The Russian moment in world history

The Russian Moment in World History

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages

  Poe, Marshall T ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84883986524     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (22)

1. Though there are many general interpretations of Russian history, most are not worth reading. Three exceptions are Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974); Richard Hellie, "The Structure of Modern Russian History: Towards a Dynamic Model," Russian History/Histoire Russe 4 (1977), 1-22;
2. Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russian Review 45 (1986), 115-81. These works are provocative yet very well informed. Indeed, much of what is found in this book was inspired by them.
3. A good book on the early history of Eurasia is David Christian's A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia, vol. 1: Inner Eurasia from Pre-History to the Mongol Empire (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
4. The most interesting work on the origins and migrations of the Slavs (and everyone else, for that matter) is currently being done by population biologists. Luigi Cavalii Sforza's Genes, Peoples and Languages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) provides an intelligible description of the science involved, as well as an overview of its findings to date. For more detailed accounts focusing on the Slavs and their neighbors
5. Vladimir Orekhov et al., "Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Diversity in Russians," Federation of European Biochemical Societies Letters 445 (1999), 197- 201;
6. Spencer R. Wells et al., "The Eurasian Heartland: A Continental Perspective on Y-Chromosome Diversity," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001), 10244-49. For a recent analysis of the linguistic and archeological evidence, see P. M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
7. The most readable single-volume introduction to the formation and early history of the Rus' empire is surely Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard's The Emergence of Rus', 750-1200 (London and New York: Longman, 1996). All the relevant literatureis cited there. The history of the Mongol-Rus' interaction is nicely summarized and analyzed in Charles Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Russian History (Bloomington: Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985).
8. A revisionist approach, stressing the importance of the Mongols on early Rus' and Muscovite history, is found in Donald G. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304-1589 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
9. The rise and early history of Muscovy is ably treated in Robert Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304-1613 (London and New York: Longman, 1987).
10. The best book on the Muscovite reaction to the challenge of Europe in any language is doubtless Richard Hellie's seminal Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
11. The dramatic changes of the Petrine epoch are nicely presented in Lindsey Hughes's encyclopedic Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
12. For a more biographical view of Peter, see Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. Catherine the Great's tumultuous era and her abortive attempt at reform are vividly portrayed in Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
14. The following period, which featured further attempts at altering Russia's path, is described in David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801-1881 (London and New York: Longman, 1992)
15. Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London and New York: Longman, 1983).
16. For those interested in the course of Russian imperial expansion from Muscovite times to the fall of the Romanov regime, one can do no better than John LeDonne's The Russian Empire and the World, 1700-1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (New York: Oxford University Press).
17. More has been written on the Bolshevik seizure of power than on any other subject in Russian history. This topic is also among the most divisive among the experts. For a conservative perspective, stressing the ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks, see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899- 1919 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
18. For a liberal view, stressing popular support for the Bolsheviks, see Diane P. Koenker and William Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). A neutral survey is John Thompson, Revolutionary Russia, 1917 (New York: Macmillan, 1989).
19. The literature on the Stalinist period is large and growing by the day. A traditional though still serviceable view emphasizing the brutality of the Stalinist dictatorship is Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. and exp., edited and translated by George Shriver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
20. A more focused treatment that gives due attention to the modernity (as well as brutality) of the Stalinist project is Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
21. Many books have already been written purporting to explain why the Soviet Union collapsed. For a summary and examination of opinions, see David Rowley, "Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2: 2 (2001), 395-426.
22. The most incisive interpretation of the entire Soviet experience is Martin Malia's The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994). On the world-historical significance of the collapse of Soviet Communism, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).