Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian) Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile. A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners—but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.

In glittering St. Petersburg, readers meet Countess Alexandra Korvin: beautiful and intelligent, but also unmarried and penniless. Craving freedom she cuts off her hair and joins the army as a man--only to find the ultimate test of her feminine heart.

This is a communicative Russian course for adults and young people, from beginners to intermediate level.

In this book Ruslan Dzarasov reveals the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in both the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. He provides an unprecedented analysis of Russian firms' corporate governance and labor practices, and makes sense of their peculiar investment strategies. By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behavior of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system. This groundbreaking study proves that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but is in fact the continuation of that tradition. At the same time, the brutal and deficient character of the current system also reflects the realities of the modern globalized and financialized world capitalist system.

This book is about the use of economic and state capture levers for achieving political clout. It details how Moscow has been able to exploit governance deficits and influence decision-making in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe through a range of economic means. The comparative country by country perspective on Russia’s corporate presence, trade, and investment in particular sectors of the region, especially energy, shows the patterns of the Kremlin’s use of economic presence and state capture tactics to amplify political and social leverage. By collating economic data with an analysis of governance loopholes and the political process, the authors reveal the Kremlin’s methods for swaying national policies, especially through the exploitation of governance failures in these countries. The book thereby highlights how Russia’s economic power is related to its wider strategic goals. It concludes that Russia’s economic grip, both direct and indirect, is tighter than official statistics imply.