This easy-to-use reference explores the people and events that shaped Russian military history—and impacted Europe, Asia, and the world—over the past eight centuries. Russian military history is an often-overlooked field. Yet Russia is and has long been an important player in global politics, and its military exploits have been central to its role on the world stage. This study of Russia's military past provides insights into European and U.S. history, including the conduct of the two World Wars and the Cold War, and will help readers better appreciate the current geopolitical situation. This work covers major events and figures in Russian military history from the end of Mongol domination in the 14th century to the present day. More than 650 entries by scores of expert contributors detail events, individuals, organizations, and ideas that have influenced Russian warfare over 800 years. Two alphabetically arranged volumes explore such conflicts as the Russo-Polish Wars, the Great Northern War, the Russo-Turkish Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Cross references and further readings in each entry serve as jumping-off points for further exploration.

Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885&–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905&–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified—and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.

In 1917 the world was turned upside down by a popular uprising in Russia followed by a Bolshevik coup d'état. Suddenly the socialist revolution was underway. Capitalism was morally and materially exhausted by war, and history seemed to be on the side of communism at last. But as Michael Occleshaw brilliantly shows the clash between communism and capitalism was never as clear-cut as later historians claimed. Far from putting their faith in historical inevitability, the Bolsheviks were shrewd and flexible operators. They used an alliance with the Kaiser's Germany to protect their infant regime and to destroy domestic challengers. The British, French and Americans, meanwhile, actively sought to cooperate with the new government. Occleshaw's wealth of fresh information deepens and enriches our understanding of this crucial period in world history. From the secret negotiations among the Bolsheviks and the capitalist powers, to Britain's plans for a separate Cossack state, he reveals a history darker and more dangerous than anyone could have imagined.

Russia in World History uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire. Choi Chatterjee analyzes the concepts of nation and empire, selfhood and subjectivity, socialism and capitalism, and revolution and the world order in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In doing so she rethinks many historical narratives that bluntly posit a liberal West against a repressive, authoritarian Russia. Instead Chatterjee argues for a wider perspective which reveals that imperial practices relating to the appropriation of human and natural resources were shared across European empires, both East and West. Incorporating the stories of famous thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, among others. This unique interpretation of modern Russia is knitted together from the varied lives and experiences of those individuals who challenged the status quo and promoted a different way of thinking. This is a ground-breaking book with big and provocative ideas about the history of the modern world, and will be vital reading for students of both modern Russian and world history.

The Russian aggression in Ukraine, culminated in its invasion on 24 February 2022, has left friend nor foe untouched and continues to shock the international philosophical community. In order to offer a wide range of perspectives on this predicament that affects each and every one of us, the present volume brings together ten philosophers – from France to Georgia, from students to professionals and professors – who shed different lights on the war. They have been asked to express themselves parrhesiastically, in other words to speak boldly, putting themselves on the line, from their personal aim at the truth and for the common good, therefore in the form of essays rather than standard scientific articles.