Russian Studies

"The two longtime foes have drawn increasingly close together due to a confluence of geostrategic, political, and economic interests-all of which have a common theme of diminishing, subverting, or displacing American power."

Diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole arrived for a new job at the United States consulate office in Moscow in September 1917, just two months before the Bolshevik Revolution. In the final year of World War I, as Russians were withdrawing and Americans were joining the war, Poole found himself in the midst of political turmoil in Russia. U.S. relations with the newly declared Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated as civil war erupted and as Allied forces intervened in northern Russia and Siberia. Thirty-five years later, in the climate of the Cold War, Poole recounted his experiences as a witness to that era in a series of interviews.

From sermons and clerical reports to personal stories of faith, this book of translated primary documents reveals the lived experience of Orthodox Christianity in 19th- and early 20th-century Russia. These documents allow us to hear the voices of educated and uneducated writers, of clergy and laity, nobles and merchants, workers and peasants, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians. Orthodoxy emerges here as a multidimensional and dynamic faith. Beyond enhancing our understanding of Orthodox Christianity as practiced in Imperial Russia, this thoughtfully edited volume offers broad insights into the relationship between religious narrative and social experience and reveals religion's central place in the formation of world views and narrative traditions.

Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the destiny of a great power brings into sharp focus several key episodes in Russia's vividly ideological engagement with law and rights. Drawing on 30 years of experience of consultancy and teaching in many regions of Russia and on library research in Russian-language texts, Bill Bowring provides unique insights into people, events and ideas.
Theorising Russia's ideological history -- The Scottish enlightenment in the Russian Empire -- The 1850s and 1860s in Russia : revolutionary situation or great reforms? -- The trajectory of Yevgeniy Pashukanis, and the struggle for power in Soviet international law -- Soviet international law and self-determination -- The collapse of the Soviet Union and the 'parade of sovereignties' -- Russian autonomy -- Human rights in the Yeltsin period -- Russia and the death penalty -- Sovereign democracy