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The Border

Author: Erika Fatland

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1643136577

The acclaimed author of Sovietistan travels along the seemingly endless Russian border and reveals the deep and pervasive influence it has had across half the globe. Imperial, communist or autocratic, Russia has been—and remains—a towering and intimidating neighbor. Whether it is North Korea in the Far East through the former Soviet republics in Asia and the Caucasus, or countries on the Caspian Ocean and the Black Sea. What would it be like to traverse the entirety of the Russian periphery to examine its effects on those closest to her? An astute and brilliant combination of lyric travel writing and modern history, The Border is a book about Russia without its author ever entering Russia itself. Fatland gets to the heart of what it has meant to be the neighbor of that mighty, expanding empire throughout history. As we follow Fatland on her journey, we experience the colorful, exciting, tragic and often unbelievable histories of these bordering nations along with their cultures, their people, their landscapes. Sharply observed and wholly absorbing, The Border is a surprising new way to understand a broad part our world.

The Border - a Journey Around Russia

Author: ERIKA. FATLAND

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 9780857057785

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Russia's Border Wars and Frozen Conflicts

Author: James J. Coyle

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 3319522043

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This book examines the origins and execution of Russian military and political activities in Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. Using a realist perspective, the author concludes that there are substantial similarities in the four case studies: Russian support for minority separatist movements, conflict, Russian intervention as peacekeepers, Russian control over the diplomatic process to prevent resolution of the conflict, and a perpetuation of Russian presence in the area. The author places the conflicts in the context of international law and nationalism theory.

On the Edge

Author: Franck Bill

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0674979486

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A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the RussiaÐChina border, one of the worldÕs least understood and most politically charged frontiers. The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. ItÕs a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the worldÕs political giants. Franck Bill and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the worldÕs most consequential and enigmatic borderlands. It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Bill and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to ÒreviveÓ their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to ÒEurope,Ó building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. BasilÕs Cathedral to woo tourists. Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

Writing at Russia's Border

Author: Katya Hokanson

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 080209306X

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It is often assumed that cultural identity is determined in a country's metropolitan centres. Given Russia's long tenure as a geographically and socially diverse empire, however, there is a certain distillation of peripheral experiences and ideas that contributes just as much to theories of national culture as do urban-centred perspectives. Writing at Russia's Border argues that Russian literature needs to be reexamined in light of the fact that many of its most important nineteenth-century texts are peripheral, not in significance but in provenance. Katya Hokanson makes the case that the fluid and ever-changing cultural and linguistic boundaries of Russia's border regions profoundly influenced the nation's literature, posing challenges to stereotypical or territorially based conceptions of Russia's imperial, military, and cultural identity. A highly canonical text such as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1831), which is set in European Russia, is no less dependent on the perspectives of those living at the edges of the Russian Empire than is Tolstoy's The Cossacks (1863), which is explicitly set on Russia's border and has become central to the Russian canon. Hokanson cites the influence of these and other 'periphera' texts as proof that Russia's national identity was dependent upon the experiences of people living in the border areas of an expanding empire. Produced at a cultural moment of contrast and exchange, the literature of the periphery represented a negotiation of different views of Russian identity, an ingredient that was ultimately essential even to literature produced in the major cities. Writing at Russia's Border upends popular ideas of national cultural production and is a fascinating study of the social implications of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Russia and Norway. Physical and Symbolic Borders

Author: Сборник статей

Publisher: Litres

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 545787902X

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The book is a collection of papers presented at the conference «Russia and Norway: Physical and Symbolic Borders» held in St Petersburg in April 2005 in connection with the opening of the exhibition «Norway – Russia. Neighbours through the ages». In the book different aspects of the history of the Norwegian-Russian border are covered by historians from Moscow, St Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Bergen and Tromso. The papers are diverse and refer to different chronological periods. One group of articles deals with problems connected with the medieval border treaties between Norway and Novgorodian Russia, others with the diplomatic history of the border convention of 1826, as well as its effect on ethnic minorities living in the border area. One author addresses the present-day delimitation controversy between Norway and Russia in the Barents Sea. Other articles deal with symbolic borders, for example, barriers in translating Russian literature into Norwegian, and borders between the two cultures, experienced by the Russian emigrants in Norway after the Russian Revolution. And finally, there are articles without explicit references to the concept of borders, where the authors investigate in more general terms different aspects of Norwegian-Russian relations.

Crossing Borders

Author: Michael David-Fox

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0822980924

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Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis. Discussions of Soviet modernity have tended to see the Soviet state either as an archaic holdover from the Russian past, or as merely another form of conventional modernity. David-Fox instead considers the Soviet Union in its own light—as a seismic shift from tsarist society that attracted influential visitors from the pacifist Left to the fascist Right. By reassembling Russian legacies, as he shows, the Soviet system evolved into a complex "intelligentsia-statist" form that introduced an array of novel agendas and practices, many embodied in the unique structures of the party-state. Crossing Borders demonstrates the need for a new interpretation of the Russian-Soviet historical trajectory—one that strikes a balance between the particular and the universal.

Russian Borderlands in Change

Author: Tiina Sotkasiira

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-20

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1317060458

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Tiina Sotkasiira a researcher at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Eastern Finland.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier

Author: Sören Urbansky

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0691195447

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A comprehensive history of the Sino-Russian border, one of the longest and most important land borders in the world The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. Through the perspectives of locals, including railroad employees, herdsmen, and smugglers from both sides, Sören Urbansky explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. Urbansky challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making. Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires. This overlapping and mingling came to an end only when the border gained geopolitical significance during the twentieth century. Relying on a wealth of sources culled from little-known archives from across Eurasia, Urbansky demonstrates how states succeeded in suppressing traditional borderland cultures by cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections across the state perimeter, through laws, physical force, deportation, reeducation, forced assimilation, and propaganda. Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds critical new light on a pivotal geographical periphery and expands our understanding of how borders are determined.