Oriented for a general reading audience, this book gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB "special operations" in Soviet Ukraine, which targeted especially the USA and Canada, using issues related to Soviet Ukrainian identity and cultural diplomacy of Soviet Ukraine after Stalin's death in 1953 until the perestroika of the 1980s. Concentrating on the period of the Cold War after Stalin and combining the counterintelligence documents from the KGB archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the official KGB correspondence and reports to the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine, this book offers an experimental view of the political and cultural history of relations between Soviet Ukraine and "capitalist America" through the prism of KGB operations against the US and Canada. Written from a "hidden" perspective of KGB operations from 1953 to the end of the 1980s, this book covers intelligence and counter-intelligence operations and the active measures of the KGB, but also various problems of anti-American cultural campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, sponsored by the KGB, involving the issues of cultural consumption, knowledge production, youth culture and national identity. Using carefully researched archive materials, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of KGB operations, the Cold War, counterintelligence and political and cultural history of the relations between Soviet Ukraine and the United States and Canada, and a role of cultural consumption in this history. "Few themes in the Cold War history received more attention but are less understood than the intelligence and counterintelligence operations of the KGB. The reason for that is simple-till recently very few if any documents on the subject were available to the scholars. In this pioneering study, Sergei Zhuk takes full advantage of the recently opened KGB archives in Ukraine to examine the "active measures" and other operations of the Soviet clandestine service against the United States and Canada. It is a major contribution to the field, which fills an important gap in our knowledge about the Cold War and the ways in which it is related to today."- Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University and author of "The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story", "Zhuk's timely book uses rigorous archival research to analyze KGB activities, avoiding the sensationalism and speculation usually associated with study of these topics. Beyond being fascinating reading, the book uses KGB operations in Ukraine as a fascinating lens for examining Soviet interactions with American society and with Ukrainian national identity." - Benjamin Tromly, University of Puget Sound "This is a highly original, eminently readable, and chillingly enlightening book on KGB operations. It illuminates the creative, clandestine, and devious measures the Soviet secret police used to enhance Soviet influence. All the same, the KGB lost ultimately to the seductive power of American culture. Highly recommended" - Hiroaki Kuromiya, Indiana University "The leading historian of postwar Ukrainian society and culture, Sergei Zhuk has revolutionized our understanding of life in Soviet Ukraine during Cold War. His new book, which focuses on the machinations of the Ukrainian KGB both inside and outside Ukraine, is both fascinating and provocative. As always, his research-this time in KGB archives, supplemented by interviews with KGB officers-is original and impeccable. Highly recommended to all students of the Cold War." - Denise J. Youngblood, University of Vermont, co-author of Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds "Sergei Zhuk's meticulously researched study accurately reconstructs the KGB's covert operations during the post-Stalin era in Soviet Ukraine and beyond, which were designed to solidify and protect Soviet society from Western political and cultural influences. His work with previously unavailable KGB documents has produced an insightful analysis of the intelligence and counterintelligence aspects of Soviet history, a significant contribution to scholarship that enhances our understanding of the dynamics of the Cold War and the continuity of the KGB traditions." - Olga Bertelsen, Tiffin University

Radical Protestant Christianity became widespread in rural parts of southern Russia and Ukraine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917," studies the origins and evolution of the theology and practices of these radicals and their contribution to an alternative culture in the region.

Arising from a confluence of immigrant Anabaptists from central Europe and native Russian religious dissident movements, the new sects shared characteristics with both their antecedents in Europe and their contemporaries in the Shaker and Quaker movements on the American frontier. The radicals' lives showed energy and initiative reminiscent of Max Weber's famous paradigm in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And women participated in congregations no less than men and often led them.

The radicals criticized the existing social and political order, created their own educational system, and in some cases engaged in radical politics. Their contributions, argues Zhuk, help explain the receptiveness of peasants in this region to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

This study is an intellectual biography of Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov (1930-2008), the prominent Soviet historian who was a pioneering scholar of US history and US-Russian relations. Alongside the personal history of Bolkhovitinov, this study also examines the broader social, cultural, and intellectual developments within the Americanist scholarly community in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Using archival documents, numerous studies by Russian and Ukrainian Americanists, various periodicals, personal correspondence, diaries, and more than one hundred interviews, it demonstrates how concepts, genealogies, and images of modernity shaped a national self-perception of the intellectual elites in both nations during the Cold War.

This study is an intellectual biography of Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov (1930-2008), the prominent Soviet historian who was a pioneering scholar of US history and US-Russian relations. Alongside the personal history of Bolkhovitinov, this study also examines the broader social, cultural, and intellectual developments within the Americanist scholarly community in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Using archival documents, numerous studies by Russian and Ukrainian Americanists, various periodicals, personal correspondence, diaries, and more than one hundred interviews, it demonstrates how concepts, genealogies, and images of modernity shaped a national self-perception of the intellectual elites in both nations during the Cold War.

What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think-it also responded to and was shaped by individuals' needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.

How did rock music and other products of Western culture come to pervade youth culture in Brezhnev-era Dniepropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city essentially closed to outsiders and heavily policed by the KGB? In "Rock and Roll in the Rocket City," Sergei I. Zhuk assesses the impact of Westernization on the city's youth, examining the degree to which the consumption of Western music, movies, and literature ultimately challenged the ideological control maintained by state officials. One among many of his stories is how the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar" led Dniepropetrovsk's young people to embrace not just one, but two Soviet taboos: rock music and Christianity.

This book is the first historical study--in any language--of the everyday lives of Soviet urban youth during the Brezhnev era. A longtime student and resident of Dniepropetrovsk, Zhuk began research for this project in the 1990s. Weaving together diaries, interviews, oral histories, and KGB and party archival documents, he provides a vivid account of how Soviet cultural repression and unrest during the Brezhnev period laid the groundwork for a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism in the 1980s. In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post-Soviet national identity.

What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think-it also responded to and was shaped by individuals' needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.