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Over the coming years the question on every Russia scholar’s, policymaker’s, and military strategist’s mind will be whether a resurgent Russia will seek additional territorial expansion in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states. Since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and waged a shadow war in eastern Ukraine on the pretext of protecting Russian compatriots, a reassessment of the Kremlin’s strategic and territorial objectives is due. What other countries and borders are at risk? What military and soft power tools will Russia utilize? Where is Russia likely to succeed in achieving its aims? Where will the Kremlin likely fail? Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire will address these questions head on. For more than two decades and particularly since the early 2000s Russia has led a consistent policy seeking to regain influence and at times territory in the post-Soviet space through leveraging Russian compatriots that reside in foreign territories bordering Russia. This book demonstrates how this policy has been implemented in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. It will also demonstrate how Russia has been pursuing similar policies in the Baltic States, Central Asia, Belarus, Armenia, and the post-Soviet space more broadly. The book enriches the ongoing public debate on Russia’s foreign policy by providing policy and case studies analysis as well as a deeper look into the nature and the roots of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy. Through extensive interviews, the reader is also offered a unique vantage point of the often voiceless and politicized Russian compatriots, scattered across the post-Soviet space.

What was known about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his career was strictly limited by the secretive Soviet government. Little more information was available after he was ousted and became a “non-person” in the USSR in 1964. This book draws for the first time on a wealth of newly released materials—documents from secret former Soviet archives, memoirs of long-silent witnesses, the full memoirs of the premier himself—to assemble the best-informed analysis of the Khrushchev years ever completed. The contributors to this volume include Russian, Ukrainian, American, and British scholars; a former key foreign policy aide to Khrushchev; the executive secretary of a Russian commission investigating Soviet-era repressions and rehabilitations; and Khrushchev's own son Sergei. The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev's struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev's years in Ukraine where he grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in the mass repressions of the 1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is Russia itself reformable?

The writings of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), like those of other major social thinkers of Russia's Silver Age, were obliterated from public consciousness under Soviet rule. Discovered again after eighty years of silence, Bulgakov's work speaks with remarkable directness to the postmodern listener. This translation of Philosophy of Economy brings to English-language speakers for the first time a major work of social theory written by a critical figure in the Russian tradition of liberal thought. What is unique about Bulgakov, it explains, is that he bridges two worlds. His social thought is firmly based in the Western tradition, yet some of his ideas reflect a specifically Russian way of thinking about society. Though arguing strenuously in favor of political and social liberty, Bulgakov repudiates the individualistic basis of Western liberalism in favor of a conception of human dignity that is compatible with collectivity. His economic theory stresses the spiritual content of life in the world and imagines national life as a kind of giant household. Bulgakov's work, with its singularly postmodern balance between Western and non-Western, offers fascinating implications for those in the process of reevaluating ideologies in post-Soviet Russia and in America as well.

Spanning the period between the end of the Russo-Caucasian War and the death of the first female Chechen suicide bomber, this ground-breaking book is the first to compare Georgian, Chechen, and Daghestani depictions of anticolonial insurgency. The book draws from previously untapped archival sources as well as from prose, poetry, and oral narratives to assess the impact of Tsarist and Soviet rule in the Islamic Caucasus. Examining literary representations of social banditry to tell the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, the book argues that the literatures of anticolonial insurgency constitute a veritable resistance or transgressive sanctity to colonialism.