Is there a sharp dividing line separating Europe into East and West? This volume brings together prominent scholars from the United States, France, Poland, and Russia to examine the evolution of the conception of Europe over the two centuries since the French Revolution. Inspired by the ideas of Martin Malia, Evtuhov and Kotkin take a flexible view of the cultural gradient of ideas throughout Europe, examining the emergence, interaction, and reception of ideas in different places. The essays address three dimensions of the cultural gradient: the history of ideas, regimes and political practices, and the contemporary political and intellectual scene. In exploring the movement of ideas across Europe, The Cultural Gradient brings a new historical perspective to the field of European studies.

Using a source-based approach, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century is the first text designed to help students, general readers, and scholars understand how people constructed Communist ways of life around the world. Taking a global approach, it extends beyond Russia and Eastern Europe to examine the lives of people in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria, Peru, Cuba, and elsewhere. The book provides an inside look at the Communist experience, where people were--sometimes simultaneously so--enthusiasts, reshapers, resisters, and victims of an ideological project that was (and, for some, still is) both humanity's darkest nightmare and brightest hope. Since the collapse of Communist regimes beginning in 1989, vital questions--about how people subjectively experienced Communism, helped to shape it, and constructed an idea of "self" in such restrictive environments--have not lost their political significance. In fact, just the opposite holds true. The opening of many formerly closed Communist archives has given scholars the opportunity to research the political significance that the construction of the self had across Communist regimes, polities, and movements. Incorporating the latest scholarship, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century includes previously unavailable documents, such as diaries and letters, which are now accessible as a result of the archival revolution. A photo essay, "Everyday Life and Everyday Things under Socialism, 1945-1989," uses visual evidence to explore everyday life across the Communist civilizations. A locator map at the beginning of each chapter identifies the places associated with each of the sources, and a chronology provides a comparative timeline for Communist and world history.

After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the Bosheviks launched a massive assault on religion. Although we know a great deal about how the Bolsheviks went about doing this--propaganda, persecution of clergy and laity, seizing church property--scholars have not devoted much attention to the other side of the story: the people who were being persecuted and how they responded to their persecutors.

Glennys Young shows how ordinary Russian peasants devised ways of asserting their religious faith during the difficult period of New Economic Policy, 1921-28, when the Party-state was ideologically obsessed with eradicating religion. Faced with persecution, torture, and the creation of antireligious organizations such as the League of the Godless, Orthodox clergy and laity organized themselves against the Bolsheviks. They revived factional politics, even using the village soviets, the intended cornerstone of Soviet power in the countryside, to defend their religious interests. When they achieved some degree of success in their resistance, the Bosheviks were forced to respond and adapt their strategies--a conclusion that scholars have not put forward previously.

Based on extensive research in archives and published sources, Young's book will force historians of Soviet Russia to confront religious issues as central to rural politics. Her work also draws upon cultural anthropology and theories of peasant politics, making it of great interest to any scholars studying the processes of secularization and desacralization in other cultures.