A century of ambivalence: the Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the present

A century ago, the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about 5 million. In the intervening century, the Jews have been at the centre of some of the most dramatic events of modern history. In startling photographs from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucid narrative, this book traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the nineteenth century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era