TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Russia"

The shepherd Gombo lives with his wife, three children and grandmother in a tent on the Mongolian steppe. They are pleased with their rustic conditions, until a Russian truck driver, Serguei, gets stuck with his truck nearby. The cultural gap between Gombo and Serguie seems invincible. But maybe they can learn a few things from each other?

Original in its range and analysis, Women in Russia, 1700-2000 fills an enormous gap in the field. It is the first book to provide a lively and compelling chronological narrative of women's experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Synthesizing recent scholarship with her own work in primary and archival sources, Barbara Alpern Engel skillfully evokes the voices of individuals to enliven the account. The book captures the diversity of women's lives, detailing how women of various social strata were affected by and shaped historical change. Adopting the perspective of women provides fresh interpretations of Russia's past and important insights into the impact of gender on the ways that Russians defined themselves and others, and imagined political change. Designed for a scholarly as well as undergraduate readership, the book integrates women's experience into broader developments in Russia's social, economic, cultural, and political history.

Although it has been imported into the west under the name Terrarium, with Boris Grebenshikov listed as the recording artist, in Russia this album is actually titled Pentagonal Sin and Terrarium is the name of the recording artist. Terrarium is, of course, a play on Aquarium, the group Grebenshikov founded, and he continued to use the name even after the original unit disbanded. He also makes side projects under his own name. But Pentagonal Sin is classified in the discography on the Aquarium website as an "incognito" album, and that may be because of its whimsy and eclecticism. Grebenshikov has reunited with old partner Anatoli Gunitskii, among others, for a busman's holiday that sounds like something they put together after listening long and hard to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and other early progressive rock albums. "January Romance," which kicks things off, sounds like a children's song, with its playful vocals and light pop sound, while "Out of Synch" could have come off the Beatles' The Beatles [White Album] and "Molloy Arrived," with its twangy guitar, has the feel of the old west. "Zoya and Sonya" has a traditional folk-rock sound, and "The Chinese Don't Want" mixes a tango rhythm with a mariachi trumpet. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach works, as it does in the best progressive rock, because it stays light and keeps moving from one thing to another. Terrarium, or Pentagonal Sin, or whatever you want to call it, sounds like it was a lot of fun to make in a sort of "hey, let's try this" manner, and that fun communicates itself to the listener, whether that listener speaks Russian or not.


Read more at CER: Little Fisherman, Big Pond

An album from Russia's greatest rock musician is long overdue, and this collection is more than worthwhile. Like some American singer/songwriters, Grebenshikov has found himself coming closer and closer to roots music over the years, and these songs are very much the product of that. Whether putting his mark on the traditional song "My Little Loom" or writing an ode to his changing homeland with "Russian Nirvana," he's masterful. The songs themselves (with lyrics provided in four languages) are gems, the product of mature thought and frequently poetic, although the images, which seem obscure to Westernerners, probably resonate with Russians. But the beauty is best-illustrated by the settings, usually stripped-down, but with just the right touches to set off the voice and words, even if it takes some strange left turns, like the pseudo-'50s arrangement of "Gertruda." Accordion is prevalent, of course, but the oboe that courses through "Nikita of Riazan" gives an aching tone to the song. He's often compared to Dylan and Springsteen, which is unfair; the traditions are utterly different. Only the quality of the writing and performing is comparable -- listen to the gentle "Dubrovsky" and you'll be convinced. Grebenshikov is world class.

Read more at CER: Little Fisherman, Big Pond

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other. Captives are executed or sent running naked into the woods. Neither side has a plan, and characters the camera picks out soon die. A White Cossack officer kills a Hungarian and is executed by his own superiors when he tries to rape a milkmaid. At the hospital, White officers order nurses into the woods, dressed in finery, to waltz. A nurse aids the Reds, then they accuse her of treason for following White orders. Red soldiers walk willingly, singing, into an overwhelming force. War seems chaotic and arbitrary.

Read more about Miklós Janscó at CER: Miklos Who?

Not by Bread Alone : Social Support in the New Russia

What Muscovites get in a soup kitchen run by the Christian Church of Moscow is something far more subtle and complex--if no less necessary and nourishing--than the food that feeds their hunger. In Not by Bread Alone, the first full-length ethnographic study of poverty and social welfare in the postsocialist world, Melissa L. Caldwell focuses on the everyday operations and civil transactions at CCM soup kitchens to reveal the new realities, the enduring features, and the intriguing subtext of social support in Russia today.
In an international food aid community, Caldwell explores how Muscovites employ a number of improvisational tactics to satisfy their material needs. She shows how the relationships that develop among members of this community--elderly Muscovite recipients, Russian aid workers, African student volunteers, and North American and European donors and volunteers--provide forms of social support that are highly valued and ultimately far more important than material resources. In Not by Bread Alone we see how the soup kitchens become sites of social stability and refuge for all who interact there--not just those with limited financial means--and how Muscovites articulate definitions of hunger and poverty that depend far more on the extent of one's social contacts than on material factors.

By rethinking the ways in which relationships between social and economic practices are theorized--by identifying social relations and social status as Russia's true economic currency--this book challenges prevailing ideas about the role of the state, the nature of poverty and welfare, the feasibility of Western-style reforms, and the primacy of social connections in the daily lives of ordinary people in post-Soviet Russia.

Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union’s collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia’s geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin.

Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia’s greatest assets—its gigantic size and Siberia’s natural resources—are now the source of one of its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them.

Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them—not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia’s prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly—it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism.

Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia’s future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past by shrinking Siberia’s cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth.

Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative. Russia cannot afford to keep the cities left by communist planners out in the cold.

The Lone Wolf And the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Power

The Lone Wolf and the Bear examines the Russo-Chechen conflict, from early Russian expansion into the Caucasus in the sixteenth century to the current war between Russia and Chechnya. Moshe Gammer offers a comprehensive study of modern Chechen history, its people and cultures, and the factors of Russo/Soviet influence and modernization that have molded Chechen self-perception and enflamed the passions of separatism. Perhaps the most ethnically diverse region in the world, Chechnya claims over seventy native groups, yet it is unified in its opposition to Russian control and the quest for nationhood.

Through difficult research (many historic documents on Chechnya have been destroyed by Russian authorities, and Chechen documentation is scarce), Gammer assembles the stories of a fiercely independent people and their three-hundred-year struggle against domination by the world power of Russia, a conflict that continues today.

The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, the book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the de-legitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.

Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895-1932

Under the Influence presents the first investigation of the social, cultural, and political factors that affected drinking and temperance among Russian and Soviet industrial workers from 1895 to 1932. Kate Transchel examines the many meanings of working-class drinking and temperance in a variety of settings, from Moscow to remote provinces, and illuminates the cultural conflicts and class dynamics that were deeply rooted in drinking rituals and the failure of attempted reforms by the Tsarist and Soviet authorities.
As the title suggests, workers were often under the influence of alcohol, but they were also under political influences that defined what it meant to be a Soviet worker. Perhaps more importantly, they were under deeper, prerevolutionary cultural influences that continued to shape lower-class identities after 1917. The more the Soviet state tried to control working-class drinking, the more workers resisted. Radical legislation, massive propaganda, and even coercion were not sufficient to motivate workers to abandon traditional forms of fraternization. Under the Influence highlights working-class culture and underscores the limitations the Bolsheviks faced in attempting to create a cultural revolution to complete their social and political revolution.

Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-soviet Change?

"Rebecca Kay assesses how men in post-Soviet Russia are represented through media and popular discourses. Using case studies she explores the challenges which have arisen for men since 1991 and the ways in which their responses are shaped by and viewed through the prism of widely accepted attitudes towards gender." "The lives and concerns of men in provincial Russia are examined through ethnographic fieldwork, combining extensive participant observation with in-depth interviews. The book reveals how individual men strive to maintain a sense of equilibrium between the activities in which they are engaged and the ways in which they are perceived, both by others and by themselves." The findings of the research have produced significant areas of contrast and comparison with the author's earlier work on women. This is drawn out throughout the book, placing the study of Russian men in a broader gendered context. The issues raised by the men mirror concerns discussed in men's studies literature and popular discourse beyond Russia. The book is therefore of interest to a wider international audience as well as contributing to ongoing interdisciplinary debates, in Russian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology and Human Geography, addressing the need for new approaches to understanding post-Socialist change.

The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

The latest developments in the countries of eastern Europe, including the rise of authoritarian tendencies in Russia and Belarus, as well as the victory of the democratic ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, pose important questions about the origins of the East Slavic nations and the essential similarities or differences between their cultures. This book traces the origins of the modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nations by focusing on premodern forms of group identity among the Eastern Slavs. It also challenges attempts to ‘nationalize’ the Rus' past on behalf of existing national projects, laying the groundwork for a new understanding of the premodern history of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The book covers the period from the Christianization of Kyivan Rus' in the tenth century to the reign of Peter I and his eighteenth-century successors, by which time the idea of nationalism had begun to influence the thinking of East Slavic elites.

Boris Yeltsin suffered from insomnia. In the long hours around midnight, when the events of the day weighed on him and he could not sleep, Yeltsin would often retreat to his study and write in his diary. These diaries -- whether brief notes on the day's events, passionate tirades on political rivals, or intimate reflections on his career and family -- form the basis of this book. Through Yeltsin's own eyes, we witness the struggles of a country on the brink of collapse and the man who did everything possible to keep it together. It wasn't easy. During Yeltsin's ten-year presidency, Russia suffered several military coup attempts, two wars in Chechnya, an economic meltdown, and a horrific rise in criminality and corruption.

Midnight Diaries focuses on Yeltsin's second term as president. During the heated 1996 election campaign, Yeltsin suffered a severe heart attack and his popularity plummeted. He won the race, but the Communist Duma soon brought impeachment proceedings against him. Still, Yeltsin clung to power. Following his keen political instinct, he repeatedly swapped prime ministers and restructured his presidential staff. He brought his daughter, Tanya, into the administration and recruited a young team of brilliant minds to introduce much-needed economic reforms to the country. The transition to a market economy was difficult. As the economy soured, the vengeful Duma struck again. And again, Yeltsin out-maneuvered his political rivals by cleverly juggling his staff. On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin revealed his final surprise: He stepped down from office and slipped his successor, Vladimir Putin, into place.

These are Boris Yeltsin's words. Like the man himself, they are passionate, stubborn, blustery, and direct. They are also deeply personal. We are with Yeltsin as he hunts for wood grouse, eats his wife's pirogi, and plays with his grandchildren. We are there as he struggles with his drinking; suffers through heart attacks; and experiences the first strange emptiness of retired life. We learn his frank opinions of Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Helmut Kohl, and other world leaders. We witness his moments of triumph and disappointment, joy and regret.

The Russo-Chechen conflict has been the bloodiest war in Europe since the Second World War. It continues to drag on, despite the fact that it hits the headlines only when there is some 'terrorist spectacular'.

Providing a comprehensive overview of the war and the issues connected with it, the author examines the origins of the conflict historically and traces how both sides were dragged inexorably into war in the early 1990s. The book discusses the two wars (1994-96 and 1999 to date), the intervening truce and shows how a downward spiral of violence has led to a mutually-damaging impasse from which neither side has been able to remove itself. It applies theories of conflict, especially theories of terrorism and counter-terrorism and concludes by proposing some alternative resolutions that might lead to a just and lasting peace in the region.

The Security Dimensions of EU Enlargement: Wider Europe, Weaker Europe?

The changing nature of security, the enlargement of European institutions and the evolving functions of the EU have been key developments in post-Cold War Europe. This book blends theses three crucial developments in a sophisticated and illuminating manner.

It assesses the impact of EU enlargement on both pre-existing security arrangements and key relationships with the EU's new partners and 'neighbours'. It also investigates both hard and soft and internal and external security issues, ranging from military intervention to terrorism and from organised crime to human rights. From this it concludes that enlargement has both positive and negative implications for European security.

Completing the analysis, this study examines the evolving security relationships with key states, regions and international organisations in the EU's 'neighbourhood'. The examination of relations with Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, the Greater Middle East and the Balkans provides a sense of the direction in which European security politics is moving.