El Campesino: Life and Death in the Soviet Union, first published in 1952, is the dramatic autobiographical account of Spanish revolutionary Valentín Gonzalez (1904-1983). The book (also titled Listen Comrades: Life and Death in the Soviet Union) details Gonzalez' experiences in the Spanish Civil War, his conversion to communism, and his flight to the Soviet Union following the Nationalist victory. In Russia, however, he is eventually arrested, tortured...

Focusing on the critical relationship between Ukraine and Russia, renowned scholar Roman Szporluk chronicles the final two decades in the history of the Soviet Union and presents a story that is often lost in the standard interpretations of the collapse of communism.

Armed with youthful optimism, a degree in Russian Area Studies, and a desire to contribute to post-Cold War Russian/American relations, Kenneth Maher thought he'd landed his dream job when he joined a US company in unraveling former Communist Russia. Despite his best intentions, he may have gotten just a bit more than he'd bargained for. Wind of Change is a keenly observed, insightful, and wry outsider's look at a nation and people in transition...

By the time World War II ended, the Soviets would lose 27 million men, women, and children from a total population of 200 million. In this lecture, examine Soviet life during the Great Patriotic War and investigate how culture (including poetry and film) was used in service of the war effort.

The Russian Revolution wasn't just about changing politics. The Bolsheviks also attacked Russia's traditional religious, sexual, and social norms. Here, examine how the Soviets built a new proletarian culture that had powerful ramifications for education, women, religion, folk songs - and even cinema.

What was everyday Soviet life like during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods? How and where did people live? How did they spend their leisure time? Answers to these and other questions reveal the degree to which politics affected even seemingly apolitical areas of life.

This anthology offers a rich array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, comic routines, and folklore to offer a close look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. Both state-sponsored cultural forms and the unofficial culture that flourished beneath the surface are represented. The focus is on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political,...

THE TITLE OF this study unfortunately implies much and tells little. The scope of any work such as this must of necessity be limited to certain aspects only of the regimes in question. The formation and political history of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, for example, have been covered only in the most cursory manner, and only insofar as they bore a direct relationship to the network of terror which evolved in both states. The historical period herein...