{"title":"Series: Russian Shorts","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRussian Shorts\u003c\/em\u003e invites readers to explore a rich tapestry of Russian thought and creativity through concise, engaging works spanning diverse genres. From profound insights in arts and culture to thought-provoking political commentary, this series offers a unique window into the multifaceted spirit of Russia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBalancing scholarly reflection with accessible storytelling, these volumes suit curious readers drawn to travel, history, science, and beyond. Whether delving into the nuances of literature or the pulse of current affairs, \u003cem\u003eRussian Shorts\u003c\/em\u003e illuminates the essence of Russian experience in compact, captivating form.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"nuclear-russia-by-professor-paul-josephson-9781350272552","title":"Nuclear Russia","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the first cultural and political history of the Russian nuclear age, Paul Josephson describes the rise of nuclear physics in the USSR, the enthusiastic pursuit of military and peaceful nuclear programmes through the Chernobyl disaster and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ongoing, self-proclaimed ‘renaissance’ of nuclear power in Russia in the 21st century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAt the height of their power, the Soviets commanded 39,000 nuclear warheads, yet claimed to be servants of the ‘peaceful atom’ – which they also pursued avidly. This book examines both military and peaceful Soviet and post-Soviet nuclear programmes for the long durée – before the war, during the Cold War, and in Russia to the present – whilst also grappling with the political and ideological importance of nuclear technologies, the associated economic goals, the social and environmental costs, and the cultural embrace of nuclear power.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eNuclear Russia\u003c\/i\u003e probes the juncture of history of science and technology, political and cultural history, and environmental history. 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It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe book then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines, leading to a variety of new nation-states – including the Russian Federation – being born.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBrigid O’Keeffe explains how and why the Bolsheviks inscribed ethnic difference into the bedrock of the Soviet Union and explores how minority peoples experienced the potential advantages and disadvantages of ethnic politics within the Soviet Union. Ukrainians and Georgians, Jews and Roma, Chechens and Poles, Kazakhs and Uzbeks – these and many other minority groups all distinctively shaped and were shaped by the Soviet and post-Soviet politics of ethnic difference.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise\u003c\/em\u003e gives you the historical context necessary to understand contemporary Russia’s relationships and conflicts with its ‘post-Soviet’ neighbours and the wider world beyond.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46850339504364,"sku":"9781350136779","price":32.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/19280073482668.jpg?v=1759082744"},{"product_id":"how-russia-got-big-by-professor-paul-w-werth-9781350284005","title":"How Russia Got Big","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHow Russia Got Big\u003c\/em\u003e accounts for Russia's changing physical scope over some seven centuries.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEven people who know little about Russia know that it is big. This concise book tells the story of how it became so.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBeginning with the small principality of Moscow in the early 14th century, Paul W. Werth recounts the construction of the world's largest country—from Muscovy and the Russian Empire through the USSR to today’s Russian Federation—as well as its territorial retrenchment and even collapse on several occasions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIntegrating geography, diplomacy, war, and imperial politics, the book ranges across three continents and recounts diverse interactions with neighbouring polities and peoples. Werth likewise contemplates different ways of conceptualising territorial possession and related understandings of sovereignty, authority, and belonging.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe result, illustrated with 29 original maps, is a grand story from a bird's-eye view that reveals deeper rhythms to Russia’s territorial history involving alternations of enlargement and crisis—ones that continue in our own day.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47072566018284,"sku":"9781350284005","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/c42ae9bc9d4ceb76680987136bec02f3.jpg?v=1765138367"},{"product_id":"russian-culture-under-putin-by-professor-eliot-borenstein-9781350399396","title":"Russian Culture under Putin","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom. Yet, by the time he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's independent media was crushed, while the few viable opposition figures were either imprisoned, exiled, or dead under mysterious circumstances.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEliot Borenstein looks at the manufactured cult of Putin, the competing models of Russianness put forth in the media, the obsession with nostalgia and the limits on imagining the future, the rise of aggressive patriotism and the myth of ancient Russian 'traditional' values, the significance of the fight against ‘gay propaganda’, and the absurdist strategies used by the opposition in the face of increasing restrictions on free speech.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThough the book's title invokes Putin, \u003ci\u003eRussian Culture under Putin\u003c\/i\u003e does not cast the Russian leader as an all-knowing genius pursuing a master plan. The culture of the past twenty years, both official and independent, has been largely improvisational. 21st-century Russia, as Borenstein demonstrates so masterfully, has not been frog-marched into unfreedom, but has in fact lurched back and forth on a dimly-lit path.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47383978508524,"sku":"9781350399396","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/21906243482668.jpg?v=1773392733"},{"product_id":"soviet-internment-by-dr-maria-cristina-galmarini-9781350507746","title":"Soviet Internment","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eUsing a microhistory based on a unique set of life-writing sources, this book provides an unparalleled insight into the Soviet POW experience during the Second World War.\u003c\/strong\u003e It reconstructs key moments in the life of former Italian POW Umberto Montini, who was captured by the Soviet Army in 1942, interned in a prisoners’ hospital in Mordovia, and then repatriated to Italy in 1945.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThrough an analysis of Umberto’s copious life-writings, \u003cem\u003eSoviet Internment\u003c\/em\u003e examines the testimony of a surviving WWII prisoner, whose memories were haunted by the fury of war and whose body carried deep physical and emotional traces but who nonetheless felt a nostalgic attachment to his place of internment. The book brings theoretical questions about memory, trauma, and European people’s political trajectories into sustained contact with an individual’s specific experience, organically prompting a reconsideration of key 20th-century events in the process.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47455734923500,"sku":"9781350507746","price":38.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/81m25mJfe_L._SL1500.jpg?v=1774794945"},{"product_id":"why-we-still-need-russian-literature-by-angela-brintlinger-9781350242142","title":"Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor nearly two centuries, readers all over the world have turned to the great canon of Russian literature. Love and death, war and peace, yes, even crime and punishment; readers across the globe have found in Russian writing a substantial measure of intellectual provocation, aesthetic pleasure, emotional resonance, and personal solace. \u003cem\u003eWhy We (Still) Need Russian Literature\u003c\/em\u003e explores the familiar names of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov to connect readers with these experiences.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith a lively, jargon-free style and insightful analyses of thought-provoking texts, this concise volume helps you to understand more fully the pleasure to be found in reading, and re-reading. By identifying what readers seek and find in Russian books—from aesthetically pleasing descriptions to apt psychological renderings—Angela Brintlinger aims to enhance the gratification of reading, giving armchair travellers an excuse to embark on a series of fascinating journeys.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDrawing on Brintlinger’s experiences as a scholar, teacher, and reader of literature, the book is informed by a deep cultural understanding of Russia and Russians. It reveals this through engaging literary meditations that connect Russian literature to the losses, ironies, and ambiguities that define the human condition. Exploring authors’ imagined readers as well as authors themselves, Brintlinger argues that it is these readers, from all over the world, who get to decide what literary works are worth reading.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAs a bonus, she offers an appendix with more names and titles, familiar and perhaps utterly new—books that show the ways in which Russian literature remains vital today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47455880347884,"sku":"9781350242142","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781350242142.jpg?v=1774863074"},{"product_id":"gulag-fiction-by-professor-polly-jones-9781350250383","title":"Gulag Fiction","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThis unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. 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Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47596507332844,"sku":"9781350250383","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/3444959db40efc2a917ae31318934143.jpg?v=1777941655"},{"product_id":"women-gardens-and-agency-in-imperial-russia-by-dr-ekaterina-heath-9781350544505","title":"Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThis book draws on the rich historical record of the Russian royal court to demonstrate how green spaces have been used as an instrument of diplomatic and political influence.\u003c\/strong\u003e Ekaterina Heath convincingly argues that parks like Pavlovsk are a fruitful new primary source, here revealing the previously obscured evidence of women’s political activities.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 19th-century Russia, green spaces gave women voice and agency, frequently taken away from them by the patriarchal power structures. \u003cem\u003eWomen, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia\u003c\/em\u003e challenges the preceding narratives of these structures as being solely masculine. 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Long a place for science diplomacy and transborder dialogue, the region has once again become a hotspot for geostrategic tensions and a new interface between an expanded NATO and Russia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhile the West is imposing increasingly broad sanctions specifically targeting Arctic hydrocarbon development projects, the Russian government is striving to circumvent or mitigate their effects with countermeasures by relying on their allies, most of whom are Asian.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLaruelle and Radvanyi convincingly contend that Russian Arctic development policy must take into account the economic needs of the Russian budget and the geopolitical realities of decoupling from the West and pivoting towards the so-called ‘Global South’. 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