HST232 - Holy Russia, Soviet Empire: Nation, Religion, and Identity in the 20th Century

20 credits (Semester 1)

Module Leader: Dr Miriam Dobson (2024-25)

Module Summary

This module explores the twentieth-century history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and its successor states. Rather than approaching this turbulent period in history by focusing on the rise and fall of different political leaders (as is often the case in survey courses), we instead approach this subject through the prism of nation, religion and identity. The course probes the following questions:

What kind of ‘empire’ did the Romanov Tsars rule in the early twentieth century? What was the nature of relations between the centre and the periphery? How were religious and ethnic differences managed?

What did the ‘Russian revolution’ mean for the multi-national empire created by the Romanovs? To what extent was it in fact Russian?

How should we describe the new ‘empire’ created by the Bolsheviks? What place did religious and national identities play in this newly-formed state? In what ways were class and gender important

How far did the communist party manage to create a ‘Soviet’ identity, and on what was this based?

Did the Bolsheviks’ attempt to create an atheist society succeed?

What happened to ‘Soviet’ identity when communist leaders began to lose their grip on power in the final decades of the twentieth century? How did memories of the Soviet experience evolve after 1991?

Teaching

The module is taught via 11 weekly lectures, and 11 weekly seminars

Assessment

Please see this page for assessment details: Level 2 assessment

Selected Reading

These are some key texts, but I will also provide reading lists for each seminar.

On citizenship, nationalism, and empire

Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire : a Multiethnic History (Harlow, 2001). [ebook]
Aleksandr Ėtkind, Internal colonization: Russia's imperial experience (Cambridge, 2011) [ebook]
Stephen M Norris and Willard Sunderland (eds), Russia's people of empire: Life stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the present (Bloomington, 2012)[ebook]
Theodore R. Weeks, Across the revolutionary divide : Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945 (Oxford, 2001) [ebook]
Daniel R. Brower, Turkestan and the fate of the Russian Empire (London, 2010) [ebook]
Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and state in late Imperial Russia : nationalism and Russification on the western frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996)
Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: the campaign against enemy aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)
Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: national and imperial Identities in late tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2009) [ebook]
Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, A state of nations: empire and nation-making in the age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001) [ebook]
Terry Martin, The affirmative action empire: nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001) [ebook]
Douglas Taylor Northrop. Veiled empire: gender and power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004) [ebook]
Ronald Grigor Suny, The revenge of the past: nationalism, revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993). [ebook]
John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin (eds) Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 (Illinois, 2012)
Eric Lohr, Russian citizenship: from empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass. , 2012) [ebook]
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic mirrors: Russia and the small peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994). [ebook]
Ronald Griogr Suny, ‘The contradictions of identity: being Soviet and national in the USSR and after’, ed. Catriona Kelly and Marc Bassin, Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities (Cambridge, 2012) [Ebook]
Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review 53 (1994), pp. 414-452
Terry Martin, The affirmative action empire: Nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001), Chapter 1, pp. 1-22 [ebook]
Eric D. Weitz, ‘Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges’, Slavic Review 61(2002), pp. 1-29
Amir Weiner, ‘Nothing but Certainty’, Slavic Review 61 (2002), pp. 44-53.
Peter A. Blitstein, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative’, Slavic Review, 65 (2006), pp. 273-293
Zbigniew Wojnowski, ‘The Soviet people: national and supranational identities in the USSR after 1945’, in Nationalities Papers, 43 (2015), pp. 1-9.
Chapter 7, ‘National Questions’, in Stephen Lovell, The shadow of war: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present (Oxford, 2010), pp. 205-24. [ebook]

On religion

Mark Steinberg and Heather Coleman (eds), Sacred stories: religion and spirituality in modern Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 2007) [ebook]
Robert P. Geraci (ed.), Of religion and empire: missions, conversion, and tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2001). [ebook]
William Husband, "Godless communists": atheism and society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (DeKalb, 2000)
Glennys Young, Power and the sacred in revolutionary Russia: religious activists in the village (University Park, Pa., 1997)
Victoria Smolkin, A sacred space is never empty : a history of Soviet atheism (Princeton, 2018)[ebook]
Eren Tasar, Soviet and Muslim : the institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 1943-1991 (New York, 2017). [ebook]
Tatiana Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from Wartime to the Khrushchev Years (Armonk, NY, 2002).[ebook]
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Conscience on trial: the fate of fourteen pacifists in Stalin's Ukraine, 1952-1953 (Toronto, 2012) [ebook]
Paul Froese, The plot to kill God: findings from the Soviet experiment in secularization (Berkeley, 2008) [ebook]
Sonja Luehrmann, Secularism Soviet style : teaching atheism and religion in a Volga republic (Bloomington, 2011) [ebook]
Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet atheism and historical knowledge (New York, 2015). [ebook]
David Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study of Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, Mass.: 1975).
Felix Corley (ed.), Religion in the Soviet Union: an archival reader (Basingstoke, 1996) [ebook]
Heather Coleman, ‘Tales of Violence against Religious Dissidents in the Orthodox Village’, in Coleman and Mark Steinberg (eds), Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 211-233. [ebook]
Darius Stalinas, ‘The Blood Libel in Nineteenth-Century Lithuania: A Comparison of Two Cases’, in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond : New Histories of an Old Accusation, edited by Eugene M. Avriutin et al., (Indiana, 2017 [ebook]
D. Klier, ‘The pogrom paradigm in Russian history’, in Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 13-38. [Eoffprint]
Robert Weinberg, Blood libel in late imperial Russia: the ritual murder trial of Mendel Beilis (Bloomington, 2014) [ebook]
Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and spiritual revolution, 1905-1929 (Bloomington, 2005). [ebook]
Michael Froggatt, ‘Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia: science in schools under Khrushchev’, in Polly Jones, The dilemmas of de-Stalinization: negotiating cultural and social change in the Khrushchev (London, 2006), pp. 41-63 [
V. Smolkin-Rothrock, ‘The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Science, Religion, and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism’, Russian Review, 72, 2 (2014), pp. 171–197.
Andrew B. Stone, ‘“Overcoming Peasant Backwardness": The Khrushchev Antireligious Campaign and the Rural Soviet’, Russian Review 67 (2008), pp. 296-320.
Miriam Dobson, ‘Child Sacrifice in the Soviet Press: Sensationalism and the “Sectarian” in the Post-Stalin Era’, Russian Review, 72, 2 (2014), 237-259.
Vladimir A. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (Armonk, 2002), ‘Orthodoxy in revolt’. [ebook]

On Gender

Elizabeth A. Wood, The baba and the comrade : gender and politics in revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997). [Ebook]
Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the state, and revolution: Soviet family policy and social life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge and New York, 1993). [Ebook]
Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the gates: gender and industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge and New York, 2002). [Ebook]
Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating women: gender, festival culture, and Bolshevik ideology, 1910-1939 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2002). [Ebook]
Dan Healey, Homosexual desire in Revolutionary Russia: the regulation of sexual and gender dissent (Chicago, 2001) [ebook]
Dan Healey, Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London, 2018).[ebook]
Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, Dan Healey (eds), Russian masculinities in history and culture (Basingstoke, 2002) [ebook]
Melanie Ilič, Susan Reid, Lynne Attwood (eds), Women in the Khrushchev era (Basingstoke, 2004) [ebook]
Linda Harriet Edmondson (ed), Gender in Russian history and culture (Basingstoke, 2001)
Douglas Northrop, ‘Hujum: Unveiling Campaigns and Local Responses, Uzbekistan 1927’, in Donald Raleigh (ed), Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-53 (Pittsburgh, 2001), pp. 125-45. [eoffprint]
Marianne Kamp, ‘Femicide as Terrorism: the Case of Uzbekistan’s Unveiling Murders’, in James Wellman (ed.), Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence across Time and Tradition (Lanham, 2007), pp. 131-144. [eoffprint]
Adrienne Edgar, ‘Emancipation of the Unveiled: Turkmen Women under Soviet Rule, 1924-29’, Russian Review 62 (2003), pp. 132-149.
Adrienne Edgar, ‘Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet "Emancipation" of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic’, Slavic Review 65 (2006), pp. 252-272.
Shoshanna Keller, ‘Conversion to the New Faith: Marxism-Leninism and Muslims in the Soviet Empire’, in Robert P. Geraci (ed.), Of religion and empire: missions, conversion, and tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2001),pp.311-334. [ebook]
Shoshanna Keller, “Trapped Between State and Society: Women’s Liberation and Islam in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1926–1941,” Journal of Women’s History, 10 (1998): 20-44.
Marianne Kamp, The new woman in Uzbekistan : Islam, modernity, and unveiling under communism (Seattle, 2008). [ebook]

Siberia

Yuri Slezkine, Arctic mirrors: Russia and the small peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994) [ebook]
Jon Smele, Civil war in Siberia: the anti-Bolshevik government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918-1920 (Cambridge and New York, 1996). [ebook]
James R. Harris, The Great Urals: regionalism and the evolution of the Soviet system (Ithaca, 1999). [ebook]
Elena Shulman, Stalinism on the frontier of empire: women and state formation in the Soviet Far East (Cambridge, 2008)
Alan Barenberg, Gulag town, company town : forced labor and its legacy in Vorkuta (New Have, 2014). [ebook]
Wilson T. Bell, Stalin's Gulag at War: Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War (Toronto, 2018). [ebook]
Art Leete, ‘Religious Revival as Reaction to the Hegemonization of Power in Siberia in the 1920s to 1940s’, Asian Folklore Studies 64 (2005), pp. 233-245.
Craig Campbell, ‘History's Ornament: Photography and Cultural Engineering in Early Soviet Siberia’, Journal of Historical Sociology 27 (2014), 490-522 [
Elena Shulman, ‘Soviet Maidens for the Socialist Fortress: The Khetagurovite Campaign to Settle the Far East, 1937-39’, Russian Review 62 (2003), pp. 387-410.
Wilson T. Bell, ‘Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De-Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia’, Russian Review 72 (2013), pp. 116-141.
Alan Barenberg, ‘Prisoners Without Borders: Zazonniki and the Transformation of Vorkuta after Stalin’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 57 (2009), pp. 513-534.
Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: death in a Siberian gulag (Princeton, 2007)
Robert Conquest, Kolyma: the Arctic death camps (Oxford, 1979)
Michael Krupa, Shallow graves in Siberia (Edinburgh, 2004). [memoir]
Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (London, 1954) [memoir]
Varlam Shalamov and Donald Rayfield, Kolyma tales (Harmondsworth, 1994) [fiction based on author’s experience] [ebook]
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ‘Ethnicity without Power: The Siberian Khanty in Soviet Society’, Slavic Review 42 (1983), pp. 633-648.

Central Asia

Robert D. Crews, For prophet and tsar: Islam and empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 2006) [ebook]
Adeeb Khalid, The politics of Muslim cultural reform: jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, 1998). [ebook]
Jeff Sahadeo, Russian colonial society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 (Bloomington, 2010) [ebook]
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan : nation, empire, and revolution in the early USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 201). Ebook
Eren Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 1943-1991 (Oxford, 2017). [ebook]
Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, 2006) [ebook]
Douglas Taylor Northrop, Veiled empire: gender & power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004) [ebook]
Marianne Kamp, The new woman in Uzbekistan : Islam, modernity, and unveiling under communism (Seattle, 2008) [ebook]
Paula A. Michaels, Curative powers: medicine and empire in Stalin's Central Asia (Pittsburgh, 2003). [ebook]
Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca (eds), Everyday life in Central Asia: past and present (Bloomington, 2007) [ebook]
Paul Stronski, Tashkent : forging a Soviet city, 1930-1966 (Pittsburgh, 2010) [ebook]
Daniel Brower, ‘Kyrgyz Nomads and Russian Pioneers: Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkestan Revolt of 1916’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44 (1996), pp.41-53.
Adeeb Khalid, ‘Nationalizing the Revolution in Central Asia: The Transformation of Jadidism, 1917–1920’, in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds), A state of nations: empire and nation-making in the age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001), pp. 145-164.
Alun Thomas, ‘The Caspian Disputes: Nationalism and Nomadism in Early Soviet Central Asia’, Russian Review, 76 (2017), 502–525.
Matt Payne, ‘The Forge of the Kazakh Proletariat? The Turksib, Nativization, and Industrialization during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan’, Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds), A state of nations: empire and nation-making in the age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001), pp. 223-252. [ebook]
Niccolò Pianciola, Susan Finnel, ‘Famine in the Steppe. The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928-1934’, Cahiers du Monde russe 45 (2004), pp. 137-191.
Anatolyi Remnev, ‘Russians as Colonists at the Empire's Asian Borders: Optimistic Prognoses and Pessimistic Assessments’, John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin (eds) Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 (Illinois, 2012), pp. 126-149.
Eren Murat Tasar “Islamically Informed Soviet Patriotism in Postwar Kyrgyzstan” in Cahiers du monde Russe 52 (2011), issues 2-3. Available here.
Alexander Morrison, ‘Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43 (2015), 387 -417.

Baltic States

Graham Smith (ed), The Baltic States: The National Self-Determination of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (Basingstoke, 1994). – This is a very good collection of essays and a useful starting point. [ebook]
Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and state in late Imperial Russia: nationalism and Russification on the western frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996). [ebook]
Romuald J. Misiunas, The Baltic States: years of dependence: 1940-1980 (London 1983).[ebook]
Guntis Šmidchens, The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution (Seattle, 2013). [ebook]
Anatol Lieven, The Baltic revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the path to independence (New Haven, 1993) [ebook]
Theodore R. Weeks, ‘Russification and the Lithuanians, 1863-1905’, Slavic Review 60 (2001), pp. 96-114
Darius Stalinas, ‘The Blood Libel in Nineteenth-Century Lithuania: A Comparison of Two Cases’, in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond : New Histories of an Old Accusation, edited by Eugene M. Avriutin et al., (Indiana, 2017 [ebook]
Tomas Balkelis, ‘Nation-building and world war I refugees in Lithuania, 1918 – 1924’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 34 (2003), pp. 432-456,
John W. Hiden, David J. Smith, ‘Looking beyond the Nation State: A Baltic Vision for National Minorities between the Wars’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), pp. 387-399
Tomas Balkelis, ‘War, State, Ethnic Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in Lithuania, 1939-1940’, Contemporary European History (2007), pp. 461-477.
Aldis Purs, ‘Working Towards 'An Unforeseen Miracle' Redux: Latvian Refugees in Vladivostok, 1918-1920, and in Latvia, 1943-1944’, Contemporary European History, 16 (2007), pp. 479-494.
Olaf Mertelsmann and Aigi Rahi-tamm, ‘Soviet mass violence in Estonia revisited’, Journal of Genocide Research, 11 (2009), pp.307-322
Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Leisure in Stalin’s Estonia’, Revista Română de Studii Baltice şi Nordice, 2 (2010), pp. 225-248.
Vieda Skultans, The testimony of lives: narrative and memory in post-Soviet Latvia (London and New York, 1998). [ebook]

Ukraine

Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians : unexpected nation (New Haven,2009). [ebook]
Terry Martin, The affirmative action empire: Nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001), [ebook]. *Although this book is about nationalism in the USSR more broadly, Martin’s main case-study is Ukraine.
Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (New York, 2007) [ebook]
Serhii Yekelchyk, Stalin's empire of memory: Russian-Ukrainian relations in the Soviet historical imagination (Toronto, 2004). [ebook]
Kate Brown, A biography of no place: from ethnic borderland to Soviet heartland (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). [ebook]
Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of despair: life and death in Ukraine under Nazi rule (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). [Ebook]
Wendy Lower, Nazi empire-building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, 2005). [ebook]
Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust : crimes of the local police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44 (Basingstoke, 2000). [ebook]
William Jay Risch, The Ukrainian West: culture and the fate of empire in Soviet Lviv (Cambridge, Mass., c2011) [ebook]
Serhy Yekelchyk, ‘The Making of a 'Proletarian Capital': Patterns of Stalinist Social Policy in Kiev in the Mid-1930s’, Europe-Asia Studies 50 (1998), pp. 1229-1244
David R. Marples, ‘Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine’, Europe-Asia Studies 61 (2009), pp. 505-518
Wendy Lower, ‘Pogroms, mob violence and genocide in western Ukraine, summer 1941: varied histories, explanations and comparisons’, Journal of Genocide Research, 13 (2011), pp.217-246.
Karel C. Berkhoff, ‘Was there a religious revival in Soviet Ukraine under the Nazi regime?’, Slavonic And East European Review, 78 (2000), pp.536-567
Zbigniew Wojnowski, ‘De-Stalinisation and Soviet Patriotism: Ukrainian Reactions to East European Unrest in 1956’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (2012), pp.799-829.
Amir Weiner, ‘The Empires Pay a Visit: Gulag Returnees, East European Rebellions, and Soviet Frontier Politics’, The Journal of Modern History 78 (2006), p.333-37
Amir Weiner, ‘Déjà Vu All Over Again: Prague Spring, Romanian Summer and Soviet Autumn on the Soviet Western Frontier’, Contemporary European history 15 (2006), pp.159-194.
Sergei I. Zhuk, ‘Popular Religiosity in the “Closed City” of Soviet Ukraine: Cultural Consumption and Religion during Late Socialism, 1959-1984’, Russian history 40 (2013), pp.183-200
Catherine Wanner, Burden of dreams: history and identity in post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park, Pa., 1998).
Workers of the Donbass speak : survival and identity in the new Ukraine, 1989-1992 (New York, 1995. [oral history]
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and terror in the Donbas: a Ukrainian-Russian borderland, 1870s-1990s (Cambridge, 1998)

Moscow and Saint Petersburg

Blair A Ruble, Leningrad: shaping a Soviet city (Berkeley, 1990)/ [ebook]
Katerina Clark, Petersburg, crucible of cultural (Cambridge, Mass.,1995) [ebook]
S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: revolution in the factories, 1917-18 (Cambridge, 1989). [ebook]
Catriona Kelly, Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988 (DeKalb, 2016). [ebook]
Steven Maddox, Saving Stalin's Imperial City [electronic resource] : Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930–1950 (Bloomington, 2015). [ebook]
Alexis Peri, The war within : diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, Mass., 2017). [Ebook]
Richard Bidlack, The Leningrad blockade, 1941-1944 : a new documentary history from the Soviet archives (New Haven, 2012) [ebook]
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: myth, memories, and monuments (Cambridge, 2006) [ebook]
David L. Hoffmann, Peasant metropolis: Social identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, 1994) [ebook]
Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge, 2012) [ebook]
Stephen V Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat (Ithaca,2008)
Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge : Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow
(Ithaca, 2019). [ebook]
Catriona Kelly, St. Petersburg : shadows of the past (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2014) [ebook]
Helena Goscilo and Stephen M Norris, Preserving Petersburg : history, memory, nostalgia (Bloomington, 2008). [ebook]
Mike O'Mahony, ‘Archaeological Fantasies: Constructing History on the Moscow Metro’, The Modern Language Review 98 (2003), pp. 138-150.
Jeff Sahadeo, ‘Black Snouts Go Home! Migration and Race in Late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow’, The Journal of Modern History, 88 (2016), 797-826 – excellent article
Matthew Light, ‘Migration Controls in Soviet and Post-Soviet Moscow’: From "Closed City" to "Illegal City" in John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin (eds) Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 (Illinois, 2012) pp. 80-100.
Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson, ‘Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (2002), pp. 524-547
Graeme Gill, ‘Changing Symbols: The Renovation of Moscow Place Names’, Russian Review 64 (2005), pp. 480-503.
Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: governing the socialist metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)

The Caucasus

Charles King, The ghost of freedom: a history of the Caucasus (Oxford, 2008). [Ebook] – a good introductory text.
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku commune, 1917-1918: class and nationality in the Russian Revolution Princeton, 1972). [Ebook].
Erik Scott, Familiar strangers: the Georgian diaspora and the evolution of Soviet empire (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), particularly Chapter 1. [ebook]
Timothy K. Blauvelt and Jeremy Smith, Georgia after Stalin : Nationalism and Soviet Power (2015) [ebook]
Thomas De Waal, Great catastrophe : Armenians and Turks in the shadow of genocide (New York, 2015).
Stephen Jones, ‘The Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia 1921-1928’, Soviet Studies 40 (1988), pp. 616-639.
Bruce Grant, ‘An Average Azeri Village (1930): Remembering Rebellion in the Caucasus Mountains’, Slavic Review 63 (2004), pp. 705-731.
Jeronim Perović, ‘Highland Rebels: The North Caucasus During the Stalinist Collectivization Campaign’, Journal of contemporary history, 51 (2016(,p.234-260
Nicolas Werth, ‘The “Chechen Problem”: Handling an Awkward Legacy, 1918-1958’, Contemporary European History 15 (2006), pp. 347-366.
Jeffrey Burds, ‘The Soviet War against 'Fifth Columnists': The Case of Chechnya, 1942-4’, Journal of Contemporary History 42 (2007), pp. 267-314.
Timothy Blauvelt, ‘Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation in the March 1956 Events in Georgia’, Europe-Asia Studies 61 (2009), pp. 651-668.
Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Politics of Gender and the Soviet Paradox: Neither Colonized nor Modern?” Central Asian Survey, 26 (2007), 601-624.
Erik Scott, ‘Edible Ethnicity How Georgian Cuisine Conquered the Soviet Table’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 13 (2012), 831-858.
Ronald Grigor Suny, Transcaucasia: nationalism and social change: essays in the history of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Ann Arbor, 1983).
Ronald Grigor Suny, The making of the Georgian nation (Bloomington, 1998)