A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.

Gathers travel accounts by Russian writers visiting the U.S. around the turn of the century, and offers background information on each other.

In the early nineteenth century, Russia established a colony in California that lasted until the Russian-American Company sold Fort Ross and Bodega Bay to John Sutter in 1841. This annotated collection of Russian accounts of Alta California, many of them translated here into English from Russian for the first time, presents richly detailed impressions by visiting Russian mariners, scientists, and Russian-American Company officials regarding the environment, people, economy, and politics of the province. Gathered from Russian archival collections and obscure journals, these testimonies represent a major contribution to the little-known history of Russian America. Well educated and curious, the visiting Russians were acute observers, generous in their appreciation of Hispanic hospitality but outspoken in their criticisms of all they found backward or abhorrent. In the various reports and reminiscences contained within this volume, they make astute observations of both Hispanic and Native inhabitants, describing the Catholic missions with their devout friars and neophyte workers; the corruptible Franciscan missionaries; the sorry plight of mission Indians; the Californios themselves, whose religion, language, dwellings, cuisine, dress, and pastimes were novel to the Russians; the economic and social changes in Alta California following Mexican independence; and the schemes of American traders and settlers to draw the province into the United States. Amplified by James R. Gibson’s informative annotations, and featuring a gallery of elegant color illustrations, this unique volume casts new light on the history of Spanish and Mexican California.

Translated into English by Richard Seltzer, this is a compilation of two books originally published in Russian. The first, From Entotto to the River Baro, was first published in 1897 and consists of two short journals of expeditions in Ethiopia from 1896-1897, plus a series of essays which cover history, culture, beliefs, languages, government, the military and commerce. The second, With the Armies of Menelik II, is a journal of Bulatovich's second trip to Ethiopia from 1887 to 1898, during which time he served as an advisor to the army of Ras Wolde Giyorgis.'

The young Russian men and women who record in these pages the hopes, fears, triumphs, and tragedies their country has undergone in recent years-altering their own lives profoundly in the process-all come from the first post-Soviet generation to achieve positions of leadership in Russia. They report on five challenges central to Russia's survival and stabilization: reshaping the state, coping with new economic rules, striving toward the rule of law, building a civil society, and preserving the national culture and educational capacity. They love their country, while understanding all too well the crippling psychological legacy of seventy years of a dictatorship that was both cunning and cruel in dispensing a plausible utopian myth and exacting extraordinary sacrifices in the name of that myth. They understand the acute sense of disorientation that overcame all generations when the USSR abruptly dissolved in 1991 and the Communist Party simultaneously lost much, if not all, of its power. As several of our authors recall, it was like waking up one morning and finding yourself a citizen of an entirely different country, meanwhile discovering that your parents were not your real parents and that you had acquired a brand new surname.

In this unique book, William Richardson analyzes the descriptions given of Mexico by an assortment of Russian visitors, from the employees of the Russian-American Company who made their first contacts in the early nineteenth century to the artists, diplomats, and exiles of the twentieth century. He explores the biases they brought with them and the interpretations they relayed back to readers at home. Richardson finds that Russians had a particular empathy for the Mexicans, sharing a perceived similarity in their histories: conquest by a foreign power; a long period of centralized, authoritarian rule; an attempt at liberal reform followed by revolution.