Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia (1878-1918) was born the youngest son of Tsar Alexander III, ruler of the mightiest empire on earth. Upon the premature death of his elder brother Grand Duke George in 1899, Michael was thrust into the spotlight as the Heir-Tsesarevich of his older brother, Tsar Nicholas II, then the father of three girls. Even after the birth of an heir in 1904, Michael was pushed closer to the throne with each of the young boy's life-threatening bouts of hemophilia.

In 1806 an anonymous Greek book called for a republican government, patterned upon that of the young United States, to be established in Greece, then long the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The “Americanization” of Greece presupposed independence.

Presented by Russian author and attorney Ilya Milyukov, Chronicles of the First and Second Chechen War presents the main events of the First (1994-1996) and Second (1999-2009) Wars in Chechnya, Russia’s deadliest conflicts since World War II.

In The Warsaw Pact, 1969-1985, young Czech scholar Matěj Bílý analyzes the internal tensions of the Soviet-led Cold War alliance as its careened toward its end. Starting with the peak of the alliance’s power under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the book follows its ossification to its increasing haplessness under Brezhnev’s successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.

Foreword: Elena A. Okladnikova, Herzen University, St. Petersburg (Russia), Deputy Director for Museum Work at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera)
Translators: Richard L. Bland, Archeologist (retired), U.S. National Park Service, Heritage Research Associates, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History; Yaroslav V. Kuzmin, Institute of Geology & Mineralogy, Russian Academy of Sciences; and Laboratory of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Continental Ecosystems, Tomsk State University (Russia)

Translator: Richard L. Bland, Archeologist (retired), U.S. National Park Service, Heritage Research Associates, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History

Eurasia remains a zone of confrontation between the United States and Russia. Over the last decade, this confrontation has reached the Middle East, and, extending through Central Asia to China and points further afield, it has acquires global dimensions.

The Russian nobleman Ivan Ivanovich Pouschine is most recognized for two achievements: his leadership role in the 1825 Decembrist uprising agains Russia’s tsarist government and his set of poignant memoirs about his dear friend Alexander Pushkin. Pouschine’s historical and cultural significance, although often subtle, extends much further, however.

In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia’s imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control.

Over a century ago, a small group of Red Guards seized the Winter Palace in the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and installed the world’s first communist government. The Bolshevik Revolution marked the beginning of a century in which adherents to communist ideology committed some of the worst and most widespread atrocities known to history. The founding of the Soviet Union inaugurated a century of political turmoil around the globe by pioneering, in spectacular fashion, a new model of political, economic, cultural, and institutional revolution.