Yuri Slezkine

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- BOOK ONE | EN ROUTE -- PART I | ANTICIPATION -- 1. The Swamp -- 2. The Preachers -- 3. The Faith -- PART II | FULFILLMENT -- 4. The Real Day -- 5. The Last Battle -- 6. The New City -- 7. The Great Disappointment -- 8. The Party Line -- BOOK TWO | AT HOME -- PART III | THE SECOND COMING -- 9. The Eternal House -- 10. The New Tenants -- 11. The Economic Foundations -- 12. The Virgin Lands -- 13. The Ideological Substance -- PART IV | THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS -- 14. The New Life -- 15. The Days Off -- 16. The Houses of Rest -- 17. The Next of Kin -- 18. The Center of the World -- 19. The Pettiness of Existence -- 20. The Thought of Death -- 21. The Happy Childhood -- 22. The New Men -- BOOK THREE | ON TRIAL -- PART V | THE LAST JUDGMENT -- 23. The Telephone Call -- 24. The Admission of Guilt -- 25. The Valley of the Dead -- 26. The Knock on the Door -- 27. The Good People -- 28. The Supreme Penalty -- PART VI | THE AFTERLIFE -- 29. The End of Childhood -- 30. The Persistence of Happiness -- 31. The Coming of War -- 32. The Return -- 33. The End -- Epilogue: The House on the Embankment -- Appendix: Partial List of Leaseholders -- Notes -- Index

A Saga of the Russian Revolution

The House of Government

Jewish Century

This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: “The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it drives home Yuri Slezkine’s provocative thesis: Jews have adapted to the modern world so well that they have become models of what it means to be modern. While focusing on the drama of the Russian Jews, including émigrés and their offspring, The Jewish Century is also an incredibly original account of the many faces of modernity—nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism. Rich in its insight, sweeping in its chronology, and fearless in its analysis, this is a landmark contribution to Jewish, Russian, European, and American history.

The Jewish Century, New Edition

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Asked shortly after the revolution about how she viewed the new government, Tatiana Varsher replied, "With the wide-open eyes of a historian." Her countrywoman, Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia, expressed a similar need to take note: "I want to write about the way those events were perceived and reflected in the humble and distant corner of Russia that was the Cossack town of Korenovskaia." What these women witnessed and experienced, and what they were moved to describe, is part of the extraordinary portrait of life in revolutionary Russia presented in this book. A collection of life stories of Russian women in the first half of the twentieth century, In the Shadow of Revolution brings together the testimony of Soviet citizens and émigrés, intellectuals of aristocratic birth and Soviet milkmaids, housewives and engineers, Bolshevik activists and dedicated opponents of the Soviet regime. In literary memoirs, oral interviews, personal dossiers, public speeches, and letters to the editor, these women document their diverse experience of the upheavals that reshaped Russia in the first half of this century. As is characteristic of twentieth-century Russian women's autobiographies, these life stories take their structure not so much from private events like childbirth or marriage as from great public events. Accordingly the collection is structured around the events these women see as touchstones: the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918-20; the switch to the New Economic Policy in the 1920s and collectivization; and the Stalinist society of the 1930s, including the Great Terror. Edited by two preeminent historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, the volume includes introductions that investigate the social historical context of these women's lives as well as the structure of their autobiographical narratives.

Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War

In the Shadow of Revolution

Arctic Mirrors is a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind.

Russia and the Small Peoples of the North

Arctic Mirrors

евреи в современном мире

Эра Меркурия

For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern—and hence their own—otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism.

Yuri Slezkine

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