Marx held that the progression of society from capitalism to communism was 'historically inevitable'. In Russia in 1917, it seemed that Marx's theory was being born out in reality. But was the Russian Revolution really inevitable? This collection of fourteen contributions from the world's leading Russian scholars attempts to answer the question by looking back at the key turning points of the...

By 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in...

Despite the Roman Empire's famous 500-year reign over Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, Italy does not have the same long national history as states such as France or England. Divided for much of its history, Italy's regions have been, at various times, parts of bigger, often antagonistic empires, notably those of Spain and Austria. In addition, its challenging and varied terrain...

This is the extraordinary story of Spain, from early tribalism and Roman rule to the Moorish conquest, Spain's eighteenth-century revival under the Bourbons, the Peninsular War and revolution in Spanish America right up to the catastrophic civil war and Franco's totalitarian regime. A key theme from Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was Spain's trans-oceanic empire which was central to the...

Series: Rossiia zabytaia i neizvesntnaia. Beloe dvizhenie

Theater between Hitler and Stalin

The author examines turbulent days of 1917 and the rise of the Bolsheviks and the power-cult and dictatorship of Lenin and Stalin.

The collection presents documents on the activities of the SVAG Directorate for the Study of German Scientific and Technical Achievements, as well as other Soviet institutions and departments in Germany for the study and use of German scientific and technical achievements and 'high' technologies in the interests of the USSR. This is the first time that documents have been published in this way....

This book is a tribute to the memory of Victor Zaslavsky (1937–2009), sociologist, émigré from the Soviet Union, Canadian citizen, public intellectual, and keen observer of Eastern Europe.In seventeen essaysleading European, American and Russian scholars discuss the theory and the history of totalitarian society with a comparative approach. They revisit and reassess what Zaslavsky considered...