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In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

Witchcraft --- Magic --- Trials (Witchcraft) --- Magick --- Necromancy --- Sorcery --- Spells --- Occultism --- Black art (Witchcraft) --- Wicca --- History --- Social aspects --- Russia --- Russie --- Rossīi︠a︡ --- Rossīĭskai︠a︡ Imperīi︠a︡ --- Russia (Provisional government, 1917) --- Russia (Vremennoe pravitelʹstvo, 1917) --- Russland --- Ṛusastan --- Russia (Tymchasovyĭ uri︠a︡d, 1917) --- Russian Empire --- Rosja --- Russian S.F.S.R. --- Russia (Territory under White armies, 1918-1920) --- Social conditions --- Witch hunting --- Witch hunting - Russia - History - 17th century --- Magic - Social aspects - Russia - History - 17th century --- Trials (Witchcraft) - Russia - History - 17th century

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This book describes one of the most terrible tragedies of the Second World War and the events preceding it. The horrible miscalculations made by the Stavka of the Soviet Supreme High Command and the Front commands led in October 1941 to the deaths and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of their own people. Until recently, the magnitude of the defeats suffered by the Red Army at Viaz'ma and Briansk were simply kept hushed up. For the first time, in this book a full picture of the combat operations that led to this tragedy are laid out in detail, using previously unknown or little-used docume

Soviet Union. -- Raboche-Krestʹi︠a︡nskai︠a︡ Krasnai︠a︡ Armii︠a︡ -- History. --- Vi︠a︡zʹma (Smolenskai︠a︡ oblastʹ, Russia) -- History, Military -- 20th century. --- World War, 1939-1945 -- Campaigns -- Eastern Front. --- World War, 1939-1945 -- Campaigns -- Russia (Federation) -- Vi︠a︡zʹma (Smolenskai︠a︡ oblastʹ). --- World War, 1939-1945 --- Campaigns --- Soviet Union. --- History --- Vi︠a︡zʹma (Smolenskai︠a︡ oblastʹ, Russia) --- History, Military