Remaking Russia

Remaking Russia
Author: Heyward Isham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315483076

In the words of George F. Kennan, Russia remains a region where "the conflicts of outlook and persuasion" have been as violent as any seen in our century. As crisis follows crisis, Western observers find the tragic complexities and cruel paradoxes of post-totalitarian Russia no less mystifying than those they encountered during the Soviet era. Looking beyond the horizon and cutting beneath the headlines, in Remaking Russia eighteen distinguished essayists of diverse backgrounds offer original insights on the three central questions Russians are now debating among themselves: Who are we? Where are we going? How do we get there? Their perspectives will retain their long-term relevance whatever the outcome of Kremlin power struggles.

Russian Energy Chains

Russian Energy Chains
Author: Margarita M. Balmaceda
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 023155219X

Russia’s use of its vast energy resources for leverage against post-Soviet states such as Ukraine is widely recognized as a threat. Yet we cannot understand this danger without also understanding the opportunity that Russian energy represents. From corruption-related profits to transportation-fee income to subsidized prices, many within these states have benefited by participating in Russian energy exports. To understand Russian energy power in the region, it is necessary to look at the entire value chain—including production, processing, transportation, and marketing—and at the full spectrum of domestic and external actors involved, from Gazprom to regional oligarchs to European Union regulators. This book follows Russia’s three largest fossil-fuel exports—natural gas, oil, and coal—from production in Siberia through transportation via Ukraine to final use in Germany in order to understand the tension between energy as threat and as opportunity. Margarita M. Balmaceda reveals how this dynamic has been a key driver of political development in post-Soviet states in the period between independence in 1991 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. She analyzes how the physical characteristics of different types of energy, by shaping how they can be transported, distributed, and even stolen, affect how each is used—not only technically but also politically. Both a geopolitical travelogue of the journey of three fossil fuels across continents and an incisive analysis of technology’s role in fossil-fuel politics and economics, this book offers new ways of thinking about energy in Eurasia and beyond.

The Future of Immortality

The Future of Immortality
Author: Anya Bernstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691182612

A gripping account of the Russian visionaries who are pursuing human immortality As long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human. The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist thought in Russia, with global implications that reach to Silicon Valley and beyond. If aging is a curable disease, do we have a moral obligation to end the suffering it causes? Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth—something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human? As vividly written as any novel, The Future of Immortality is a fascinating account of techno-scientific and religious futurism—and the ways in which it hopes to transform our very being.

The Dynamics of Russia’s Geopolitics

The Dynamics of Russia’s Geopolitics
Author: David Oualaalou
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030582558

This book provides an understanding of Russia’s geopolitical strategic interests as well as a larger picture of its political realities. It shares insights on how to understand and solve the problems affecting US-Russian relations and the world.The book addresses three primary questions relevant to the current global context: Will current geopolitical shifts greatly benefit Russia’s long-term global objectives? What foreign policy will Russia pursue in the Middle East and the Baltic regions to guarantee the security of its strategic interests? And will major powers confront one another over resources that could trigger military conflict, or will they choose appeasement to maintain peace and stability in this new era? Thus, the book offers insights into the future geopolitical landscape. It therefore is a must-read for scholars, researchers of international relations and political science, as well as professionals, practitioners and analysts, interested in a better understanding of the changing global order and Russia’s geopolitical strategic interests.

Shadow State

Shadow State
Author: Luke Harding
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2020-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0062966057

A thrilling account of how Russia is waging a hidden war against America and the West, using espionage, corruption, fake news, and KGB-style murder March 2018. Two Russian assassins arrive in a provincial English city to kill a former officer from Russia’s GRU intelligence agency. His crime? Passing secrets to British spies. The poison? A lethal nerve agent, novichok. The attempted execution was a reminder – as if one were needed - of Russia’s contempt for international norms. The Soviet Union and its doctrine are long gone, but the playbook used by the Kremlin’s spies during that long confrontation with the West is back. And the underlying goal remains the same: to undermine democracy and exploit divisions within American and European society and politics. Moscow’s support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has grown into the biggest political scandal of modern times. Its American players are well-known. In Shadow State, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Luke Harding reveals the Russians behind the story: the spies, hackers and internet trolls. Harding charts how the Kremlin has updated Communist-era methods of influence and propaganda for the age of Facebook and Twitter, and considers the compelling question of our age: what exactly does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump? Similar to those of the Cold War, Putin’s ambitions are truly global. His emissaries include oligarchs, bankers, lawyers, mercenaries, and agents of influence. They roam from Salisbury to Helsinki, Ukraine to Central Africa, London to Washington, D.C. Shadow State is the singular account of how the Kremlin seeks to reshape the world, to divide the US from its European friends, and to remake America in its own dark and kleptocratic image. This is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how our politics came to be so chaotic and divided. Nothing less than the future of Western democracy is at stake.

China and Russia

China and Russia
Author: Alexander Lukin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-03-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509521747

With many predicting the end of US hegemony, Russia and China's growing cooperation in a number of key strategic areas looks set to have a major impact on global power dynamics. But what lies behind this Sino-Russian rapprochement? Is it simply the result of deteriorated Russo–US and Sino–US relations or does it date back to a more fundamental alignment of interests after the Cold War? In this book Alexander Lukin answers these questions, offering a deeply informed and nuanced assessment of Russia and China’s ever-closer ties. Tracing the evolution of this partnership from the 1990s to the present day, he shows how economic and geopolitical interests drove the two countries together in spite of political and cultural differences. Key areas of cooperation and possible conflict are explored, from bilateral trade and investment to immigration and security. Ultimately, Lukin argues that China and Russia’s strategic partnership is part of a growing system of cooperation in the non-Western world, which has also seen the emergence of a new political community: Greater Eurasia. His vision of the new China–Russia rapprochement will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding this evolving partnership and the way in which it is altering the contemporary geopolitical landscape.

Wheel of Fortune

Wheel of Fortune
Author: Thane Gustafson
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 673
Release: 2012-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674066472

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year on Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics The Russian oil industry—which vies with Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil, providing nearly 12 percent of the global supply—is facing mounting problems that could send shock waves through the Russian economy and worldwide. Wheel of Fortune provides an authoritative account of this vital industry from the last years of communism to its uncertain future. Tracking the interdependence among Russia’s oil industry, politics, and economy, Thane Gustafson shows how the stakes extend beyond international energy security to include the potential threat of a destabilized Russia. “Few have studied the Russian oil and gas industry longer or with a broader political perspective than Gustafson. The result is this superb book, which is not merely a fascinating, subtle history of the industry since the Soviet Union’s collapse but also the single most revealing work on Russian politics and economics published in the last several years.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs “The history of Russia’s oil industry since the collapse of communism is the history of the country itself. There can be few better guides to this terrain than Thane Gustafson.” —Neil Buckley, Financial Times

Remaking Ukraine after World War II

Remaking Ukraine after World War II
Author: Filip Slaveski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781108794183

Ukraine was liberated from German wartime occupation by 1944 but remained prisoner to its consequences for much longer. This study examines Soviet Ukraine's transition from war to 'peace' in the long aftermath of World War II. Filip Slaveski explores the challenges faced by local Soviet authorities in reconstructing central Ukraine, including feeding rapidly growing populations in post-war famine. Drawing on recently declassified Soviet sources, Filip Slaveski traces the previously unknown bitter struggle for land, food and power among collective farmers at the bottom of the Soviet social ladder, local and central authorities. He reveals how local authorities challenged central ones for these resources in pursuit of their own vision of rebuilding central Ukraine, undermining the Stalinist policies they were supposed to implement and forsaking the farmers in the process. In so doing, Slaveski demonstrates how the consequences of this battle shaped post-war reconstruction, and continue to resonate in contemporary Ukraine, especially with the ordinary people caught in the middle.

The Depths of Russia

The Depths of Russia
Author: Douglas Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2015-11-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501701568

Russia is among the world’s leading oil producers, sitting atop the planet’s eighth largest reserves. Like other oil-producing nations, it has been profoundly transformed by the oil industry. In The Depths of Russia, Douglas Rogers offers a nuanced and multifaceted analysis of oil’s place in Soviet and Russian life, based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the Perm region of the Urals. Moving beyond models of oil calibrated to capitalist centers and postcolonial "petrostates," Rogers traces the distinctive contours of the socialist—and then postsocialist—oil complex, showing how oil has figured in the making and remaking of space and time, state and corporation, exchange and money, and past and present. He pays special attention to the material properties and transformations of oil (from depth in subsoil deposits to toxicity in refining) and to the ways oil has echoed through a range of cultural registers. The Depths of Russia challenges the common focus on high politics and Kremlin intrigue by considering the role of oil in barter exchanges and surrogate currencies, industry-sponsored social and cultural development initiatives, and the city of Perm’s campaign to become a European Capital of Culture. Rogers also situates Soviet and post-Soviet oil in global contexts, showing that many of the forms of state and corporate power that emerged in Russia after socialism are not outliers but very much part of a global family of state-corporate alliances gathered at the intersection of corporate social responsibility, cultural sponsorship, and the energy and extractive industries.

Remakes and Remaking

Remakes and Remaking
Author: Rüdiger Heinze
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2015-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839428947

From »Avatar« to danced versions of »Romeo and Juliet«, from Bollywood films to »Star Wars Uncut«: This book investigates film remakes as well as forms of remaking in other media, such as ballet and internet fan art. The case studies introduce readers to a variety of texts and remaking practices from different cultural spheres. The essays also discuss forms of remaking in relation to neighbouring phenomena like the sequel, prequel and (re-)adaptation. »Remakes and Remaking« thus provides a necessary and topical addition to the recent conceptual scholarship on intermediality, transmediality and adaptation.