The Thinking Reed

The Thinking Reed
Author: Boris Kagarlitsky
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1989-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN:

This panoramic account of political culture in the Soviet Union, by one of the leading voices of unofficial radical socialism, examines the way in which cultural life in the arts, philosophy and historiography has been able to withstand the persistent efforts of the “statocracy” to extinguish independent thought.

Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917-91

Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917-91
Author: Andrei A. Kokoshin
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1998-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780262611381

During the Cold War, Westerners were obsessed with the military policies of the Soviet Union. Until the demise of the Soviet Union, however, few details of Moscow's thinking on military matters were available. In this book, Andrei Kokoshin reveals how Soviet military theorists developed and debated the concepts that provided the basis for the Kremlin's defense policies. Drawing on Soviet-era archives and unpublished materials, he sheds light on this important chapter in the history of Russia and the world.The book covers three main themes: the relationship between politics and military strategy in the Soviet Union; how the Soviet political and military leadership assessed threats to Soviet security, the nature of future wars, and methods of warfare; and the relationship between offense and defense in Soviet military strategy. Kokoshin places the strategic concepts behind Moscow's military policies in the context of internal and international struggles for power, and assesses the future role of military power in Russia's national security strategy.

The Russians

The Russians
Author: Britta Johnson
Publisher: Singapore Books
Total Pages:
Release: 2000
Genre: Artists' books
ISBN:

In RUSSIANS, Gregory Feifer explains the seeming paradoxes of Russian life by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West? Using the insights of his eight years as a journalist in Russia, Feifer corrects pervasive misconceptions about the country by showing that much of what appears inexplicable is actually logical when seen from the inside. He gets to the heart of why the world's leading energy producer continues to exasperate many in the international community. And he makes clear why President Vladimir Putin remains popular even as the gap widens between the super-rich and the great majority of poor. Drawing on his family history as well as formative experiences in Russia's past and illustrative workings of its culture, Feifer sheds much-needed light on the purposely hidden functioning of its society before, during and after communism. RUSSIANS is an...

Secondhand Time

Secondhand Time
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2016-05-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0399588817

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation. In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world. A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. “Through the voices of those who confided in her,” The Nation writes, “Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil—in a word, about ourselves.” A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Financial Times, Kirkus Reviews

The Soviet Mind

The Soviet Mind
Author: Isaiah Berlin
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815709046

Isaiah Berlins response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Never before collected, Berlins writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalins manipulative artificial dialectic; portraits of Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more.

Russia and the Idea of the West

Russia and the Idea of the West
Author: Robert D. English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231110594

In most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.

Collapse

Collapse
Author: Vladislav M. Zubok
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300262442

A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise “A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart.”—Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times “[A] masterly analysis.”—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances—and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

Russians

Russians
Author: Gregory Feifer
Publisher: Twelve
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2014-02-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1455509655

From former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer comes an incisive portrait that draws on vivid personal stories to portray the forces that have shaped the Russian character for centuries-and continue to do so today. Russians explores the seeming paradoxes of life in Russia by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West? Using the insights of his decade as a journalist in Russia, Feifer corrects pervasive misconceptions by showing that much of what appears inexplicable about the country is logical when seen from the inside. He gets to the heart of why the world's leading energy producer continues to exasperate many in the international community. And he makes clear why President Vladimir Putin remains popular even as the gap widens between the super-rich and the great majority of poor. Traversing the world's largest country from the violent North Caucasus to Arctic Siberia, Feifer conducted hundreds of intimate conversations about everything from sex and vodka to Russia's complex relationship with the world. From fabulously wealthy oligarchs to the destitute elderly babushki who beg in Moscow's streets, he tells the story of a society bursting with vitality under a leadership rooted in tradition and often on the edge of collapse despite its authoritarian power. Feifer also draws on formative experiences in Russia's past and illustrative workings of its culture to shed much-needed light on the purposely hidden functioning of its society before, during, and after communism. Woven throughout is an intimate, first-person account of his family history, from his Russian mother's coming of age among Moscow's bohemian artistic elite to his American father's harrowing vodka-fueled run-ins with the KGB. What emerges is a rare portrait of a unique land of extremes whose forbidding geography, merciless climate, and crushing corruption has nevertheless produced some of the world's greatest art and some of its most remarkable scientific advances. Russians is an expertly observed, gripping profile of a people who will continue challenging the West for the foreseeable future.

American Girls in Red Russia

American Girls in Red Russia
Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2017-04-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 022625612X

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.