You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Semën Kanatchikov, born in a central Russian village in 1879, was one of the thousands of peasants who made the transition from traditional village life to the life of an urban factory worker in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the last years of the nineteenth century. Unlike the others, however, he recorded his personal and political experiences (up to the even of the 1905 Revolution) in an autobiography. First published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, this memoir gives us the richest and most thoughtful firsthand account we have of life among the urban lower classes in Imperial Russia. We follow this shy but determined peasant youth's painful metamorphosis into a self-educated, skilled patt...
This is the authoritative and long-awaited volume on Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, this collection of scholarly articles and personal memoirs illuminates in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The contributors—whose perspectives range from that of FSM leader Mario Savio to University of California president Clark Kerr—-shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown "little Free Speech Movement of 1966."
"With scrupulous attention to his sources, elegant presentation of narrative detail, and a flair for psychological analysis, Zelnik has managed to tell the story of a small episode in a manner that illuminates the grand issues of imperial Russian history. It is a remarkable achievement."--Laura Engelstein, Princeton University "Zelnik has allowed the wonderfully textured account of the strike to illuminate some of the most gnarled problems in Russian labor history. . . . A breakthrough work, one that challenges more conventional labor historians to rethink the very nature of the field."--Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan "A tour de force, a magnificent example of Zelnik's capacities for historical reconstruction."--Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University
Annotation A biography of Anna Pankratova, a leading Soviet labor historian from the 1920s to her death in 1957.
This book examines the shifting identity of the "working class" in late tsarist and early Soviet societies.
Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize “Fascinating and perceptive.” —Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books “Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured.” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Powerful and illuminating...A fascinating, insightful, and nuanced work.” —Anna Reid, Times Literary Supplement “Much has been written about Leningrad’s heroic resistance. But the remarkable aspect of [Peri’s] book is that she tells a very different story: recount...
Drawing on hundreds of newly available, top-secret KGB and party Central Committee documents, historian Matthew E. Lenoe reexamines the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Joseph Stalin used the killing as the pretext to unleash the Great Terror that decimated the Communist elite in 1937–1938; these previously unavailable documents raise new questions about whether Stalin himself ordered the murder, a subject of speculation since 1938.The book includes translations of 125 documents from the various investigations of the Kirov murder, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions about Stalin’s involvement in the assassination.
Reinterpreting the emergence of the Soviet state, Holquist situates the Bolshevik Revolution within the continuum of mobilization and violence that began with World War I and extended through Russia's civil war, thereby providing a genealogy for Bolshevik political practices that places them clearly among Russian and European wartime measures.
Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode—a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant—to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.