20th-century Russian history comes to life through six generations of a family in their Moscow apartment The Apartment: A Century of Russian History explains the true history of 20th-century Russia through the fictitious story of a Moscow family and their apartment. The Muromtsev family have been living in the same apartment for more than a century, generation after generation. Readers are taken through different rooms and witness how each generation actually lived alongside the larger social and political changes that Russia experienced. A search-and-find element has readers looking for objects from page to page to see which items were passed down through the generations. Beautifully illustrated with minute details, this book helps readers engage with Russia’s history in an all new way. The book includes a timeline, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Russia has had an extraordinary history in the twentieth century. As the first Communist society, the USSR was both an admired model and an object of fear and hatred to the rest of the world. How are we to make sense of this history? A History of Twentieth-Century Russia treats the years from 1917 to 1991 as a single period and analyzes the peculiar mixture of political, economic, and social ingredients that made up the Soviet formula. Under a succession of leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, various methods were used to conserve and strengthen this compound. At times the emphasis was upon shaking up the ingredients, at others upon stabilization. All this occurred against a background of dictatorship, civil war, forcible industrialization, terror, world war, and the postwar arms race. Communist ideas and practices never fully pervaded the society of the USSR. Yet an impact was made and, as this book expertly documents, Russia since 1991 has encountered difficulties in completely eradicating the legacy of Communism. A History of Twentieth-Century Russia is the first work to use the mass of material that has become available in the documentary collections, memoirs, and archives over the past decade. It is an extraordinarily lucid, masterful account of the most complex and turbulent period in Russia's long history.

In the slightly more than two centuries since the dawn of the nineteenth century, Russia has undergone sweeping changes several times over. Readers will learn about the tension between reform and autocracy that marked the nineteenth century, World War I and the fall of the last tsar, and the rise of the USSR. They will examine the USSR's time as a twentieth-century superpower, the fall of communism, and Russia's current power plays for global influence. Sidebars provide extra information, while historical photographs let readers see the figures and events that shaped Russian history with their own eyes.

What happens when you measure an economy? How does measurement impact policy? In Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms David Darrow responds to these broad questions by looking at the application and profound consequences of statistical measurement to the peasant economy in Russia, from the eighteenth century to the Civil War. Nearly all studies of Russia make reference to the land allotment, or "nadel," as a measure of peasant wellbeing. This is the first work examining the origins of the nadel, how statistical measurement converted it into a modern entitlement, and how it framed the state–peasant relationship. Land, Darrow argues, was life – peasants needed it and the state, most everyone believed, had an obligation to provide it. The question, however, was how much land was enough. Statistics supplied the answer but also locked policy-makers and society into a particular way of seeing peasants and their economy. Even the empire's final attempt to reform the peasant economy after 1905 remained locked within the old regime category of the nadel. Statistical measurement strengthened, rather than weakened, the nadel as a category of peasant economic wellbeing such that it persisted beyond 1917 into the early years of Soviet power. Based on archival sources and rural councils' statistical studies, Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms shows how the state constructed both an image and a measure of peasant wellbeing from which it could not escape, and how the resultant perception that peasants were entitled to a sufficient allotment became a major obstacle to successful agrarian reform.

This book combines social and institutional histories of Russia, focusing on the secret police and their evolving relationship with the peasantry. Based on an analysis of Cheka/OGPU reports, it argues that the police did not initially respond to peasant resistance to Bolshevik demands simply with the gun—rather, they listened to peasant voices.

A broad, panoramic view of Russian imperial society from the era of Peter the Great to the revolution of 1917, Wirtschafter's study sets forth a challenging interpretation of one of the world's most powerful and enduring monarchies. A sophisticated synthesis that combines extensive reading of recent scholarship with archival research, it focuses on the interplay of Russia's key social groups with one another and the state. The result is a highly original history of Russian society that illuminates the relationships between state building, large-scale social structures, and everyday life. Beginning with an overview of imperial Russia's legal and institutional structures, Wirschafter analyzes the "ruling" classes, and service elites (the land-owning nobility, the civil and military servicemen, the clergy) and then examines the middle groups (the raznochintsy, the commercial-industrial elites, the professionals, the intelligentsia) before turning to the peasants, townspeople, and factory workers. Wirtschafter argues that those very social, political, and legal relationships that have long been viewed as sources of conflict and crisis in fact helped to promote integration and foster the stability that ensured imperial Russia's survival.