Soulful, theatrical, intense: Russian talk is notably full of existential musing and dark passion. However, despite the widespread appreciation of Russian talk, no one has analyzed it as a form of cultural performance. As one of the first Western...

For centuries, dictators ruled Russia. Tsars and Communist Party chiefs were in charge for so long some analysts claimed Russians had a cultural predisposition for authoritarian leaders. Yet, as a result of reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, new...

Russians have often been characterized as people with souls rather than selves. Self and Story in Russian History challenges the portrayal of the Russian character as selfless, self-effacing, or self-torturing by exploring the texts through which...

The Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia is one of the few remaining places on earth where a nomadic people retain a traditional culture. Here in the tundra, the Nenets—one of the few indigenous minorities of the Russian North—follow a lifestyle...

Engelstein asks how Russia's identity came to be defined in terms of an consensus opposed to Western-style liberalism, examining debates on religion and secularism, the role of culture and the law, and the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries.

In this deeply researched book Ted Hopf challenges contemporary theorizing about international relations. He advances what he believes is a commonsensical notion: a state's domestic identity has an enormous effect on its international policies. Hopf...

In book that will be cheered by soccer fans worldwide, Robert Edelman finds in the stands and on the pitch keys to understanding everyday life under Stalin, Khrushchev, and their successors. To cheer for Spartak, Edelman shows, was to oppose the regime.

Soviet official culture underwent a dramatic shift in the mid-1930s, when Stalin and his fellow leaders began to promote conventional norms, patriarchal families, tsarist heroes, and Russian literary classics. For Leon Trotsky—and many later...

"I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children." "From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to...