Finalist, PEN Center USA Literary Awards, Research NonfictionRich in oil and strategically located between Russia and China, Kazakhstan is one of the most economically and geopolitically important of the so-called Newly Independent States that emerged after the USSR's collapse. Yet little is known in the West about the region's turbulent history under Soviet rule, particularly how the regime asserted colonial dominion over the Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities.Grappling directly with the issue of Soviet colonialism, Curative Powers offers an in-depth exploration of this dramatic, bloody, and transformative era in Kazakhstan's history. Paula Michaels reconstructs the Soviet government's use of medical and public health policies to change the society, politics, and culture of its outlying regions. At first glance the Soviets' drive to modernize medicine in Kazakhstan seems an altruistic effort to improve quality of life. Yet, as Michaels reveals, beneath the surface lies a story of power, legitimacy, and control. The Communist regime used biomedicine to reshape the function, self-perception, and practices of both doctors and patients, just as it did through education, the arts, the military, the family, and other institutions.Paying particular attention to the Kazakhs' ethnomedical customs, Soviet authorities designed public health initiatives to teach the local populace that their traditional medical practices were backward, even dangerous, and that they themselves were dirty and diseased. Through poster art, newsreels, public speeches, and other forms of propaganda, Communist authorities used the power of language to demonstrate Soviet might and undermine the power of local ethnomedical practitioners, while moving the region toward what the Soviet state defined as civilization and political enlightenment.As Michaels demonstrates, Kazakhs responded in unexpected ways to the institutionalization of this new pan-Soviet culture. Ethnomedical customs surreptitiously lived on, despite direct, sometimes violent, attacks by state authorities. While Communist officials hoped to exterminate all remnants of traditional healing practices, Michaels points to evidence that suggests the Kazakhs continued to rely on ethnomedicine even as they were utilizing the services of biomedical doctors, nurses, and midwives. The picture that ultimately emerges is much different from what the Soviets must have imagined. The disparate medical systems were not in open conflict, but instead both indigenous and alien practices worked side by side, becoming integrated into daily life.Combining colonial and postcolonial theory with intensive archival and ethnographic research, Curative Powers offers a detailed view of Soviet medical initiatives and their underlying political and social implications and impact on Kazakh society. Michaels also endeavors to link biomedical policies and practices to broader questions of pan-Soviet identity formation and colonial control in the non-Russian periphery.

Using firsthand, personal accounts, and focusing on the experiences of women, Katherine R. Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939.Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions. In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens—only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland—were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences.Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival.Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.

The first International Women's Day was celebrated in Copenhagen in 1910 and adopted by the Bolsheviks in 1913 as a means to popularize their political program among factory women in Russia. By 1918, Women's Day had joined May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution as the most important national holidays on the calendar.Choi Chatterjee analyzes both Bolshevik attitudes towards women and invented state rituals surrounding Women's Day in Russia and the early Soviet Union to demonstrate the ways in which these celebrations were a strategic form of cultural practice that marked the distinctiveness of Soviet civilization, legitimized the Soviet mission for women, and articulated the Soviet construction of gender. Unlike previous scholars who have criticized the Bolsheviks\u2019 for repudiating their initial commitment to Marxist feminism, Chatterjee has discovered considerable continuity in the way that they imagined the ideal woman and her role in a communist society.Through the years, Women's Day celebrations temporarily empowered women as they sang revolutionary songs, acted as strong protagonists in plays, and marched in processions carrying slogans about gender equality. In speeches, state policies, reports, historical sketches, plays, cartoons, and short stories, the passive Russian woman was transformed into an iconic Soviet Woman, one who could survive, improvise, and prevail over the most challenging of circumstances.

The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, was one of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union\u2019s First Five-Year Plan. As the major icon to ending the economic \u0022backwardness\u0022 of the USSR\u2019s minority republics, it stood apart from similar efforts as one of the most potent metaphors for the creation of a unified socialist nation.Built between December 1926 and January 1931 by nearly 50,000 workers and at a cost of more 161 million rubles, Turksib embodied the Bolsheviks\u2019 commitment to end ethnic inequality and promote cultural revolution in one the far-flung corners of the old Tsarist Empire, Kazakhstan. Trumpeted as the \u0022forge of the Kazakh proletariat,\u0022 the railroad was to create a native working class, bringing not only trains to the steppes, but also the Revolution.In the first in-depth study of this grand project, Matthew Payne explores the transformation of its builders in Turksib\u2019s crucible of class war, race riots, state purges, and the brutal struggle of everyday life. In the battle for the souls of the nation\u2019s engineers, as well as the racial and ethnic conflicts that swirled, far from Moscow, around Stalin\u2019s vast campaign of industrialization, he finds a microcosm of the early Soviet Union.

A critical study of the philosophy and political practice of the Czech dissident movement Charter 77. Aviezer Tucker examines how the political philosophy of Jan Patocka (1907-1977), founder of Charter 77, influenced the thinking and political leadership of Vaclav Havel as dissident and president. Presents the first serious treatment of Havel as philosopher and Patocka as a political thinker. Through the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, opponents of communism based their civil struggle for human rights on philosophic foundations, and members of the Charter 77 later led the Velvet Revolution. After Patocka's self-sacrifice in 1977, Vaclav Havel emerged a strong philosophical and political force, and he continued to apply Patocka's philosophy in order to understand the human condition under late communism and the meaning of dissidence. However, the political/philosophical orientation of the Charter 77 movement failed to provide President Havel with an adequate basis for comprehending and responding to the extraordinary political and economic problems of the postcommunist period. In his discussion of Havel's presidency and the eventual corruption of the Velvet Revolution, Tucker demonstrates that the weaknesses in Charter 77 member's understanding of modernity, which did not matter while they were dissidents, seriously harmed their ability to function in a modern democratic system. Within this context, Tucker also examines Havel's recent attempt to topple the democratic but corrupt government in 1997-1998. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel will be of interest to students of philosophy and politics, scholars and students of Slavic studies, and historians, as well as anyone fascinated by the nature of dissidence.

In this interdisciplinary and controversial work, Igal Halfin takes an original and provocative stance on Marxist theory, and attempts to break down the divisions between history, philosophy, and literary theory.

Models of Nature studies the early and turbulent years of the Soviet conservation movement from the October Revolution to the mid-1930s—Lenin\u2019s rule to the rise of Stalin. This new edition includes an afterword by the author that reflects upon the study's impact and discusses advances in the field since the book was first published.

Jonathan A. Grant has written a highly original study of the Putilov works—the most famous industrial conglomerate in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the emergence of a capitalist system in the Russian federation in the 1990s, scholarly debate over the nature of Russian capitalism has been revived, and with this study, Grant issues a major challenge to the conventional wisdom on the nature of the Russian economy in the years before the Bolshevik revolution. Grant argues that the Putilov Company, which manufactured arms for the Russian state and a wide range of heavy industrial equipment for civilian use, adopted business practices that resembled the experiences of large machinery and armaments manufacturers in Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. This interpretation runs directly counter to the traditional and widely held view that Russian capitalism was shaped by the tsarist state's orders and subsidies and that the tsarist system was incompatible with the development of modern capitalism. Grant makes direct comparisons between Putilov and the famous western firm of Krupp and Vickers, illustrating similar business decisions made by both companies in terms of diversification of the product line and a penchant for private (as opposed to state) markets for primary income. Grant has gone beyond Soviet works on the Putilov plant, examining archival documents of the company and offering critical comments on both Soviet and Western scholarship on Russian economic and social history from the perspective of this important industrial enterprise. Grant not only repeatedly demonstrates that the Putilov firm responded effectively to the changing market for its wide range of industrial products but also shows that the tsarist regime provided far more of the \u0022systemic regularity\u0022 needed for capitalist development than generally believed. Grant's work is a significant contribution to this ongoing debate, offering a much-needed case study of Russian business history and a comparative study that extends across national boundaries. Big Business in Russia is essential reading for graduate students in Russian and European history and will also appeal to American and European business leaders eager to understand the historical background of the current economic challenges facing Russia.

In this ground-breaking book, Beth Holmgren examines how—in turn-of-the-century Russia and its subject, the Kingdom of Poland—capitalism affected the elitist culture of literature, publishing, book markets, and readership. Rewriting Capitalism considers how both \u201cserious\u201d writers and producers of consumer culture coped with the drastic power shift from \u201cserious\u201d literature to market-driven literature.

A comprehensive, original, and innovative analysis of the social, economic, and political factors affecting contemporary Russian reform, the book is organized around the central question of the role of the state and its effect on the course of Russian agrarian reform. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, contemporary conventional wisdom holds the the Russian state is \u201cweak.\u201d Stephen Wegren feels that the traditional approach to the weak/strong state suffers from measurement and circular logic problems, believing that the Russian state, thought weaker than in its Soviet past, is still relatively stronger than other actors. The state\u2019s strength allows it to intervene in the rural sector in ways that other power contender cannot.Specifically, as a measure of state intervention, Wegren analyzes how the state has influenced urban-rural relations, rural-rural relations, and the nonstate (private) agricultural sector. Several dilemmas arose that have complicated successful agrarian reform as a result of the nature of state interventions, how reform policies were defined, and the incentives rhar arose from state-sponsored policies. During contemporary Russian agrarian reform, urban-rural differences have widened, marked by a deterioration in rural standards of living and increased alienation of rural political groups from urban alliances. At the same time, within the rural sector, reform failed to reverse rural egalitarianism. In addition, the nature of state interventions has undermined attempts to create a vibrant, productive private rural sector based on private farming.Wegren\u2019s research is based upon extensive field work, interviews, archival documents, and published and unpublished source material conducted over a six-year period, and he demonstrates the link between agrarian reform and the success of overall reform in Russia. This learned and often controversial volume will interest political scientists, policy makers, and scholars and students of contemporary Russia.

Winner of the 1998 Misha Djordjevic Award for the best book on Serbian culture in English.Editors Gorup and Obradovic have collected stories from thirty-five outstanding writers in this first English anthology of Serbian fiction in thirty years. The anthology, representing a great variety of literary styles and themes, includes works by established writers with international reputations, as well as promising new writers spanning the generation born between 1930 and 1960. These stories may lead to a greater understanding of the current events in the former Yugoslavia.

Kenneth Straus weaves together many threads in Russian social history to develop a new theory of working-class formation in the years of Stalin\u2019s First Five Year Plan. In so doing, he addresses a long-standing debate among historians by suggesting new answers to an old question: Was there social support for the Stalin regime among the Soviet working class during the 1930s, and if so, why?Straus argues that the keys for interpreting Stalinism lie in occupational specialization, on the one hand, and community organization, on the other. He focuses on the daily life of the new Soviet workers in the factory and community, arguing that the most significant new trends saw peasants becoming open hearth steel workers, housewives becoming auto assembly line workers and machine operatives, and youth training en masse rather than occupations categories in the vocational schools in the factories, the FZU.Tapping archival material only recently available and a wealth of published sources, Straus presents Soviet social history within a new analytical framework, suggesting that Stalinist forced industrialization and Soviet proletarianization is best understood within a comparative European framework, in which the theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber best elucidate both the broad similarities with Western trends and the striking exceptional aspects of the Soviet experience.

In the early nineteenth century, Vuk Karadzic, a Serb scholar and linguist, collected and eventually published transcriptions of the traditional oral poetry of the South Slavs. It was a monumental and unprecedented undertaking. Karadzic gathered and heard performances of the rich songs of Balkan peasants, outlaws, and professional singers and their rebel heroes. His four volumes constitute the classic anthology of Balkan oral poetry, treasured for nearly two centuries by readers of all literatures, and influential to such literary giants as Goethe, Merimee, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Sir Walter Scott.This edition of the songs offers the most complete and authoritative translations ever assembled in English. Holton and Mihailovich, leading scholars of Slavic literature, have preserved here the unique meter and rhythm at the heart of Serbian oral poetry, as well as the idiom of the original singers. Extensive notes and comments aid the reader in understanding the poems, the history they record and the oral tradition that lies beneath them, the singers and their audience.The songs contain seven cycles, identified here in sections titled: Songs Before History, Before Kosovo, the Battle of Kosovo, Marko Karadzic, Under the Turks, Songs of the Outlaws, and Songs of the Serbian Insurrection. The editors have selected the best known and most representative songs from each of the cycles. A complete biography is also provided.

In this pathbreaking study, I. Michael Aronson offers a closely argued and many-faceted reinterpretation of Russian anti-Semitism and tsarist nationalities policy. He examines, and refutes, the widely held belief that the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881 were a result of a conspiracy supported by the tsarist government or circles close to it, investigating claims and counterclaims about what happened during that fateful year and guiding the reader through a maze of events and decades of subsequent interpretations. Although the pogroms are treated within the context of Russian history, Aronson's analysis has significance for Jewish studies as well. When the Russian government adopted reactionary and repressive policies, Jews began to seek new solutions to the problems that plagued them: massive numbers emigrated to the United States; other turned to revolutionary socialism; still others were attracted to Zionism and supported the creation of the state of Israel.

In topics ranging from industrial accident prevention before and during Stalin's industrialization drive to the long and complex history of the Soviet science called defectology, the essays in this collection chronicle the responses of the state and society to a variety of disabled groups and disabilities. Also included, in addition to the editors, are Julie Brown, Vera Dunham, David Joravsky, Janet Knox and Alex Kozulin, Stephen and Ethel Dunn, Bernice Madison, Paul Raymond, and Mark Field. This unusual and provocative collection brings to light a dimension of Soviet history and policy rarely explored.

Thomas Remington discusses the methods used by the Communist Party to manage communications in Soviet society. Covering literature produced by Soviet scholars from the 1970s and 1980s, that studies the organization, content, usage, and impact of propaganda, Remington views how Party officials intrinsically manage the structure of the Soviet communications system, through rhetoric of both conservatism and reform.