In old Russia, patron/client relations, "clan" politics, and a variety of other informal practices spanned the centuries. Government was understood to be patrimonial and personal rather than legal, and office-holding was far less important than proxi...

<p>The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described...

"Panaceia's Daughters" provides the first book-length study of noblewomen's healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicin...

The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, the schools, and the cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party pro...

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany's unexpected self-dissolution...

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly...

Policing Stalin's "Socialism" is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin's Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of...

Filled with a remarkable cast of characters and set against the backdrop of imperial Russia, this tale of forbidden romance could be the stuff of a great historical novel. But in fact "The Pearl" tells a true tale, reconstructed in part from archival...

Bukharin's "Prison Manuscripts" were written in Moscow's Lubyanka prison during 1937-1938 while awaiting his inevitable liquidation. Like Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Bukharin's Manuscripts too have their central emphasis on issues such as cul...

About sixty thousand Jews from Wilno (Vilnius), present-day Lithuania, and surrounding townships were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in huge pits on the outskirts of Ponary. Over a period of several years, Kazimierz Sakowicz...