The essays in this volume seek to appreciate the literary construction of the memoir, with its dual agendas of individualized expression and reliable reportage, and explore its functions as interpretive history, social modelling, and political expression in Russian culture. The memoirs under scrutiny range widely, including those of the private person (Princess Natalia Dolgorukaia), sophisticated high culture writers (Nikolai Zabolotskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky), cultural critics and facilitators (Lidiia Ginzburg, Avdot'ia Panaeva), political dissidents (Evgeniia Ginzburg, Elena Bonner), and popular artists (filmmaker Elidar Riazanov). It examines each memoir for its aesthetic and rhetorical features as well as its cultural circumstances. In mapping the memoir's social and historical significance, the essays consider a wide range of influences and issues, including the specific impact of the author's class, gender, ideology, and life experience on his/her witnessing of Russian culture and society.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A rich and revealing account of the turbulent relationship between the U.S. and Russia during the first post-Cold War years. . . . Essential for any understanding of this critical and even dangerous period.”—Elizabeth Drew “A fascinating memoir of a weirdly unpredictable world.”—The New York Review of Books In the eight years Bill Clinton was president, as Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, each one more horrifying than the last, Clinton and his foreign-policy team found they faced no greater task than helping to keep Russia stable and at peace with herself and her neighbors. Strobe Talbott’s mesmerizing account of this struggle reveals what a close-run thing this was, and how much the relationship between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin has been defined by the work of Bill Clinton. Written with a novelistic richness and energy, The Russia Hand is the first great book about war and peace in the post-Cold War world. It is also the one book anyone needs to understand Russia’s fateful transformation and future possibilities after ten years as a democracy.

Russia played a decisive role in the Napoleonic wars and the success in the struggle against France allowed Russian leaders to profoundly influence the course of European history. Over the last 200 years, the Napoleonic era has been discussed and analysed in numerous studies, but many fail to fully portray the Russian side of events due to the relative scarcity of Russian sources in English. Only a handful of Russian memoirs have been translated, while dozens remain unknown outside Russia. This book seeks to fill this gap by providing, in English, previously unavailable memoirs of Russian participants.??Defeat at Leipzig in 1813 had driven Napoleon back across the borders of France, and in January 1814 the Russians, Austrians, Prussians and their other German allies stood poised to cross the Rhine. But the French Emperor was far from beaten, and the ensuing campaign saw desperate fighting, with the outcome very much in the balance. This book is the first to bring together dozens of letter, diaries and memoirs of Russian participants of the 1814 Campaign. Reading these documents we see both what Russian officers and soldiers experienced during the final months of the three-year-long campaign as well as their joy at defeating Russia’s most dangerous enemy. We follow them not only through the heat of battle but also on delightful tours of Paris which they describe as the pleasure and entertainment capital of the world.

Readings on the Russian Revolution brings together 15 important post-Cold War writings on the history of the Russian Revolution. It is structured in such a way as to highlight key debates in the field and contrasting methodological approaches to the Revolution in order to help readers better understand the issues and interpretative fault lines that exist in this contested area of history. The book opens with an original introduction which provides essential background and vital context for the pieces that follow. The volume is then structured around four parts – 'Actors, Language, Symbols', 'War, Revolution, and the State', 'Revolutionary Dreams and Identities' and 'Outcomes and Impacts' – that explore the beginnings, events and outcomes of the Russian Revolution, as well as examinations of central figures, critical topics and major historiographical battlegrounds. Melissa Stockdale also provides translations of two crucial Russian-language works, published here in English for the first time, and includes useful pedagogical features such as a glossary, chronology, and thematic bibliography to further aid study. Readings on the Russian Revolution is an essential collection for anyone studying the Russian Revolution.

“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat . . . the Nobel laureate found . . . ‘a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.’” —Kirkus Reviews This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away—the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its mainstream media on the other. Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from recent émigrés who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and Gorbachev’s protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too—the immense artistic quandary of fashioning The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.

Originally published in 1986. Martin A. Miller, author of the definitive biography of the exiled revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, traces the history of the first generations of Russians who went to Western Europe to devote their lives to anti-tsarist politics. Refusing to assimilate abroad and unable to return home, the émigrés political orientations were influenced by intellectual and social currents in both Russia and Europe. Miller undertakes a major reassessment of the émigré contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement. Starting with Nikolai Turgenev, who in 1825 was declared the first "émigré" by a special act of the Russian government, the exiles formed a unique social and political group. Miller takes a biographical approach in tracing the progression from a disparate community of intellectuals, unable to act together to promote their own program for change, to a more cohesive second émigré generation that provided the foundation for collective action and the development of a revolutionary ideology. The creation of the Russian émigré press, Miller argues, gave identity and momentum to the émigrés and helped promote their program of revolution and a new social order. The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, 1825-1870 concludes with the death in 1870 of the leading émigré figure, Alexander Herzen, and with an analysis of the impact upon the émigrés of the emergence of the populist revolutionary movement within Russia. The émigrés overcame the loss of their homeland through their version of a future Russia, one transformed into a new society where their ideals could be realized. When, two generations later, Lenin returned to Russia after decades in Europe and made this vision a reality, his actions built on the foundation laid by his nineteenth-century predecessors.