An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational crimes jump from city streets onto the screen almost before the pistols have had a chance to cool. Paris in the Twenties? Fitzgerald's New York? Early Hollywood? No, tsarist Russia in the last decades before the Revolution. In Russia at Play, Louise McReynolds recreates a vibrant, rapidly changing culture in rich detail. Her account encompasses the "legitimate" stage, vaudeville, nightclubs, restaurants, sports, tourism, and the silent movie industry. McReynolds reveals a pluralist and dynamic society, and shows how the new icons of mass culture affected the subsequent gendering of identities. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late tsarist period spawned dramatic social changes—an urban middle class and a voracious consumer culture demanded new forms of entertainment. The result was the rapid incursion of commercial values into the arts and the athletic field and unprecedented degrees of social interaction in the new nightclubs, vaudeville houses, and cheap movie houses. Traditional rules of social conduct shifted to greater self-fulfillment and self-expression, values associated with the individualism and consumerism of liberal capitalism. Leisure-time activities, McReynolds finds, allowed Russians who partook of them to recreate themselves, to develop a modern identity that allowed for different senses of the self depending on the circumstances. The society that spawned these impulses would disappear in Russia for decades under the combined blows of revolution, civil war, and collectivization, but questions of personal identity are again high on the agenda as Russia makes the transition from a collectivist society to one in which the dominant ethos remains undefined.

In the 17th century, only Moscow's elite had access to the magical, vibrant world of the theater. In Russia's Theatrical Past, Claudia Jensen, Ingrid Maier, Stepan Shamin, and Daniel C. Waugh mine Russian and Western archival sources to document the history of these productions as they developed at the court of the Russian tsar. Using such sources as European newspapers, diplomats' reports, foreign travel accounts, witness accounts, and payment records, they also uncover unique aspects of local culture and politics of the time. Focusing on Northern European theatrical traditions, the authors explore the concept of intertheater, which describes transmissions between performing traditions, and reveal how the Muscovite court's interest in theater and other musical entertainment was strongly influenced by diplomatic contacts. Russia's Theatrical Past, made possible by an international research collaborative, offers fresh insight into how and why Russians went to such great efforts to rapidly develop court theater in the 17th century.

Four years after the NATO-Russia Council came into being, it represents a picture in ambivalence and incomplete realization of partnership. This monograph focuses on the Russian side of this growing estrangement. It finds the Russian roots of this ambivalence or alienation in the increasingly visible manifestations of an autocratic and neo-imperial Russian state and foreign and defense policy. These strong trends in Russian policy inhibit the formation of a genuine security partnership that can provide for Eurasian security in the face of multiple contemporary threats. Indeed, it is debatable whether Russia really wants a comprehensive partnership with NATO. The author examines Russia's perspectives in this relationship and this growing estrangement between the West and Russia, tracing it to trends in Russian domestic, defense, and foreign policies.

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

This book tackles questions about the reception and production of translated and untranslated Russian theatre in post-WW2 Britain: why in British minds is Russia viewed almost as a run-of-the-mill production of a Chekhov play. Is it because Chekhov is so dominant in British theatre culture? What about all those other Russian writers? Many of them are very different from Chekhov. A key question was formulated, thanks to a review by Susannah Clapp of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country: have the British staged a ‘Russia of the theatrical mind’?

Russia has generally been neglected in the academic and policy discourse on regional integration in East Asia. This book fills this gap, with particular attention to the role of Pacific Russia in the deepening regional integration in East Asia. It examines the increasingly diverse foreign policy interests of Russia related to emerging economic and political realities of the world, and Russia’s potential role in the regional integration in East Asia. Topics discussed include Russian strategic interests and security policy in East Asia generally, Russia’s bilateral relations with China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula, opportunities and challenges energy and immigration presents for Russia and its engagement with East Asia, and Russia’s present and future roles in regional integration in East Asia.

This text traces the lineage and development of Russian foreign policy with the insight that comes from a historical perspective. Now fully updated, the seventh edition incorporates new coverage of issues including relations with the major powers and with other post-communist states, with an emphasis on tensions with the United States and engagement with Ukraine, Crimea, and Syria. International security issues including arms control, sanctions, and intervention continue to grow in importance. Domestic and regional issues related to natural resource politics, human rights, Islamism, and terrorism also persist. Chronologically organized chapters highlight the continuities of Russia’s behavior in the world since tsarist times as well as the major sources of change and variability over the revolutionary period, wartime alliances and Cold War, détente, the Soviet collapse, and the first post-communist decades. The basic framework used in the book is a modified realism that stresses the balance of power and the importance of national interest, and it identifies several factors (both internal and external) that condition Russian policy. The interpretations are original and based on a mix of primary and secondary sources. New to the Seventh Edition A new concluding chapter: Russia Openly Confronts the "Collective West". Thoroughly updated coverage of Russia’s bilateral relations with the United States and countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Expanded discussion of Moscow’s efforts to control the flow of information at home and abroad as it employs Russia’s "soft power" assets. Russian-American relations, especially with respect to continuing interference in the U.S. elections and to U.S. foreign policy concerns in the Far East, Iran, and Syria. The full unfolding of the Ukraine crisis, culminating in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s escalated claims of the superiority of Russian cultural values and more openly imperialistic ambitions. Expanded coverage of Russia’s relations with China and India, now in a separate chapter on this "strategic triangle." Greater attention to the impact of climate change on Russian foreign policy, including its heightened activity in the Arctic. Significant new developments in the Middle East including the collapse of the nuclear deal with Iran, the expanded Russian role in the Syrian civil war, and the growing complexity in Russian-Turkish relations.

A comprehensive history of Russian theatre, written by an international team of experts.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has tried to restore its lost status, prestige, and influence in the global political arena. At the same time, internal political challenges and international events – such as the Arab Spring and the colour revolutions in former Soviet republics – have threatened the security and the national interests of the country. Taking these challenges and opportunities into account, The Russian Military Intervention in Syria examines Russia’s assertive foreign policy and its attempts to protect its geostrategic interests in the Middle East and former Soviet territory. Ohannes Geukjian analyzes the history of Russian military presence in the Middle East and the country’s growing frustration with American and Western policy, revealing the objectives behind Russia’s use of military power – namely, to maintain its regional influence in Eurasia and to enhance its status in the world. Geukjian provides a detailed examination of the Geneva and Astana peace processes, the geopolitical objectives of Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and how disagreements between Russia and the United States over issues of regime change, global security, and armaments have negative implications for international conflict management. The Russian Military Intervention in Syria is an authoritative overview, based on a wide range of new and updated sources, providing a fresh interpretation and analysis of Russia’s foreign policy goals and Russian diplomacy in handling the Syrian conflict.

This collection contains Gogol's three completed plays The Government Inspector, which satirises a corrupt society was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest play in the Russian language and is still widely studied in schools and universities: "I resolved to gather into one heap everything that was bad in Russia which I was aware of at that time, all the injustices being perpetrated in those places, and in those circumstances that especially cried out for justice, and tried to hold them all up to ridicule, at one fell swoop." (Nikolai Gogol) Marriage is a comedy about the business of matchmaking and matrimony; The Gamblers is an exoriating piece about the excesses of the Moscow aristocracy. "Two and two make five, if not the square root of five, and it all happens quite naturally in Gogol's world... Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange" (Vladimir Nabokov)