Soviet Attitudes Towards Poland’s Solidarity Movement
Nowadays, the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s is often considered to be the first step in the downfall of the Soviet empire. Solidarity was not only…
The Polish Perspective of American Foreign Policy: Selected Moments from the Cold War Era
Introduction Bipolarity in international relations was the main characteristic of the Cold War Era. The world was divided between two opposing political, economic and military blocs. The…
Soviet Perspective On The Cold War And American Foreign Policy
Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and former Soviet republics became sovereign states. Since that time Ukraine started its own policy,…
Judging Communism and All Its Works: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Reconsidered
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s villains stopped short…
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Overcoming Personal, Political, and Historical Amnesia Through Literary-Aesthetic Anamnesis
As late as Nov 29, 1988, well into the Gorbachev period of "glasnost," Suslov’s successor and top party ideologist, Vadim Medvedev "confirmed Solzhenitsyn would remain on the…
The Special Relationship: United States-Russia
A special relationship between the United States and Russia existed during the period 2001–2002, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. However, this…
What Numbers Can and Cannot Tell Us about Russian Politics
New Trends in Russian Political Mentality: Putin 3.0. Elena Shestopal, ed. Lanham, Lexington Books, 2015. Quantitative measures of political phenomena can be enormously appealing. They seem…
Russia’s Lost Reformation
Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917. Sergei I. Zhuk. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Suppressed by…
Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies
Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies. Mark D. Steinberg and Catherine Wanner, ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Since the collapse of the…
Nationalism and Religion in Post-Soviet Russian Civil Society: An Inquiry into the 1997 Law “On Freedom of Conscience”
What will be the contribution of the Russian Orthodox Church to the creation of a civil society in post-Soviet Russia? Much depends on whether the Russian Orthodox…
The Russian Empire (1721-1917)
The Russian Empire, which lasted from 1721 to 1917, spanned an enormous territory of almost 14 million square miles (36 million sq km) across the eastern portion…
The Russian Empire: The Amber Room
The original Amber Room was in the Catherine Palace: it was a chamber with amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. It was created from 1701…
The Russian Empire: Major Accomplishments
The Russian Empire was one of the largest empires in the world, spanning almost 14 square miles (36 million sq km) across eastern portion of Europe and…
What You Need to Know About Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Physician, playwright, philander, short story author, and prison reform advocate, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) lived a life full of paradoxes. He had a religious education but became…
The Problem of Stupidity in Chekhov’s Three Sisters
One of the continual challenges that confront critics of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is to locate a theme that unites the various elements in the play. The initial…