Internal Colonization: Russia\u27s Imperial Experience

A review of the book Internal Colonization: Russia\u27s Imperial Experience, by Alexander Etkind is presented

The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: Catch Up and Surpass in the Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950-1960

THE BIGGEST PRIZE SOUGHT by the Soviet Union in its newly acquired postwar territory was the bomb itself—or initially the defense‐related industries, research specialists, and scientists in the German zone deemed useful to achieving this goal.1 The Soviets similarly made arrangements to benefit from uranium deposits in Jáchymov, Czechoslovakia, from the fall of 1945.2 The effort to develop the bomb, however, was merely the most visible expression of the Soviet state at work in what would eventually become the socialist bloc. The Soviet technical and managerial elite routinely engaged in a similar search for useful forms of industrial development and technology throughout an alliance that eventually included even distant China. Moscow was at the center of a vast project of imperial scavenging that simultaneously shaped and was shaped by the transnational nature of exchange and collaboration in the socialist bloc. These exchanges within the socialist world shaped the evolution of the bloc in the 1950s, the Sino‐Soviet relationship, and even the broader Cold War

The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World

A reader of both Russian and Chinese, Lorenz M. Lüthi provides fascinating depth and detail to an unstable Sino-Soviet alliance shaped by strong and ambitious personalities, nationalist sensitivities, cultural misunderstandings, and the perhaps inevitable clash between two societies at very different stages in “socialist” history

Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy 1883-1917

The Russian Empire was composed of diverse nationalities, as was the revolutionary movement that sought to overthrow it. Georgians played a prominent role in both the evolution of the empire and the revolutionary movement. Russia offered Georgians protection from nearby Islamic states, an administrative and military alliance against the enduring mountain insurgency in the North Caucasus, and institutional and intellectual resources in their historic struggle to build a nation and overcome regional fragmentation

The Dilemmas of Enlightenment in the Eastern Borderlands: The Theater and Library in Tbilisi

The Russian field is quickly accumulating a wide variety of works on Russian imperialism. These works now rival the field of colonial studies on the Western empires, and include explorations of imperial ideology, the multiethnic service elite, educational policy, missionary activities, cultural borrowing and interaction among the diverse peoples of the empire, and native responses and challenges to Russian rule.1 The new studies often venture out to the eastern borderlands of [End Page 27] the empire, such as the Volga-Urals and Turkestan, and complement and complicate a more developed historiography on the western borderlands and its peoples, such as Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, and Jews. Studies of the western frontier often highlight the problem of Russification, which generally meant the series of late-19th-century repressive policies designed to limit the economic and cultural activities of the non-Russian peoples.

Orientalism and Empire: North Caucausus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917

This text aims to sheds light on the little-studied Russian empire in the Caucasus by exploring the tension between national and imperial identities on the Russian frontier. Austin Jersild contributes to the growing literature on Russian orientalism and the Russian encounter with Islam, and reminds us of the imperial background and its contribution to the formation of the 20th-century ethno-territorial Soviet state. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_books/1013/thumbnail.jp