Former Soviet Republics category: 758 books

Unlike the benevolent orphan found in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid or the sentimentalized figure of Little Orphan Annie, the orphan in postwar Eastern European cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown...

Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte lost her childhood to ethnic cleansing. In 1988, she was a ten year old girl living in the seaside city of Baku, in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Like any other young girl, she had childhood aspirations, crushes and dreams. That entire life was swept away as the majority...

Yugoslav-American Economic Relations Since World War II provides a comprehensive study of the economic relations between the United States and Yugoslavia over the past four decades. The authors recount how Yugoslavia and the United States, despite great differences in size, wealth, and ideology, overcame...

This unique guide produced by the Department of Defense provides comprehensive information about all aspects of life in Georgia, with a special emphasis on geography, history, the economy, society, security and military matters, religion, traditions, urban and rural life, ethnic groups, crime, the...

Most of us are baffled.(a)There is practically no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan then why United States is not leaving the opium rich and strategically vital mountainous country in a hurry.(b)Al-Qaeda never attacks Israel though as champion of Islam you would think the Jewish nation ought to be its first...

Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located...

Although fluent in Russian, I have traveled to my homeland only once in my life, in the depressive years of the Soviet Union’s Communist existence. That trip, in 1977, was occasioned by my position as an executive of a supercomputer company whose products were highly desired by the Soviets. As a...

In Putin’s Footsteps is Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler’s unique combination of travelogue, current affairs, and history, showing how Russia’s dimensions have shaped its identity and culture through the decades. With exclusive insider status as Nikita Khrushchev’s great grand-daughter,...

Here is a fresh perspective on the last tumultuous years of the Soviet Union and an exquisitely poetic travelogue.With a keen grasp of Russia's history, a deep appreciation for its architecture and iconography, and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for its people and its culture, Colin Thubron is the perfect...

In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a na•ve Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet...

Glenn Cheney arrived in Kiev during those first days when the Soviet Union ceased to exist and Ukraine was reborn. Almost immediately he found himself talking with scientist, journalist, refugees, engineers, top-level government officials, doctors, environmentalists, parents of sick children and people...

A witty and insightful tour of contemporary Russia, using its Golden Age writers, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, as guides: part history, part sociopolitical commentary, Mud and Stars reveals the heart of a country that never fails to surprise us. "We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the...

A travel narrative written over the course of ten years, One Russia, Two Chinas is about change and resistance to change in the postmodern world. In 1991, when the Soviet Union was about to morph into the Russian Federation, George Fetherling found himself in Moscow. He both marched with the workers...

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted from the end of World War II until the end of the 1980s. Over the course of five decades, they never came to blows directly. Rather, these two world superpowers competed in other arenas that would touch almost every corner of the globe.  Inside...