modern affairs. First, the accounts provide ample information about Muscovite society itself. Works such as Herberstein's seminal Rerum moscoviticarum (Vienna, 1549) offer modern historians rich data about Muscovite social, cultural, political, and military practices. The...

In a career spanning nearly four decades Daniel Kaiser has produced a wealth of studies illuminating otherwise little understood aspects of society and culture in medieval and early modern Russia. He pioneered the use of anthropology in the study of Russian law, and he has stood at the forefront of applying statistical methods to the study of daily life in...

UCLA Slavic Studies no. 7 Russia’s first narrative history, The Book of Degrees of the Royal Genealogy (Kniga stepennaia tsarskogo rodosloviia), was produced in the Kremlin scriptorium of the Moscow metropolitans during the reign of Ivan IV (1533–84). A collaborative project to prepare a new critical edition in three volumes, based on the text of the earliest surviving copies with...

In the mid-1930s, when the Soviet regime established Birobidzhan as the “Soviet Jewish state” with Yiddish as its official language, the local Yiddish theater assumed new prominence. In Search of Milk and Honey focuses on the theater’s role as the standard bearer and guiding spirit of this controversial exercise in nation building. The reconstruction of the ideological and cultural impulses...

Ján Kollár, famed poet, romantic nationalist, and Lutheran pastor for the Slovak community in Budapest, took the Slavic world by storm in the early nineteenth century with his idea of Slavic Reciprocity. Kollár conceived of Russians, Poles, Czechs, and South Slavs as tribes of one great Slavic nation, destined for a glorious future if they would but unite. Kollár's ideals...