Polly Jones – författare

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Russia’s Arctic policies since the 2022 war with Ukraine began. Covering geopolitical transformations, domestic evolutions and the role of climate change, it traces how, for around two decades, Russia has renewed its strategic interest in the Arctic region. It reflects on how, with more than half of the circumpolar territories, Russia’s Arctic regions generate between 10 and 15% of Russia's GDP and a quarter of its exports, with the yet-to-be-explored reserves of the Arctic continental shelf also offering immense potential.Russia’s Arctic analyses the growth of hydrocarbon deposits in the far north of Siberia and nearby offshore areas and how this has contributed to the rapid development of the Northern Sea Route. Marlene Laruelle and Jean Radvanyi examine the tremendous long-term importance of the region for Russia, regardless of internal political developments and the state of relations with the West. 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. While 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.Laruelle 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’. Additionally, it must consider the heavy legacies of the past in terms of population, infrastructure, and pollution, as well as future projections regarding the impact of climate change.

Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle popular enthusiasm for the revolution, which eventually gave rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels (The Fiery Revolutionaries/Plamennye revoliutsionery series), authored by many key post-Stalinist writers and published throughout late socialism until the Soviet collapse. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by writers, including dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists? How did their millions of readers engage with these highly varied texts? To what extent does this Brezhnev-era publishing phenomenon challenge the notion of late socialism as a time of 'stagnation', and how does it confirm it? By exploring the complex processes of writing, editing, censorship, and reading of late Soviet literature, Revolution Rekindled highlights the dynamic negotiations that continued within Soviet culture well past the apparent turning point of 1968, through to the late Gorbachev era. It also complicates the opposition between 'official' and underground post-Stalinist culture by showing how Soviet writers and readers engaged with both, as they sought answers to key questions of revolutionary history, ethics and ideology. Polly Jones reveals the enormous breadth and vitality of the 'historical turn' amongst the late Soviet population. Revolution Rekindled is the first archival, oral history, and literary study of this unique late socialist publishing experiment, from its beginnings in the early 1960s to its collapse in the early 1990s. It draws on a wide range of previously untapped archives, including those of the publisher Politizdat, of Soviet institutions in charge of propaganda, publishing, and literature, and of many individual writers. It also uses in-depth interviews with Brezhnev-era writers, editors, and publishers, and assesses the generic and stylistic innovations within the series' biographies and novels.

Drawing on newly available materials from the Soviet archives, Polly Jones offers an innovative, comprehensive account of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras. Jones traces the authorities’ initiation and management of the de-Stalinization process and explores a wide range of popular reactions to the new narratives of Stalinism in party statements and in Soviet literature and historiography. Engaging with the dynamic field of memory studies, this book represents the first sustained comparison of this process with other countries’ attempts to rethink their own difficult pasts, and with later Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to Stalinism.

The Khrushchev era is increasingly seen as a period in its own right, and not just as 'post-Stalinism' or a forerunner of subsequent 'thaws' and 'reform from within'. This book provides a comprehensive history of reform in the period, focusing especially on social and cultural developments. Since the opening of the former Soviet archives, much new information has become available casting light on how far official policies correlated with popular views. Overall the book appraises how far 'Destalinization' went; and whether developments in the period represented a real desire for reform, or rather an attempt to fortify the Soviet system, but on different lines.

The Khrushchev era is increasingly seen as a period in its own right, and not just as 'post-Stalinism' or a forerunner of subsequent 'thaws' and 'reform from within'. This book provides a comprehensive history of reform in the period, focusing especially on social and cultural developments. Since the opening of the former Soviet archives, much new information has become available casting light on how far official policies correlated with popular views. Overall the book appraises how far 'Destalinization' went; and whether developments in the period represented a real desire for reform, or rather an attempt to fortify the Soviet system, but on different lines.

Beginning with the 1881 Itinerant Art Exhibition, this book examines the history of modern Russia through the paintings of Vasily Surikov and Viktor Vasnetsov, two of the most important Russian painters of the period. By placing specific paintings and their artists alongside the historical myths and legends depicted in the art, Stephen M. Norris explores in highly readable prose how paintings helped to bring obscure, half-forgotten historical events into the public imagination in the 19th century.Russia's History Painters reveals how Russian history and national identity came to include Kievan princes, Orthodox Christian knights, Cossacks and Peter the Great, among many others. It also analyzes how critics and commentators interpreted these canvases as living entities, encouraging viewers to immerse themselves into the pasts captured on them, and in doing so, to assimilate notions of honour, bravery, and love for the motherland. Analysing 11 pivotal artworks in depth, this accessible book explores how painting has defined Russian history and nationhood up to the present day.

Beginning with the 1881 Itinerant Art Exhibition, this book examines the history of modern Russia through the paintings of Vasily Surikov and Viktor Vasnetsov, two of the most important Russian painters of the period. By placing specific paintings and their artists alongside the historical myths and legends depicted in the art, Stephen M. Norris explores in highly readable prose how paintings helped to bring obscure, half-forgotten historical events into the public imagination in the 19th century.Russia's History Painters reveals how Russian history and national identity came to include Kievan princes, Orthodox Christian knights, Cossacks and Peter the Great, among many others. It also analyzes how critics and commentators interpreted these canvases as living entities, encouraging viewers to immerse themselves into the pasts captured on them, and in doing so, to assimilate notions of honour, bravery, and love for the motherland. Analysing 11 pivotal artworks in depth, this accessible book explores how painting has defined Russian history and nationhood up to the present day.

A vivid account of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s infamous penal system, this book charts how Bolshevik visions of a humane alternative to Tsarist exile and Western penitentiaries became a chaotic and violent system of mass incarceration that bore a tragic human toll.As the first concise history in the English language, The Soviet Gulag: History and Memory provides an illuminating account of the Gulag from 1917, through to the end of the Soviet Union and the contested memory of the Gulag that persists today.Beginning with their conception, during the various penal experiments of the 1920s, their expansion, during the campaigns against perceived enemies of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, and their decline in the years proceeding Stalin’s death, Jeffrey S. Hardy explores how many facets of Gulag life endured right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He addresses both the intentions of administrators and the experience of inmates, as well as covering the main scholarly debates surrounding these issues,Crucially, the book also examines the post-Soviet era. You discover how politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and Gulag survivors have debated how or even if to commemorate the victims of the Gulag. Hardy reveals that despite numerous monuments and museum displays emerging out of these discussions, the Gulag’s legacy remains hotly contested in Russia today

Tracing the evolving nature of popular and official beliefs about the purported nature of the Jews from the 18th century onwards, Russia and the Jewish Question explores how perceptions of Jews in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union shaped the regimes’ policies toward them. In so doing Robert Weinberg provides a fruitful lens through which to investigate the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of modern Russia. Here, Weinberg reveals that the ‘Jewish Question’ – and, by extension anti-Semitism – emerged at the end of the 18th century when the partitions of Poland made hundreds of thousands of Jews subjects of the Russian crown. He skillfully argues the phrase itself implies the singular nature of Jews as a group of people whose religion, culture, and occupational make-up prevent them from fitting into predominantly Christian societies. The book then expounds how other characteristics were associated with the group over time: in particular, debates about rights of citizenship, the impact of industrialization, the emergence of the nation-state, and the proliferation of new political ideologies and movements contributed to the changing nature of the ‘Jewish Question’. Its content may have not remained static, but its purpose consistently questions whether or not Jews pose a threat to the stability and well-being of the societies in which they live and this, in a specifically Russian context, is what Weinberg examines so expertly.

This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. 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. The 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.Brigid 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. The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise gives you the historical context necessary to understand contemporary Russia’s relationships and conflicts with its ‘post-Soviet’ neighbors and the wider world beyond.

This book skilfully probes the conflicted relationship that the Russian peoples have had with their army, most often seeing service as a burden to the individual and family, yet a necessary one to defend the interests of the nation/empire. Roger R. Reese reflects on the fact that even from before its formal institutionalization by Peter I, military service and the army as an institution have not been held in high regard by the Russian peoples, except briefly in exceptional circumstances. Reese examines, illustrates, and explains the varying relationships and expectations of all involved in military service — in their own words wherever possible.From the top down, A Social History of the Russian Army shows what the state, whether tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet, expected of the army as an organisation and of its members. From the middle, it shows the expectations and behaviors of army leaders, from ensigns to generals and how they related to each other, their soldiers, and civilians. While at the bottom, the book examines the expectations, behaviors, and feelings about service of the enlisted men. Outside the army, civilian attitudes toward the military are probed to reveal what they envisaged from the military, their willingness or unwillingness to serve, and their views of the army as an institution — views that ranged from seeing it as an oppressive force in the hands of the state to a symbol of patriotism. Throughout, this volume emphasizes the agency of all members of society and the army and the degree to which they used it in their interests or in the interest of the army or the state.

This 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.The 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. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. 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.

This 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.The 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. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. 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.

This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union’s antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many of these individuals sought to experience the Soviet Union firsthand because of the Soviet claims to racial egalitarianism and Moscow’s stated support for the movements for racial justice and anticolonialism.Maxim Matusevich places special emphasis on the promises and unresolved dilemmas of Soviet internationalism and official antiracism, as well as their complicated legacy in the post-Soviet period. Black Encounters with the Soviet Union makes extensive use of individual case studies, including luminaries like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois, to identify the points of contact and the inherent tensions between ideological aspirations and the pragmatic demands of foreign policy. Furthermore, the book brings attention to the impact of Soviet antiracism on the Soviet society, where it functioned both as a vehicle of ideological conditioning and, somewhat counterintuitively, of cultural and political subversion.

This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union’s antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many of these individuals sought to experience the Soviet Union firsthand because of the Soviet claims to racial egalitarianism and Moscow’s stated support for the movements for racial justice and anticolonialism.Maxim Matusevich places special emphasis on the promises and unresolved dilemmas of Soviet internationalism and official antiracism, as well as their complicated legacy in the post-Soviet period. Black Encounters with the Soviet Union makes extensive use of individual case studies, including luminaries like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois, to identify the points of contact and the inherent tensions between ideological aspirations and the pragmatic demands of foreign policy. Furthermore, the book brings attention to the impact of Soviet antiracism on the Soviet society, where it functioned both as a vehicle of ideological conditioning and, somewhat counterintuitively, of cultural and political subversion.

This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand’s conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world.Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand’s writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations – in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries’ moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

How Russia Got Big accounts for Russia's changing physical scope over some seven centuries.Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big. This concise book tells the story of how it became so. Beginning 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. Integrating geography, diplomacy, war, and imperial politics, the book ranges across three continents and recounts diverse interactions with neighboring polities and peoples. Werth likewise contemplates different ways of conceptualizing territorial possession and related understandings of sovereignty, authority, and belonging. The 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.

This 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 and 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.Eliot 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. Though the book's title invokes Putin, Russian Culture under Putin 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.

Using 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. 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.Through an analysis of Umberto’s copious life-writings, Soviet Internment 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.

This 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. 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. In 19th-century Russia, green spaces gave women voice and agency, frequently taken away from them by the patriarchal power structures. Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia challenges the preceding narratives of these structures as being solely masculine. It also argues for the need to consider consorts in the analysis of political life at the Russian court. Their soft power strategies were deployed through their gardens, the main tool of political propaganda in the long 18th century.Ekaterina Heath discusses Pavlovsk’s use for building relationships, promoting virtues, mounting political arguments, and writing Russian history. She explores the strategies used by Empress Maria Fedorovna to influence Catherine II and Paul I to maintain her access to power in a precarious political environment. Heath then goes on to analyse Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna’s use of her garden to grow her power after the death of her husband, Paul I, and her son Alexander I’s ascension to the throne.

This book argues that ikona, the Russian word for ‘icon’, is a modernist concept invented by Russian avant-garde artists and art critics at the turn of the 20th century. Clemena Antonova argues that the very notion of ikona is modernist in the sense that it grew naturally out of the evolution of Russian avant-garde art and art criticism. Quite literally then, the Russian icon was not ‘discovered’ at the beginning of the 20th century, as we are often told; it was invented. Further, this invention was not the work of backward-looking, religious mystics and Orthodox conservatives – an all too frequent implication – but, as Antonova convincingly contends, the creation of some of the most trailblazing figures among the avant-garde and circles associated with the avant-garde.IKONA - The Modernist Invention of the Icon in the Russian Art World, 1900s-1920s casts a fresh look at the much misunderstood idea of the Russian icon. Rather than accepting the conventional view that the icon is a remnant of medieval art which continues to cast its spell over modern image-making, it approaches ikona as a concept that was developed at the crossroad of ideas that were central to the emergence of Russian modernism.