History/Area Studies

Hailed for her “fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia” (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own—as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.

Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Signed by the author.

Persecution by the Russian tsarist government forced Old Believers into remote and undeveloped areas, where they quietly continued to practice the old rituals, periodically moving when threats of persecution caught up with them again. Several of these groups migrated to the United States in the 1960s, settling in rural areas of Oregon and Alaska. Their obedience to pre-17th century ways places them in conspicuous contrast and often conflict to other residents of their new locations. Despite tendencies toward acculturation and culture change, they continue to observe the old ways in many cultural domains.

The following monograph by Alexander Dolitsky is a valuable contribution to the research on Alaska and the circumpolar region for two reasons. First, it provides a fine ethnohistorical description of the Old Believers. This part of the work gives us an insight to why the Old Believers have come to Alaska and why they wish to continue their traditional way of life. Secondly, the book clarifies and modifies some aspects of the theories regarding social-cultural change in the Arctic.

This comprehensive edition is a reminder to Alaskans and all of mankind of a remarkable chapter in the world's history, when peace-seeking nations united against evil.

In the "worst of times" between 1939 and 1945, 55 million people died violent deaths — the majority of them not as soldiers-in-arms but as defenseless civilians, including the millions of victims of the Holocaust. Yet, in one way, this period was also the "best of times," when many countries of the world rallied against the ultimate rogue states of Germany and Japan to achieve the total defeat of German Nazism and Japanese militarism.

The United States' Lend-Lease program contributed greatly to the victory in World War II, and the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union in particular. The volume of materiel transferred from the United States to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 was indeed staggering: nearly 15,000 airplanes, 7,000 tanks, 51,000 jeeps, 376,000 trucks, 132,000 machine guns, 4.5 million tons of food, 107 million tons of cotton, and more than 15 million pairs of army boots, among other items. At its peak in 1944, American help amounted to 12 percent of the Soviet gross national product. 1 Ladd Army Airfield (now Fort Wainwright) in Fairbanks, Alaska, served as a key transfer point for nearly 8,000 American-built combat aircraft from the United States to the Russian battlefronts on the Alaska-Siberia (ALSIB) Air Route. In the three years of the route's existence, thousands of Americans worked with Soviet personnel on the cooperative program. From 1942 to 1945, the Alaska- Siberia Lend-Lease operations demonstrated that two nations could set aside differing views, cultural values, and ideologies to achieve a common, mutually beneficial goal: to defeat Nazi Germany and its Axis partners.

The heroism and dedication of the Soviet and American participants of the Alaska-Siberia Airway will not be forgotten. It is our civic duty to express our deep respect to those whose efforts led to the program's success and, in the process, brought the war to a close. This is our history. Future generations should be brought up with a respectful spirit of patriotism to understand this history of cooperation between our countries. This edition will preserve awareness of that massive effort for all time.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction.

The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Jewish Century (Princeton), which won the National Jewish Book Award.

An online version of this publication is available here. A physical version is located in the CEERES office, please email us for more information about access to the physical copy.  

The fifth issue of Harriman Magazine features a profile of our 2015 Paul Klebnikov Russian Civil Society Fellow, photojournalist Maria Turchenkova, who has been covering the Ukraine Crisis since its inception; we are thrilled to include an interview with former Ambassador to Russia Michael Mcfaul, who discusses his career, U.S.-Russia relations, his experiences in Russia, and his predictions for the future; an article about Teatr.doc, one of Moscow's last independent theater companies; a piece by the late Catharine Nepomnyashchy on Nabokov and the Detective novel, and more!

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the emancipation of mankind from past oppression" or "a crime and a disaster." Some things are clear. After the implosion of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty as a result of the First World War, Russia was in crisis-one interim government replaced another in the vacuum left by imperial collapse.

In this monumental and sweeping new account, Laura Engelstein delves into the seven years of chaos surrounding 1917 --the war, the revolutionary upheaval, and the civil strife it provoked. These were years of breakdown and brutal violence on all sides, punctuated by the decisive turning points of February and October. As Engelstein proves definitively, the struggle for power engaged not only civil society and party leaders, but the broad masses of the population and every corner of the far-reaching empire, well beyond Moscow and Petrograd.

Yet in addition to the bloodshed they unleashed, the revolution and civil war revealed democratic yearnings, even if ideas of what constituted "democracy" differed dramatically. Into that vacuum left by the Romanov collapse rushed long-suppressed hopes and dreams about social justice and equality. But any possible experiment in self-rule was cut short by the October Revolution. Under the banner of true democracy, and against all odds, the Bolshevik triumph resulted in the ruthless repression of all opposition. The Bolsheviks managed to harness the social breakdown caused by the war and institutionalize violence as a method of state-building, creating a new society and a new form of power.

Russia in Flames offers a compelling narrative of heroic effort and brutal disappointment, revealing that what happened during these seven years was both a landmark in the emancipation of Russia from past oppression and a world-shattering disaster. As regimes fall and rise, as civil wars erupt, as state violence targets civilian populations, it is a story that remains profoundly and enduringly relevant.

In this monograph, Tatyana Naumenko looks at modern Russian musicology through the prism of texts representing it. She mentions subjects addressed in musicological studies, names genres of music that scholars preference to explore, and describes modern methods of research and criteria of assessment, largely with the aim of overcoming Soviet-era dogmatism. Special consideration is given to the writing of academic degree dissertations on music in the Former Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.

This scientific event brought together various bodies, institutions and academic, political and media organizations at Villa Noel to draw up an assessment of the sensitive issues related to religious freedom and conscience, spirituality and secularism, symbols loaded with meaning. intellectual, ethical and emotional. The papers are a contribution to the debate on the epistemological and ethical distance "politically correct" for secularism and spirituality at the service of freedom by considering two paradigmatic cases, two European countries, Romania and France, one of which is statistically the most religious in Europe and the least religious, and in their respective public spaces, the relationship between spirituality and secularism is different.

Religion (s), secularity (s) and society (s) at the turning point of the digital humanities : proceedings of the 3rd international Comsymbol — 9-10 November 2016, Montpellier, France

This 3rd Comsymbol Symposium, with the participation of researchers from 11 countries, aimed to provide answers to two major questions of great international relevance. On the one hand, how the religions conquered by digital technologies expand and renew their experiences of community life and their social networks by producing new symbols and signifiers whose rapid spread in the public space is based on the development of forms innovations in the production of knowledge and the circulation of knowledge and, on the other hand, how academics, communication practitioners, social activists, journalists, politicians, industrialists and economic actors participate in the social transformation. In French. 

Czech Radio has one of the richest and most diverse audio archives in the world, going back to the very beginnings of radio in the 1920s. These recordings map a hundred years of Czech and Czechoslovak history through the voices of the people who shaped it. We hear not only their words, but also the tone of their voice, the mood and the atmosphere. We travel in time, as voices from the past speak to us with an immediacy that is powerful, moving and sometimes dramatic.

Prague was at the centre of many 20th century dramas: the Munich Crisis of 1938, the German occupation of March 1939, the Prague Uprising of 1945, the Communist putsch of 1948, the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. That the archives exist at all is little short of a miracle, especially after surviving a direct hit on the radio building from a Luftwaffe aerial torpedo in 1945.

They include famous names, like Czechoslovakia’s first President, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his son, Jan Masaryk; we have the pioneering feminist Františka Plamínková and the inspirational politician Milada Horáková who was sentenced to death in the show trials of the 1950s; we have writers like Karel Čapek, inventor of the term “robot”, musicians like the great Czech jazzman Jaroslav Ježek, who paints a picture of the Czechoslovak jazz scene in the 1930s, and we have sporting heroes like Emil Zátopek, one of the greatest long-distance runners of all time. And then there are some of the people who came to Czechoslovakia from abroad, as visitors or exiles. They include the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, to name just a few.

There are also some fascinating curiosities, such as some of the earliest ever live radio sports commentaries, a Dvořák opera sung in Esperanto and an experimental 1960s English-language adaptation of Karel Čapek’s “War with the Newts”. 

This series of podcasts brings together some of the most vivid and evocative of these archive recordings. Through the alchemy of sound, we bring the past to life.

The podcast can be accessed here and on most major podcast platforms.