This book is about a thousand years of history of the Caspian region and talks about the naval campaigns of our glorious ancestors Russ, dashing ushkuynikov Novgorod, Don and Volga Cossacks, on the Persian campaign of Peter the Great, after which the Caspian Sea became a Russian lake. Particular attention is given to change the situation in the region associated with the discovery of vast oil...

Since his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama has captured attention as reporters, politicos, and ordinary citizens have wondered if he might be the nation's first black president. Chicago Tribune reporter Mendell argues that although Obama's rise to the national stage might seem unplanned, it is the outcome of a carefully calculated strategy by an ambitious man. Mendell...

A detailed collection of documents on the course and evolution of Perestroika related to its main architect, Alexander Iakovlev. One of the first Russians to come to the US on a Fulbright in the 1950s (together with Oleg Kalugin), Iakovlev became the leading thinker and architect of perestroika and glasnost under M S Gorbachev. Vital collection for anyone interested in contemporary Russian...

An Orderly Mess is a timely diagnosis of the current dissolution of the modern order, while highlighting the opportunities of messiness. The essay focuses on the temporal and spatial dimensions in which messiness becomes apparent today: broken time lines and fragmented spaces. Messiness is framed by a blurring of the world orderings inherited from modernity. Against the backdrop of rapid...

The collection of well-researched essays assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevailing historiographical approach of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and Communism. This provides opportunities to exonerate...

This volume examines the present-day situation of Hungarian as a minority language in Romania. It is an important addition to the study of the Hungarian language in the diaspora that should be of interest not only to linguists and sociologists also sociolinguists but to historians, political or social scientists, educators and dialectologists as well. The problems presented, albeit referring...

The genesis of the federalist thought that the book discusses is the project beginning in the fall of 1939 about the idea of combining Poland’s and Czechoslovakia’s war efforts. It soon developed into federalist concepts, leading, in turn, to particular political gestures: the Polish-Czechoslovak Declaration of November 11, 1940; a joint project of a constitution of a future Polish-Czechoslovak...

In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents...

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape,...

The Berlin Wall Memorial Center on Bernauer Strasse is the main memorial site of divided Germany, located in the center of the German capital. Alongside the exhibit at the former border strip, a permanent exhibition entitled ‘1961 - 1989. The Berlin Wall’ was opened in November 2014, providing information about the political and historical context.