What was known about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his career was strictly limited by the secretive Soviet government. Little more information was available after he was ousted and became a "non-person" in the USSR in 1964. This pathbreaking book draws for the first time on a wealth of newly released materials -- documents from secret former Soviet archives, memoirs of long-silent witnesses, the full memoirs of the premier himself -- to assemble the best-informed analysis of the Khrushchev years ever completed. The contributors to this volume include Russian, Ukrainian, American, and British scholars; a former key foreign policy aide to Khrushchev; the executive secretary of a Russian commission investigating Soviet-era repressions and rehabilitations; and Khrushchev's own son Sergei.

The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev's struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev's years in Ukraine where he grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in mass repressions of the 1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is Russia itself reformable?

It is the 1960s, and Ireland is hoping to join what will later become the European Union. The government has devised a plan to stem emigration and save the Irish language by supporting small factories in the Gaeltacht, traditional Irish-speaking villages in remote western areas. But is the plan working? With her signature humor and charm, Eileen Kane transports the reader to County Donegal with a detailed account of rural Irish life during this period of rapid change. This is a story about people living beyond the margins of maps, boundaries, language groups, and government departments - people bound by borders that have little or no correspondence to their own cultural, economic, and historical margins. Ultimately, it is a story about life on the edges, and the places and people who fall outside them.

It is the 1960s, and Ireland is hoping to join what will later become the European Union. The government has devised a plan to stem emigration and save the Irish language by supporting small factories in the Gaeltacht, traditional Irish-speaking villages in remote western areas. But is the plan working? With her signature humor and charm, Eileen Kane transports the reader to County Donegal with a detailed account of rural Irish life during this period of rapid change. This is a story about people living beyond the margins of maps, boundaries, language groups, and government departments - people bound by borders that have little or no correspondence to their own cultural, economic, and historical margins. Ultimately, it is a story about life on the edges, and the places and people who fall outside them.

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.