Tsar Of The Empty Lands

Nineteen Thirty-Five, Soviet Russia. Josef Dobrov is only a soldier and wants it to stay that way, to be someone nobody notices. Some of his friends have been noticed and it did not end well for them. One of them is on the train of gulag-bound prisoners he is guarding. Not his affair, says Josef. He has no intention of getting into trouble. But high in the Urals, fate throws the young soldier into not only trouble but an whole new world, a world of savagery and beauty, danger and wonder. A world he adopts as his own, only to find it besieged by forces from without, and the woman he loves endangered and ensorcelled by those forces. Can he and the ancient and powerful sorcerer, Hurasu, stop them? Jokingly named 'Tsar' by his fellows, Josef becomes a man willing to step forward at last, to be seen as leader, as hero, in Tsar of the Empty Lands, a fantasy novel by Stephen Brooke.

The Russian conquest of Siberia was an event of which the consequences have only slowly become apparent. Already great, they may come to dominate much of our world; with today’s technology, a resource base of this size and richness confers immense power on the owner. The conquest was a gradual process of absorption. But if one had to assign a time and place for its start, then one would certainly choose the campaign of Yermak in the 1580’s. This enterprise was by no means wholly successful, and probably fewer than a thousand Russians participated in it. But it was the first entry in force into Siberia, and Russian historians have long regarded it as crucial. Among English-speakers, the events are not so well known. The object of this book is to provide the reader of English with translations of the most important documents relating to the campaign. There are several narrative accounts, collectively known as the Siberian chronicles: the Stroganov, Yesipov; Remezov and New chronicles. The Remezov chronicle, written about 1700, is illustrated with 154 pen and ink drawings. These are of great historical and artistic interest, for very few Russian drawings of this period survive. All are reproduced here. The collection of documents is rounded out with seven charters or decrees of Ivan IV relating to the advance across the Urals. Dr Armstrong's introduction provides background on Muscovy's eastern frontier in the 16th century; the Stroganov family; the Cossacks, in particular Yermak Timofeyevich and his band; routes across the Urals; non-Russian peoples encountered; and the authorship and provenance of the chronicles. Mr William Harrison contributes an essay on Yermak as folk-hero. The frontispiece and map 1 are now printed at the end of the volume.

The collection of the scientific articles and papers in history, philosophy, and political sciences of Russian, Kazakhsyan, and Ukrainian scientists

Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that emerged in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for resources. Official histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground caught between rival empires. Zatsepine, by contrast, views it as a unified natural economy populated by Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol people who crossed the border in search of work or trade and who came together to survive a harsh physical environment. This colourful account of a region and its people highlights the often-overlooked influence of frontier developments on state politics and imperial policies and histories.

"By studying 17th century maps Kivelson sheds light on Muscovite Russia - the relationship of state and society, the growth of an empire, the rise of serfdom and the place of Orthodox Christianity in society"-OCLC

Sergei Feodorovich Platonov's Time of Troubles is a classic study of the years 1598-1613, a turbulent and decisive period in Russian history. Available for the first time in English, this work will be a valuable tool for students of the medieval as well as modern periods. Platonov, himself a tragic victim of the regimentation imposed on Soviet cultural life in the 1920s, was born in 1860 and attained immense public and professional recognition in Russia as a leading historian. In his work he synthesized, to a high degree, two major traditions of Russian historiography: the St. Petersburg "school," which emphasized the collection and rigorous use of primary sources, and the Moscow "school" with its socioeconomic and geopolitical approaches. Time of Troubles represents the finished product of a lifetime spent in research, writing, and teaching. In broad terms it treats nearly a century and a half of Russian history (1500-1648); in detail it scrutinizes developments in the Muscovite State from 1598 to 1613. Some of the major issues covered in this volume are: the growing consolidation of Muscovite absolutism and the formation of a national state; the expansion of Muscovy to the west and southeast; the demise of the boyar class and the rise of the service-gentry; the emergence of serfdom as the social basis of Muscovite society; the cataclysmic end of one dynasty, the House of Rurik, and the beginnings of another, the House of Romanov. For Platonov—who devoted most of his career as a scholar to the study of these dramatic years—the epoch marked nothing less than the great divide between medieval Muscovy and modern Russia, witnessing the downfall of an essentially patrimonial regime and its replacement, after fierce struggles, by a more modern state founded on a new constellation of social groups.

Though usually forgotten in general surveys of European colonization, the Russians were among the greatest colonizers of the Old World, eventually settling across most of the immense expanse of Northern Europe and Asia, from the Baltic and the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the Eurasian past by examining the policies, practices, cultural representations, and daily-life experiences of Slavic settlement in non-Russian regions of Eurasia from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the nuclear era. The movement of tens of millions of Slavic settlers was a central component of Russian empire-building, and of the everyday life of numerous social and ethnic groups and remains a crucial regional security issue today, yet it remains relatively understudied. Peopling the Russian Periphery redresses this omission through a detailed exploration of the varied meanings and dynamics of Slavic settlement from the sixteenth century to the 1960s. Providing an account of the different approaches of settlement and expansion that were adopted in different periods of history, it includes detailed case studies of particular episodes of migration. Written by upcoming and established experts in Russian history, with exceptional geographical and chronological breadth, this book provides a thorough examination of the history of Slavic settlement and migration from the Muscovite to the Soviet era. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian history, comparative history of colonization, migration, interethnic contact, environmental history and European Imperialism.

Larger in area than the United States and Europe combined, Siberia is a land of extremes, not merely in terms of climate and expanse, but in the many kinds of lives its population has led over the course of four centuries. Janet M. Hartley explores the history of this vast Russian wasteland—whose very name is a common euphemism for remote bleakness and exile—through the lives of the people who settled there, either willingly, desperately, or as prisoners condemned to exile or forced labor in mines or the gulag. From the Cossack adventurers’ first incursions into “Sibir” in the late sixteenth century to the exiled criminals and political prisoners of the Soviet era to present-day impoverished Russians and entrepreneurs seeking opportunities in the oil-rich north, Hartley’s comprehensive history offers a vibrant, profoundly human account of Siberia’s development. One of the world’s most inhospitable regions is humanized through personal narratives and colorful case studies as ordinary—and extraordinary—everyday life in “the nothingness” is presented in rich and fascinating detail.