How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political expectations. In Murder Most Russian, Louise McReynolds uses a fascinating series of murders and subsequent trials that took place in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II to understand the impact of these reforms on Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. For the first time in Russian history, the accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in courtrooms that were open to the press. Drawing on a wide array of sources, McReynolds reconstructs murders that gripped Russian society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of perpetrating insurance fraud, to the beating death of Marianna Time at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her diamond earrings. As McReynolds shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively, transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, she analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses about what made a defendant's behavior "criminal." She also deftly connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this period. Murder Most Russian will appeal not only to readers interested in Russian culture and true crime but also to historians who study criminology, urbanization, the role of the social sciences in forging the modern state, evolving notions of the self and the psyche, the instability of gender norms, and sensationalism in the modern media.

How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political expectations. In Murder Most Russian, Louise McReynolds draws on a fascinating series of murders and subsequent trials that took place in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II. For the first time in Russian history, the accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in courtrooms that were open to the press. Drawing on a wide array of sources, McReynolds reconstructs murders that gripped Russian society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of perpetrating insurance fraud, to the beating death of Marianna Time at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her diamond earrings. As McReynolds shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively, transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, she analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses about what made a defendant’s behavior "criminal." She also deftly connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this period. Murder Most Russian will appeal not only to readers interested in Russian culture and true crime but also to historians who study criminology, urbanization, the role of the social sciences in forging the modern state, evolving notions of the self and the psyche, the instability of gender norms, and sensationalism in the modern media.

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is one of the most gripping novels in the Russian canon. Often described as a murder mystery in search of a motive, it follows a former student in St. Petersburg, Rodion Raskolnikov, as he commits a grisly murder - a murder he justifies by both a peculiar sort of "arithmetic" and by a theory about the right of "extraordinary" people to wade through blood on their path to power. Yet his crime itself suggests that he is far from extraordinary - at least, not in the sense he had hoped. As he seeks out the real motivation behind his crime, he is confronted with life's deepest questions: what it means to have a self that one cannot be rid of, and to have an existence one did not ask for and cannot rationally understand. Is life an unfathomable gift, to be affirmed in defiance of any objective measure? Or is it an empty, meaningless joke? And, perhaps most importantly: when life seems over, can we dare to believe that a new life is possible? While locked in psychological warfare with the lead investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, and tempted by the depraved Svidrigailov to embrace his darkest inclinations, Raskolnikov must choose whether to end his life, or to confess, and try to begin again. Along the way, he strikes up an unlikely acquaintance with Sonya, a prostitute, who reveals a kind of existence previously unknown to him. This volume contains a condensed but otherwise unedited and unsimplified version of the novel that follows the novel's main plotline - from the opening lines to the epilogue - allowing students of Russian to delve into Dostoevsky's text in considerable depth. Facing the original Russian text is a new English translation, made specifically for this purpose. Also included are original photographs of many of the locations in the novel, allowing you to follow Raskolnikov's footsteps through St. Petersburg. Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs); the text and notes are also marked for stress. The book also features comprehensive grammar tables for reference, with everything from conjugation patterns, to case endings, to verbs of motion and participles.About the Author... Mark Pettus holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Altogether, he's spent around six years living, studying, and working in Russia. Today he is a lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. Mark is the author of the Russian Through Propaganda textbook series (Books 1 and 2), and its continuation, Russian Through Poems and Paintings (Books 3 and 4). He is now working on additional books for students of Russian, including the Reading Russian series of which the present volume is a part. Check out www.russianthroughpropaganda.com for a variety of resources for students of Russian language, literature, and culture.

Ranging from medieval Kievan Rus' to Vladimir Putin, Dark History of Russia explores the murder, brutality, genocide, insanity and skulduggery in the efforts to seize, and then maintain, power in the Slav heartland. Highly illustrated, Dark History of Russia is a fascinating story from the Mongol invasions to the present day.

This “riveting history . . . brings us face to face with this notorious trial” of a Russian Jew who was framed for ritual murder in 1913 (Jewish Book World). On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis’s trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg’s account of the Beilis Affair explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia. It is a gripping narrative culled from trial transcripts, newspaper articles, Beilis’s memoirs, and archival sources, many appearing in English for the first time.

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, his critics have turned up dead on a regular basis. According to Amy Knight, this is no coincidence. In Orders to Kill, the KGB scholar ties dozens of victims together to expose a campaign of political murder during Putin’s reign that even includes terrorist attacks such as the Boston Marathon bombing. Russia is no stranger to political murder, from the tsars to the Soviets to the Putin regime, during which many journalists, activists and political opponents have been killed. Kremlin defenders like to say, “There is no proof,” however convenient these deaths have been for Putin, and, unsurprisingly, because he controls all investigations, Putin is never seen holding a smoking gun. Orders to Kill is a story long hidden in plain sight with huge ramifications.