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The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953

James Heinzen

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, ... More

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union for this period. A study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. Bribery (vziatochnichestvo)—typically defined in law as gifts in cash or in kind intended to influence public officials to the benefit of the giver—represents the paradigmatic variety of corruption. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, examining it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society and state administration relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. The book examines three major, related themes. The book’s first theme, “The Landscape of Bribery,” concerns the nature and varieties of bribery, while painting a sociological portrait of the people involved. Whom did prosecutors accuse of such crimes? The second major topic addresses the regime’s attempts to understand the causes of bribery, and then to wipe it out through centrally directed anti-corruption “campaigns.” “The view from below,” which examines popular perceptions and understandings of bribery, constitutes the third dimension of the study. Focusing on bribery among police, court, and other law enforcement employees, this phase explores the imprecise and shifting line that separated “acceptable” from “unacceptable” behavior.Less

Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television

Christine E. Evans

This book—the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings—challenges the idea that mass culture in the Soviet ... More

This book—the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings—challenges the idea that mass culture in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era was dull and formulaic. The book follows the history of Central Television in the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tracing the emergence of play, conflict, and competition on Soviet news programs, serial films, and variety and game shows, the book shows that Central Television's most popular shows were experimental and creative, laying the groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms and the post-Soviet media system. It shows that the highly televisual Putin era represents the culmination of a long Soviet—now Russian—“era of television” that began in the late 1950s.Less

Charand-o Parand: Revolutionary Satire from Iran, 1907-1909

Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda

A classic of modern Persian literature, Charand-o Parand (Stuff and Nonsense) is a work familiar to every literate Iranian. Originally a series of newspaper columns written by scholar and satirist ... More

A classic of modern Persian literature, Charand-o Parand (Stuff and Nonsense) is a work familiar to every literate Iranian. Originally a series of newspaper columns written by scholar and satirist Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, the pieces poke fun at mullahs, the shah, and the old religious and political order during the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1906–11). The chapters were the Daily Show of their era. The columns were heatedly debated in the Iranian parliament, and the newspaper was shut down on several occasions for its criticism of the religious establishment. Translated by two distinguished scholars of Persian language and history, this book makes Dehkhoda's entertaining political observations available to English readers for the first time.Less

Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin

Pauline Fairclough

This book explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state ... More

This book explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state policy of repression, censorship, and dissonance that existed in all areas of Soviet artistic endeavour. Newly opened archives from the Leninist and Stalinist eras have shed new light on Soviet concert life, demonstrating how the music of the past was used to help mold and deliver cultural policy, how ‘undesirable’ repertoire was weeded out during the 1920s, and how Russian and non-Russian composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pëtr Chaykovskiy, Richard Wagner, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Sergey Rachmaninov were ‘canonised’ during different, distinct periods in Stalinist culture. The book's study of the ever-shifting Soviet musical–political landscape identifies 1937 as the start of a cultural Cold War, rather than occurring post-World War II, as is often maintained, while documenting the efforts of musicians and bureaucrats during this period to keep musical channels open between Russia and the West.Less

Gulag Letters

Arsenii Formakov

Emily D. Johnson (ed.)

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least ... More

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least sporadically with relatives either through the official, censored Gulag mail system or by smuggling letters out of camp with free laborers. Examples of such correspondence that survive to the present day represent a powerful, largely unstudied historical source with the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand both the Soviet forced labor system and Stalinist society in general. Gulag Letters offers readers an English-language translation of the letters of a single Gulag inmate, the journalist, poet, and novelist Arsenii Formakov (1900-1983), who was a prominent member of Latvia’s large and vibrant Russian Old Believer community during the interwar period. Formakov was arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1940 as part of a broad round-up of anti-Soviet elements that began just weeks after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Latvia, and survived two terms in Soviet labor camps (1940-1947 and 1949-1955). The letters that he mailed home to his wife and children while serving these sentences reveal the surprising porousness of the Gulag and the variability of labor camp life and describe the difficult conditions that prisoners faced during and after World War II. They also represent an important eye-witness account of the experience of Latvian citizens deported to internment sites in the Soviet interior during the 1940s.Less

Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta

Alan Barenberg

Gulag Town, Company Town examines the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost that was built in the 1930s as one of the most notorious prison camp complexes in the Soviet Union. But ... More

Gulag Town, Company Town examines the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost that was built in the 1930s as one of the most notorious prison camp complexes in the Soviet Union. But Vorkuta was not just a camp; it was also a Soviet city, with a substantial non-prisoner population and urban spaces. This book questions the idea that the Gulag was an “archipelago” separated from Soviet society at large. Instead, it examines camp and city together, looking at the interrelationships between them. It demonstrates that borders between the inside and outside of the camp were permeable and contested, and a web of personal connections linked camp and city together. Such connections continued to play an important role during the post-Stalin period in Vorkuta, as they allowed ex-prisoners to navigate their transition to civilian life by relying on social networks that they had established while imprisoned. Based on archival research and oral history, Gulag Town, Company Town offers new interpretations of the relationship between the Gulag and Soviet society, and of the enduring legacy of forced labor in the Soviet Union.Less

Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag

Golfo Alexopoulos

This book is a new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror. The book is a shocking study of life and death in Stalin's ... More

This book is a new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror. The book is a shocking study of life and death in Stalin's Gulag. It demonstrates how the ruthless exploitation of prisoners, their hunger, and a lack of medical care turned the camps into destructive-labor camps, and suggests that these forced labor camps were often administered as death camps. Examining the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this book draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.Less

Nietzsche's Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire

Rebecca Mitchell

This book explores how, amid the final tumultuous years of the Russian empire, music was viewed as a powerful force with the ability to overcome the social, political, and ethnic divisions that, it ... More

This book explores how, amid the final tumultuous years of the Russian empire, music was viewed as a powerful force with the ability to overcome the social, political, and ethnic divisions that, it was feared, were tearing the empire asunder. Drawing on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of music as the “Dionysian” force and the “primal unity” that underpinned reality itself, Russian cultural elites (philosophers, historians, musicians and writers) argued that music promised an important means through which to forge a unified Russian identity within a society increasingly threatened by social discord, revolutionary upheaval, and growing nationalism. In this context of perceived modern disintegration and national uncertainty, music offered both a symbol of a transformed society (marked by social unity, spiritual depth, and cultural richness) and a means through which to achieve this transfiguration. This book offers a detailed examination of the philosophical claims surrounding music given voice by Russian cultural elites (“Nietzsche’s orphans”) with particular analysis of three Russian composers: Aleksandr Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Though internally divided in their individual assessments of each composer’s significance, Nietzsche’s orphans sought in these musical figures a possible theurgic artist (or latter-day “Orpheus”) whose music would have the power to reunify society. This worldview of “musical metaphysics” ultimately proved incapable of reuniting Russian society, however, as music and philosophy both took on an increasingly nationalistic meaning in the cataclysm of the Great War, undermining the very unity that had been sought.Less

Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801

G. M. Hamburg

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long before Peter the Great’s opening to the ... More

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long before Peter the Great’s opening to the West. Examining a broad range of writings, the book shows why Russia’s Enlightenment constituted a precondition for the explosive emergence of nineteenth-century writers such as Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev. The book examines ideas of faith, politics, and reason in Muscovite Russia across three centuries. It explores Russian religious, political, and social thought by focusing on a disparate cast of thinkers, from Churchmen and laymen to theologians and heretics, government officials and their critics, statists and brigands. It also considers how Orthodox Christianity became the dominant strain in Russian religious and political life and thus in Russian culture, the relationship between virtue and politics in the turbulent era of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great’s contributions to Russian thought, and the genesis of enlightened conservatism late in the eighteenth century.Less

Scorched Earth: Stalin's Reign of Terror

Jörg Baberowski

This book, an unremitting indictment of the mad violence with which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, depicts Stalinism as a cruel and deliberate attack on Russian society, driven by ... More

This book, an unremitting indictment of the mad violence with which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, depicts Stalinism as a cruel and deliberate attack on Russian society, driven by “totalitarian ambitions” and the goal of modernizing and rationalizing a backward people. The text takes a twofold approach, emphasizing Stalin's personal role and responsibility as well as the continuity he sees in Communist aims and ideology since 1917. Unlike recent apologist accounts that focus on the challenges of modernization or on the operational complexities of managing the Soviet state, this hard-hitting analysis unequivocally locates the origins of the terror in the culture of violence and the techniques of power. Detailed, well-documented, and including many new details on the workings of the Stalinist state, this work encompasses the dictator's brutal reign from his achievement of total power in 1929 to his death in 1953.Less