Fairytales is a work about the mystery and myth of the largest country in the world. Treading the line between poignant realism and humorous fantasy, Frank Herfort's project Fairy Tale of Russia is a mesmerising, thought-provoking and at times chilling collection of photographs from his journey through Russia. Surreal imagery, colours and scenes lead on to candid shots of post-soviet aesthetic in an honest and strikingly human sequence of photos. German photographer Frank Herfort has spent over a decade photographing the insides and outsides of spaces throughout the East. His style is influenced by social realism: people are shown in their everyday life, which seems to be made up by banal details. His large-format artworks are hence an artistic combination of the surreal and the straight-lined, with an irony detectable in the pictorial language. Herfort's work brings a modern twist, seemingly imported from the outside, that eradicates markers of time or context and persuades the viewer to create their own narrative. The images make a surreal, absurd impression; they raise more questions than they answer. Each image in this series stands alone and tell its own story, but together they seem to tell a whole fairytale. Text in English, French, and German.

This volume brings together the latest work in Russian labour history, based on exciting materials from previously closed archives and collections. Sixteen essays, focusing on peasants and workers, explore the lives and struggles of working people. Ranging over a century of dramatic upheaval, from the late 1800s to the present, the essays are organized around three broad themes: workers' politics, incentives and coercion within industrial and rural workplaces, and household strategies. The volume explores the relationship between the peasantry and the working class, a nexus that has been central to state policy, oppositional politics, economic development, and household configuration. It profiles a working class rent by divisions and defined not only by its relationship to the workplace or the state, but also by its household strategies for daily survival. The essays explore many topics accessible for the first time, including the motivations of women workers, roots of revolutionary activism, the revolutionary movement outside the great cities, socialist opposition to the Soviet regime, reactions of workers to Stalinist terror, socialist tourism, peasant families in forced exile, and work discipline on the collective farms.

Starting from a broad definition of labour relations as the full range of vertical and horizontal social relations under which work is performed, both within and outside the household, this volume examines the way states have shaped and interacted with labour relations in a wide range of periods and places, from the sixteenth-century silver mines of Potosi in the Andes to late twentieth-century Sweden, and from seventeenth-century Dzungharia to early twentieth-century colonial Mozambique. The articles presented look at very different types of states, from local and regional power holders to nation states and empires, and explore the activities of these states and their impact on labour relations in three roles, as conquerors, employers and arbiters. The volume finds diversity, but also a remarkable degree of similarity across space and time in the mechanisms deployed by states to extract and allocate the labour required to carry out their essential tasks.

The years 2002-2003 marked the seventieth anniversary of the man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine and surrounding areas by Stalin's Soviet leadership. The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the anniversary with a symposium in October 2003 titled "The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932-1933: Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project." This volume contains some of the papers presented at the symposium (previously published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies volume 25, no. 3/4), including Sergei Maksudov's large-scale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era; Niccolo Pianciola's description of the denomadization famine in Kazakhstan from 1931 to 1933; and Gijs Kessler's study of events in the Urals region from the same period. Also included in this volume are Andrea Graziosi's remarks on the present state of Famine scholarship and how it addresses the question of genocide, Hennadii Boriak's assessment of the current state of source material, and an essay by George Grabowicz on the legacy of the Famine in Ukraine today.