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The First World War is Russia’s ‘forgotten war’. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the memory of the war was subsumed into the history of the revolutionary process.

In spring 2004, Chris Ward argued in Rethinking History that writing on late Stalinism ‘focuses almost exclusively on “high politics”’.(1) Despite the publication of a handful of works that explore the social and cultural history of post-war era – in particular monographs by Amir Weiner, Donald Filtzer and Elena Zubkova – this has remained

Forty years after his death, much of Nehru’s world has been lost, its certainties eroded, its structures demolished. The European empires which Nehru challenged have long since disappeared.

This book is about four episodes of excess mortality in Russia/the USSR: 1914-22, 1931-38, 1941-45, and the 1990s. The book is aimed at the general reader, although it may be of most use to older schoolchildren and students on many courses.

There are several novel things about this book that make it worth reading. The first one relates to the author. Unlike most other historians of Japan, who come from the areas of Japanese or East Asian studies, the author of this book arrives from an unexpected field. L. M.

Originally published in French in 2000 (1), this English translation of A History of Pakistan and its Origins was prepared for the English reader and released following the events of September 11. 2001.

s the deft pun in the title reminds us, one of the ways in which nations were both imagined and institutionalised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was through the conscripting of young men into the army. The ways in which they were called up, selected, trained and led, and the arrangements made for their families left behind deeply affected the nature of nationhood.

I suppose a slight confession is in order before I begin. This is a book that I had hoped to write, but for a variety of reasons it never transpired. To me, it seemed to be a glaring omission in the literature on Stalin. Bookshops were awash with biographies of Stalin. Appraisals of the Stalinist system were as numerous as medals on Brezhnev's chest.

Weighing in at over five hundred pages, this formidable work of scholarship investigates the fifteen-year evolution of the Soviet Union's strategy towards its multi-ethnic jurisdiction from the 'Lenin Constitution' of 1923 through to the consolidation of the 'Stalin Constitution' of 1936.

This is the third book on Russian women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century collectively authored by Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar of Southampton University.