TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Russia"

This book is a study of the role of clan networks in Central Asia from the early twentieth century through 2004. Exploring the social, economic, and historical roots of clans, and their political role and political transformation in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, it argues that clans are informal political actors that are critical to understanding politics in this region. The book demonstrates that the Soviet system was far less successful in transforming and controlling Central Asian society, and in its policy of eradicating clan identities, than has often been assumed. In order to understand Central Asian politics and their economies today, scholars and policy makers must take into account the powerful role of these informal groups, how they adapt and change over time, and how they may constrain or undermine democratization in this strategic region.

Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture provides the first account of Russia’s immemorial commitment to the theory and practice of autocracy, the most formative and powerful idea in Russia’s political history. Richard Pipes considers why Russian thinkers, statesmen, and publicists have historically always argued that Russia could prosper only under an autocratic regime.

Beginning with an insightful study of the origins of Russian statehood in the Middle Ages, when the state grew out of the princely domain but was not distinguished from it, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics includes a masterful survey of Russia’s major conservative thinkers and demonstrates how conservatism is the dominant intellectual legacy of Russia. Pipes examines the geographical, historical, political, military, and social realities of the Russian empire—fundamentally unchanged by the Revolution of 1917—that have traditionally convinced its rulers and opinion leaders that decentralizing political authority would inevitably result in the country’s disintegration. Pipes has written a brilliant thesis and analysis of a hitherto overlooked aspect of the Russian intellectual tradition that continues to have significance to this day.

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya

Chechnya, a 6,000-square-mile corner of the northern Caucasus, has struggled under Russian domination for centuries. The region declared its independence in 1991, leading to a brutal war, Russian withdrawal, and subsequent "governance" by bandits and warlords. A series of apartment building attacks in Moscow in 1999, allegedly orchestrated by a rebel faction, reignited the war, which continues to rage today. Russia has gone to great lengths to keep journalists from reporting on the conflict; consequently, few people outside the region understand its scale and the atrocities—described by eyewitnesses as comparable to those discovered in Bosnia—committed there.

Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta, is the only journalist to have constant access to the region. Her international stature and reputation for honesty among the Chechens have allowed her to continue to report to the world the brutal tactics of Russia's leaders used to quell the uprisings. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya is her second book on this bloody and prolonged war. More than a collection of articles and columns, A Small Corner of Hell offers a rare insider's view of life in Chechnya over the past years. Centered on stories of those caught-literally-in the crossfire of the conflict, her book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. Politkovskaya's unflinching honesty and her courage in speakingtruth to power combine here to produce a powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet.

Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy

A searing portrait of a country in disarray, and of the man at its helm, from “the bravest of journalists” (The New York Times) Hailed as “a lone voice crying out in a moral wilderness” (New Statesman), Anna Politkovskaya made her name with her fearless reporting on the war in Chechnya. Now she turns her steely gaze on the multiple threats to Russian stability, among them President Putin himself.
Putin’s Russia depicts a far-reaching state of decay. Politkovskaya describes an army in which soldiers die from malnutrition, parents must pay bribes to recover their dead sons’ bodies, and conscripts are even hired out as slaves. She exposes rampant corruption in business, government, and the judiciary, where everything from store permits to bus routes to court appointments is for sale. And she offers a scathing condemnation of the ongoing war in Chechnya, where kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, rape, and torture are begetting terrorism rather than fighting it.
Sounding an urgent alarm, Putin’s Russia is both a gripping portrayal of a country in crisis and the testament of a great and intrepid reporter.

Leningrad is a phenomenon. Wherever they appear, they leave people gasping for air. The cult is growing and has by now also found them fans among people, who have nothing to do with Russia.

How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia

How Capitalism Was Built tells the story of how the former communist countries in East and Central Europe, Russia, and Central Asia became market economies from 1989 to 2006. It discusses preconditions, political breakthroughs, and alternative reform programs. Three major chapters deal with the deregulation of prices and trade, price stabilization, and privatization. Early radical reform made output decline the least. Social developments have been perplexing but mixed. The building of democracy and the establishment of the rule of law have been far less successful. International assistance has been limited but helpful. This region has now become highly dynamic, but corruption remains problematic.

Distinguished historian of the Soviet period Robert V. Daniels offers a penetrating survey of the evolution of the Soviet system and its ideology. In a tightly woven series of analyses written during his career-long inquiry into the Soviet Union, Daniels explores the Soviet experience from Karl Marx to Boris Yeltsin and shows how key ideological notions were altered as Soviet history unfolded.
The book exposes a long history of American misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, leading up to the "grand surprise" of its collapse in 1991. Daniels's perspective is always original, and his assessments, some worked out years ago, are strikingly prescient in the light of post-1991 archival revelations. Soviet Communism evolved and decayed over the decades, Daniels argues, through a prolonged revolutionary process, combined with the challenges of modernization and the personal struggles between ideologues and power-grabbers.

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea

The Oil and the Glory tells the heretofore little-heralded story of the long, epic struggle for fortune, glory and power on the Caspian Sea.

It takes the reader behind closed doors to watch the players themselves act out their self-interest in negotiations in the region itself, in Moscow, Paris, London, Caribbean islands, the United States and elsewhere.

The conclusion is both spectacular and tragic, as huge oil is found and fortunes earned, the United States scores one of its sole significant foreign policy triumphs of the last decade, but at the same time two Caspian presidents find themselves as unindicted co-conspirators in U.S. corruption cases, and the region's biggest foreign dealmaker of them all is charged with bribery in New York.

At a time when Moscow has dramatically reappeared as a powerful international player, the book also answers the question: can Russia be trusted?

Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution, Updated Edition

With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy and a market economy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsins handpicked successorVladimir Putin, a self-described childhood hooligan turned KGB officerresolved to end the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to offer a sobering picture of its leader and the direction in which the country is now headed.

As Moscow bureau chiefs for the Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from Putins unlikely rise through the key moments of his tenure. But the authors go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encounteredboth those who have prospered and those barely survivingand show how the political flux has shaped these individuals lives.

With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putins insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling revelations about Russias leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land he is building. This book is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of Russia and the debate about the countrys uncertain future and its relationship with the United States.

The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth

In the 1990s, as the Soviet Empire lay in ruins, the Russian and Ukrainian governments undertook a project to dismantle the collective farm system that was created under Stalin and in the process privatize an expanse of farmland larger than Australia. Ordinary people were supposed to benefit from the reform, but local government leaders quietly rebelled against it. The end result was the dispossession of millions of rural people. This is the first book to explain why and how this happened through the perspective of a firsthand observer in the Black Earth region.

Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917

Russian Peasants Go to Court brings into focus the legal practice of Russian peasants in the township courts of the Russian empire from 1905 through 1917. Contrary to prevailing conceptions of peasants as backward, drunken, and ignorant, and as mistrustful of the state, Jane Burbank's study of court records reveals engaged rural citizens who valued order in their communities and made use of state courts to seek justice and to enforce and protect order. Through narrative studies of individual cases and statistical analysis of a large body of court records, Burbank demonstrates that Russian peasants made effective use of legal opportunities to settle disputes over economic resources, to assert personal dignity, and to address the bane of small crimes in their communities. The text is enhanced by contemporary photographs and lively accounts of individual court cases.

From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia.”

Russia and energy sources, first oil and then both oil and gas, have been inextricably connected in a way unmatched by any other major power in the history of the world. The United States and other developed countries, such as Japan and members of the European Union, are both heavy users of energy yet devoid of adequate indigenous resources. The search and control of energy resources have been central to major world conflicts, including both World Wars and other civil wars and global conflicts. Geopolitics of oil and gas power modern life and control trans-national relationships. Countries with insufficient domestic petroleum supplies are inherently vulnerable, and politicians campaign on promises of increasing their nation’s “energy independence.” Meanwhile, political militancy by certain energy-rich nations such as Venezuela, Iran and increasingly Russia has legitimized their regimes and political leaders.
Loaded with formidable energy resources, Russia, has used its natural endowment as a pivotal tool to further political and strategic aims before, during and after the Soviet period., One of the least understood but enormously significant examples of this is the role that oil played in the post-World War II USSR. In terms of international influence, the 1960s was the golden era of the Soviet Union. Surrounded by its newly acquired satellite states the country was emerging as a counter-balancing force to the United States and other western capitalist powers, some whose global influence was entering a period of relative decline. Ideologically, the USSR painted itself as the champion of the so called non-aligned world, gaining credibility as a supporter of their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles. To the idealists of the world, the dream of a society without poverty and class-based domination evoked admiration for the Soviet creed. It also enhanced the emotional and intellectual appeal of a system that seemingly provided an alternative to the cruel realities of unfettered capitalism. What these romantics could not see was the problematic machinery used to run the Soviet Union and its drain on everyday lives of the people living in the communist bloc.
What also many could not see is that oil would bankroll the U.S.S.R, when copious quantities of oil were discovered exactly when the country seemed to need it most, time and time again. In the last fifteen years of Soviet rule, petroleum was often wielded as an antidote for the degeneration of the USSR. In the end, all it did was mask the real problems.
Under President Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia has recovered much of its rightful position and power bestowed upon it by its energy resources, but only after a series of misadventures. What Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev could not do with nuclear weapons and raw military power, Putin is doing with oil and gas in what arguably can be called energy imperialism.

Reviving Greater Russia: The Future of Russia's Borders and Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhastan, Moldova

In December 2001, a new Russian law laying the basis for the peaceful territorial expansion of the Russian Federation went into effect. The entire country of Belarus-as well as parts of Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine-are the most likely candidates to join Russia. Should this largely ethnically-based expansion occur, Russia would grow by more than 20 million people, and the resultant rise in Russian nationalism might encourage further Russian territorial ambitions-especially those directed at Ukraine. Even if Russian expansion stops with all, or part, of these territories, however, it could breathe new life into the ethnically based border problems of other countries. Co-published with the American Foreign Policy Council.

Kalmykia is a constituent of the Russian Federation that shaped and has been developing within Russia for several centuries. Kalmykia was incorporated into the Russian state in the early second half of the 17 th century, it was officially recognized by the Russian authorities and constituted as an ethno-political entity in the form of feudal khanate with the status of a virtually autonomous unit. The Kalmyk Khanate’s status as a largely self-ruling area within the Russian Empire gradually transformed into the status of a regular administrative territory under the Astrakhan governor. It received the status of a Republic from Stalin.

Maksimov examines issues of interrelations between the Kalmyk people and Russia before and after the Kalmyks’ accession to the Russian state. Analyzes the Soviet national policy and to the destiny of Kalmykia under the communist regime. The legal status of this republic and its development under the new Russian federalism are discussed in great details.