Russian and East European Studies

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editor: Jonathan Harris, University of Pittsburgh

The Russian and East European Studies series was established in 1984. Since then REES has grown to include a list of distinguished books from a variety of disciplinary, ideological, and methodological perspectives on every aspect of the region’s history, politics, society, economics, and culture. With the dissolution of old Cold War boundaries, the series has expanded its scope to include the German-speaking parts of Central Europe as a vital factor in the region. REES thus takes under its purview potentially everything from Aachen to Vladivostok, and from Tirana to Petersburg. REES is proud to be the home of many prize-winning books and it continues to thrive even as it enters its fourth decade.

Emergence Of Modern Jewish Politics, The Cover

Format: Paperback

Pages: 288

ISBN: 9780822963240

Pub Date: 04 Nov 2014

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics examines the political, social, and cultural dimensions of Zionism and Bundism, the two major political movements among East European Jews during the first half of the twentieth century. While Zionism achieved its primary aim—the founding of a Jewish state—the Jewish Labor Bund has not only practically disappeared, but its ideals of socialism and secular Jewishness based in the diaspora seem to have failed. Yet, as Zvi Gitelman and the various contributors argue, it was the Bund that more profoundly changed the structure of Jewish society, politics, and culture.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 240

ISBN: 9780822963189

Pub Date: 24 Oct 2014

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

In 1949 construction of the planned town of Nowa Huta began on the outskirts of Kraków, Poland. Its centerpiece, the Lenin Steelworks, promised a secure future for workers and their families. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Solidarity movement and the ensuing shock therapy program of the early 1990s rapidly transitioned the country from socialism to a market-based economy, and Nowa Huta fell on hard times.

Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia Cover

Format: Paperback

Pages: 408

ISBN: 9780822963202

Pub Date: 03 Oct 2014

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Gábor T. Rittersporn shows, the “little tactics” people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system’s development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras. For Rittersporn, citizens' conscious and unreflected actions at all levels of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual’s relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and the culture it engendered. Through a meticulous reading of primary documents and materials uncovered in numerous archives located in Russia and Germany, Rittersporn identifies three related responses - anguish, anger, and folkways - to the pressures people in all walks of life encountered, and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated. Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system’s persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror. He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life’s pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices. As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime’s ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee.

Democracy Assistance from the Third Wave Cover

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

ISBN: 9780822962717

Pub Date: 28 Feb 2014

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

The role of Western NGOs in the transition of postcommunist nations to democracy has been well documented. In this study, Paulina Pospieszna follows a different trajectory, examining the role of a former aid recipient (Poland), newly democratic itself, and its efforts to aid democratic transitions in the neighboring states of Belarus and Ukraine.Belarus is widely regarded as the most authoritarian state in the region, while Ukraine is witnessing a slow, if often troubled, democratic consolidation.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 280

ISBN: 9780822962939

Pub Date: 05 Feb 2014

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Silence has many causes: shame, embarrassment, ignorance, a desire to protect. The silence that has surrounded the atrocities committed against the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II is particularly remarkable given the scholarly and popular interest in the war. It, too, has many causes—of which antisemitism, the most striking, is only one.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 232

ISBN: 9780822962656

Pub Date: 15 Nov 2013

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was just one link in a chain of events leading to World War I and the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. By 1918, after nearly four hundred years of rule, the Habsburg monarchy was expunged in an instant of history. Remarkably, despite tales of decadence, ethnic indifference, and a failure to modernize, the empire enjoyed a renewed popularity in interwar narratives.

History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism, A Cover

Format: Paperback

Pages: 424

ISBN: 9780822962861

Pub Date: 15 Nov 2013

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 280

ISBN: 9780822962618

Pub Date: 28 Oct 2013

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Living in one of the world’s most volatile regions, the people of the Balkans have witnessed unrelenting political, economic, and social upheaval. In response, many have looked to building communities, both psychologically and materially, as a means of survival in the wake of crumbling governments and states. The foundational structures of these communities often center on the concept of individual sacrifice for the good of the whole.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 400

ISBN: 9780822962823

Pub Date: 25 Oct 2013

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917. Heirs to the legacy of the PeopleÆs Will movement, the SRs were unabashed proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 456

ISBN: 9780822961925

Pub Date: 28 Feb 2013

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. In Visions of Annihilation, Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movementÆs use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 312

ISBN: 9780822962243

Pub Date: 15 Nov 2012

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Most early Western perceptions of the Holocaust were based on newsreels filmed during the Allied liberation of Germany in 1945. Little, however, was reported of the initial wave of material from Soviet filmmakers, who were in fact the first to document these horrors. In First Films of the Holocaust, Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of the horrors of Nazi rule.

Format: Hardback

Pages: 400

ISBN: 9780822944201

Pub Date: 28 Oct 2012

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

In 1956, Hungarian workers joined students on the streets to protest years of wage and benefit cuts enacted by the Communist regime. Although quickly suppressed by Soviet forces, the uprising led to changes in party leadership and conciliatory measures that would influence labor politics for the next thirty years.In The Workers' State, Mark Pittaway presents a groundbreaking study of the complexities of the Hungarian working class, its relationship to the Communist Party, and its major political role during the foundational period of socialism (1944-1958).

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

ISBN: 9780822962076

Pub Date: 31 Aug 2012

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Russia and Germany have had a long history of significant cultural, political, and economic exchange. Despite these beneficial interactions, stereotypes of the alien Other persisted. Germans perceived Russia as a vast frontier with unlimited potential, yet infused with an \u201cAsianness\u201d that explained its backwardness and despotic leadership.

The History of Liberalism in Russia Cover

Format: Hardback

Pages: 392

ISBN: 9780822944157

Pub Date: 16 Jan 2012

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Foreword by Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe influence of liberalism in tsarist Russia is deeply problematic to most historians. In this highly original study, Victor Leontovitsch offers a reinterpretation of liberalism in a uniquely Russian form. He documents the struggles to develop civil society and individual liberties in imperial Russia up until their ultimate demise in the face of war, revolution, and the collapse of the old regime.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 344

ISBN: 9780822961673

Pub Date: 16 Dec 2011

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Marjorie L. Hilton presents a captivating history of consumer culture in Russia from the 1880s to the early 1930s. She highlights the critical role of consumerism as a vehicle for shaping class and gender identities, modernity, urbanism, and as a mechanism of state power in the transition from tsarist autocracy to Soviet socialism.

Format: Paperback

Pages: 344

ISBN: 9780822961710

Pub Date: 11 Nov 2011

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press

Series: Russian and East European Studies

Description:

Several stark premises have long prevailed in our approach to Russian history. It was commonly assumed that Russia had always labored under a highly centralized and autocratic imperial state. The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was ultimately assigned to the profoundly agrarian character of Russian society. The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the nationÆs population, was considered a harsh world of cruel landowners and ignorant peasants, and a strong hand was required for such a crude society. A number of significant conclusions flowed from this understanding. Deep and abiding social divisions obstructed the evolution of modernity, as experienced \u201cnaturally\u201d in other parts of Europe, so there was no Renaissance or Reformation; merely a derivative Enlightenment; and only a distorted capitalism. And since only despotism could contain these volatile social forces, it followed that the 1917 Revolution was an inevitable explosion resulting from these intolerable contradictions—and so too were the blood-soaked realities of the Soviet regime that came after. In short, the sheer immensity of its provincial backwardness could explain almost everything negative about the course of Russian history. This book undermines these preconceptions. Through her close study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century, Catherine Evtuhov demonstrates how nearly everything we thought we knew about the dynamics of Russian society was wrong. Instead of peasants ground down by poverty and ignorance, we find skilled farmers, talented artisans and craftsmen, and enterprising tradespeople. Instead of an exclusively centrally administered state, we discover effective and participatory local government. Instead of pervasive ignorance, we are shown a lively cultural scene and an active middle class. Instead of a defining Russian exceptionalism, we find a world recognizable to any historian of nineteenth-century Europe. Drawing on a wide range of Russian social, environmental, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, and synthesizing it with deep archival research of the Nizhnii Novgorod province, Evtuhov overturns a simplistic view of the Russian past. Rooted in, but going well beyond, provincial affairs, her book challenges us with an entirely new perspective on RussiaÆs historical trajectory.