The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
fter the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former Soviet Union. With the Muppets envisioned as ideal ambassadors of Western values, no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be.
War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939-1945, Volume 3
Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world's three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is ......
The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
Muppets in Moscow is the incredible true story of the author's odyssey to create Sesame Street in Russia. It reveals how--in between bombings and political chaos in 1990s Moscow--a team of Russian and American artists, producers, educators, writers, and puppeteers overcame their many differences to create an unprecedented hit in a post-communist ......
This study examines Ukrainian historical writing in the United States and Canada during the Cold War. The author describes the development of Ukrainian historical studies as an open yet sometimes difficult dialogue between Ukrainian ethnic and academic communities and between Ukrainian scholars and the Western academic mainstream.
This book explores English trade to Russia in the first half of the seventeenth century. Meticulously reconstructing commercial activities, personnel, and day-to-day business strategies of the Muscovy Company, it reveals the workings of a growing branch of early modern overseas trade linking Russia to intersecting markets across the globe.
This book examines recent innovations in Polish film. The authors analyzes the ways in which Polish directors challenge revered images of national and gender identity, the country's historical martyrdom, the benevolent family, and the status of the influential Catholic Church.
Describes how Russian leaders have used consistent doctrinal and strategic approaches to the rest of the world. These approaches may seem alien in the West, but understanding them is essential for successful engagement with Moscow. Keir Giles argues that understanding how Moscow's leaders think will help the West develop a less crisis-prone and ......
The Hermitage Musuem in St Petersburg is possibly the greatest museum in the world. It began as a showcase for the art treasures of the Tsars and reflects their legendary extravagance. Imperial romances, marriages and murders all had an impact on the collection, as did the byzantine bartering of international politics. Nationalised by the ......
Today Crimea. Tomorrow? Many Putin watchers believe that being able to anticipate the enigmatic Russian president's next move - whether it's hosting another grandiose spectacle, crushing a political rival, or annexing part of a neighboring country - depends on uncovering the "real" Vladimir Putin and his true motives.
This title is filled with fine-scale drawings of Russian armoured fighting vehicles including: T-34 Model 1940; BA-64B Model 1943 Light Armoured Car; BT-7 (Model 1937 Fast Tank); SU-76i (on Pz III chassis); KV-8 flamethrower; ZIS-42 Halftrack; and dozens more.
Because the Soviet Union loudly proclaimed to be an ideological state, its scholars have rarely scrutinized their ideology as a concept. Instead, they have treated it as a self-evident fact, and proceeded to deliberate the importance of the Marxist-Leninist creed in social life or political decision-making. In the context of the Cold War, such ......
The Idea of the Great Man in the Works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary focuses on the response of Russia's greatest writers-poets, novelists, critics, and historians-to the idea of "Great Man" as an agent of transformational change as it manifests itself in the person and career of Napoleon.
This book examines the reception of Darwin's books and ideas in Russia as a cultural phenomenon, involving language, literature, science, philosophy, and humor. Diverse writers reveal the impact of the Darwinian moment on Russian minds and the public exchange of ideas, reflecting the optimism and anxiety of the late imperial era.
This collection of interviews, diaries, and scholarly analyses is the first comprehensive look at Russian sentiments in the wake of the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It features the reflections of Russian soldiers, dissidents, and journalists.
What are the origins of this increasingly aggressive stance? What are the geopolitical ramifications? And what will be the likely outcomes? This book examines the interplay between contemporary Russian foreign policy and a global environment that has rarely been more fluid and uncertain.
Isaiah Berlin's response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. The Soviet Mind will assume its rightful place among Berlin's works and will prove invaluable for policymakers, students, and those interested in Russian politics, past, present and future.
Why, asks Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in this controversial book, has Russia been a country of suffering? Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries, ancient religious tracts emphasizing humility as the mother of virtues, the ......
Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine gives a broad view on Soviet Jewish literary life, and on the repression suffered by Yiddish writers under Stalinist rule. It moves from the paradigm of writing almost exclusively about the most prominent authors, whose execution in Moscow on August 12, 1952 is tragically known as ......
The Age of Assassins describes in gripping detail Vladimir Putin's ruthless rise to power in Russia from his earliest rise to power in 1991 as an insignificant former KGB officer in Berlin. He gained power over the entire country and its economy by determining elections through business deals and criminal intervention -- from sophisticated ......
My Twisted Tale of Gangsters, Oligarchs, and Pop Stars in Russia
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia opened its borders, and Russian audiences were hungry for Western popular music and the values it espoused. David Junk was one of the first idealistic, young Americans to seize this opportunity. Rockin' the Kremlin is the thrilling true story of how David became the first CEO of Universal Music ......
This text is a comprehensive collection of more than 100 carefully edited documents (speeches, treaties, statements, and articles), making the great events of the era come alive through the words and phrases of those who were actively involved. Coverage traces the Cold War from its roots in East-West tensions before and during World War II through ......
This text is a comprehensive collection of more than 100 carefully edited documents (speeches, treaties, statements, and articles), making the great events of the era come alive through the words and phrases of those who were actively involved. Coverage traces the Cold War from its roots in East-West tensions before and during World War II through ......
In 2022, Russia heightened its initial 2014 assault and launched its imperialist full-scale war against Ukraine. The Kremlin continued to perpetrate its denial of Ukrainians as a nation distinct from the Russians. Russia's Denial of Ukraine: Letters and Contested Memory explores the gradual and long-lasting integration of contested memory in the ......
The figure of Stalin continues to intrigue, fascinate, and repel historians into the 21st century, while in the Russian Federation, he has returned to the status of a figure to be respected, principally as the leader who led his country through industrialization and militarization, enabling it to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War, ......
Russian Foreign Policy Debates and the Conflicts in Georgia (1991-2008): Between Multilateralism and Unilateralism discusses the conflicts and crises in the former Soviet space from a historical perspective and reconstructs the often-contradictory approaches of public actors in Russia on how to deal with them. Notably, it enquires whether the ......
The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors ......
Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Gambler is one of the most profound literary works to treat the phenomenon of gambling with a remarkable depth of psychological analysis and a wide-ranging cultural and philosophical exploration of obsessive behavior, from addictive gambling to erotic passion. This novel delves into the cultural, psychological, and ......
Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine's Hutsuls
The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine's Hutsuls addresses rituals and texts in a small mountainous area located in today's Ukraine. The residents of this remote region are known as the Hutsuls. This book argues that Hutsul rituals and texts, cast as ancient and extraordinary, had more mundane roots. They formed out of ......
This book examines Joseph Stalin's increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalin--the one projected by the generation ......
The history of Russian Germans (Russlanddeutsche) is one of intensive mobility across space and time. Today, the descendants of eighteenth-century German-speaking settlers in the Russian Empire live on four continents: Europe, Asia, and North and South America. In this volume, authors from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, and ......
This book is more than timely: no other book offers a comprehensive overview of Russia's fears and challenges to help the American public to understand how Russian domestic policy and foreign policy interact. This in-out aspect is critical to understand the country's international stance and therefore directly US policy and security.
This book is the first social constructionist study of spelling norms and spelling mistakes. Starting from the question of why, in the modern world, misspelling is considered evidence of incompetence, laziness, stupidity, or carelessness, the author traces the origins of such attitudes in German and Russian societies of the nineteenth and early ......
A History of Tatarstan: The Russian Yoke and the Vanishing Tatars surveys the history of the Tatar people living along the Volga river and argues that the Volga Tatars were Russias first colonized people.
The first in-depth study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing, this book combines textual analysis and literary theory with intellectual biography to elucidate the dancer's riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. This interdisciplinary study explores the modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I.
