This booklet is the second chapter of a training course developed for Air Force Reserve personnel about the military strength of communist countries. This chapter discusses the development of the Soviet armed forces and includes background information, analysis, review questions, and a list of readings for further study.

This study seeks to explore the role of peasant women in resistance to the antireligious campaigns during collectivization and analyze how the interplay of the state and resistors formed a new culture of religion in the countryside. I argue that while the state’s succeeded in controlling most of the public sphere, peasant women, engaging in subversive activities and exploiting the state’s ideology, succeeded in preserving a strong peasant adherence to religion prior to World War II. It was peasant women’s determination and adaptation that thwarted the party’s goal of nation-wide atheism.

No one has investigated in detail the totality of Anglo-Russian relations from the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 to the outbreak of World War I. Those who have written on the history of the Triple Entente have tended to claim that France was the dominant partner and that her efforts pulled Great Britain and Russia together and kept them together. Britain and Russia had little in common, the standard argument asserts; their ideological and political views were almost diametrically opposed, and furthermore,they had major imperial conflicts. This dissertation tests two hypotheses. The first is that Russia and Britain were drawn together less from French efforts than from a mutual reaction to German policy. The second is that there was less political and ideological friction between Britain and Russia than previous writers have assumed. The first hypothesis has been supported in previous writings only tangentially, while the second has not been tested for the period under review. Studies of the period have been detailed studies on specific events and crises, while this investigation reviews the course of the Anglo-Russian partnership for the entire seven year period. The dissertation concludes that it was primarily the need for allies in the face of German …

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has raised a number of serious issues and choices for the United States. The train of events seem likely to have an important influence on overall American foreign policy in the 1980s. Reassessment of Soviet motives and of U.S. roles in the world are already in progress. Emerging American attitudes, in turn, will shape more specific policy decisions on several issues, which this issue brief discusses.

This paper analyzes the piano compositions of Sergei Prokofieff and identifies four elements evident in the literature: classicism, innovation, toccata, and lyricism. Elisabeth Euwer Roberts traces the history of his works and the evidence of these elements in them.

The musical career of Alexander Tumanov extends from Stalinist and Soviet Russia through contemporary Canada, and as such provides an inspiring portrait of one person’s devotion to his art under trying circumstances. Tumanov was a founding member of Moscow’s Madrigal Ensemble of early music, which introduced Renaissance and Baroque music to the Soviet Union. The Ensemble enjoyed tremendous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, despite occasional official disapproval by the Soviet bureaucracy. At times the compositions of the group’s founder, Andrei Volkonsky, were banned. Volkonsky eventually emigrated to escape the oppressive conditions, followed soon after, in 1974, by Tumanov, and the Madrigal Ensemble continued in a changed form under new leaders. The story of the author's subsequent life and career in Canada provides a poignant point of contrast with his Soviet period — at the musical, academic, and political levels. This book is a valuable resource for those interested in the history of music and intellectual life in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century and is the first published book on the Madrigal Ensemble.