Elizabeth A. Wood

William E. Pomeranz

E. Wayne Merry

Maxim Trudolyubov

In February 2014, Russia initiated a war in Ukraine, its reasons for aggression unclear. Each of this volume's authors offers a distinct interpretation of Russia's motivations, untangling the social, historical, and political factors that created this war and continually reignite its tensions. What prompted President Vladimir Putin to send troops into Crimea? Why did the conflict spread to eastern Ukraine with Russian support? What does the war say about Russia's political, economic, and social priorities, and how does the crisis expose differences between the EU and Russia regarding international jurisdiction? Did Putin's obsession with his macho image start this war, and is it preventing its resolution? The exploration of these and other questions gives historians, political watchers, and theorists a solid grasp of the events that have destabilized the region.

Roots of Russia's War in Ukraine

After seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik regime faced the daunting task of educating and bringing culture to the vast and often illiterate mass of Soviet soldiers, workers, and peasants. As part of this campaign, civilian educators and political instructors in the military developed didactic theatrical fictions performed in workers' and soldiers' clubs in the years from 1919 to 1933. The subjects addressed included politics, religion, agronomy, health, sexuality, and literature. The trials were designed to permit staging by amateurs at low cost, thus engaging the citizenry in their own remaking. In reconstructing the history of the so-called agitation trials and placing them in a rich social context, Elizabeth A. Wood makes a major contribution to rethinking the first decade of Soviet history. Her book traces the arc by which a regime's campaign to educate the masses by entertaining and disciplining them culminated in a policy of brute shaming.Over the course of the 1920s, the nature of the trials changed, and this process is one of the main themes of the later chapters of Wood's book. Rather than humanizing difficult issues, the trials increasingly made their subjects (alcoholics, boys who smoked, truants) into objects of shame and dismissal. By the end of the decade and the early 1930s, the trials had become weapons for enforcing social and political conformity. Their texts were still fictional—indeed, fantastical—but the actors and the verdicts were now all too real.

Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia

Performing Justice

were now expected to place more emphasis than ever on organizing other women and persuading them to join the Communist Party.

GENDER AND POLITICS IN SOVIET RUSSIA: WORKING WOMEN UNDER THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY, 1918-1928. (VOLUMES I AND II) (WOMEN).

How could the baba--traditionally the "backward" Russian woman--be mobilized as a "comrade" in the construction of a new state and society? Drawing on newly available archival materials, historian Elizabeth Wood explores the Bolshevik government's campaign to draw women into the public sphere and involve them in the world of politics in the early Soviet years.

Elizabeth A. Wood

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