Books by Laura Engelstein

Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.

Engelstein asks how Russia's identity came to be defined in terms of an consensus opposed to Western-style liberalism, examining debates on religion and secularism, the role of culture and the law, and the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries.

Of the many sects that broke from the official Russian Orthodox church in the eighteenth century, one was universally despised. Its members were peasants from the Russian heartland skilled in the arts of animal husbandry who turned their knives on...