A Normal Totalitarian Society

A Normal Totalitarian Society PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9781563244728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This study analyzes the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-Soviet decade. Without overlooking the USSR's repressive character, the author treats it as a "normal" system that employed socialist and nationalist ideologies.

A Normal Totalitarian Society

A Normal Totalitarian Society PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9781563244728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study analyzes the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-Soviet decade. Without overlooking the USSR's repressive character, the author treats it as a "normal" system that employed socialist and nationalist ideologies.

A Normal Totalitarian Society

A Normal Totalitarian Society PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 131548272X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. Foregoing the projection of Western norms and assumptions, he seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.

A Normal Totalitarian Society

A Normal Totalitarian Society PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. Foregoing the projection of Western norms and assumptions, he seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.

The Future Is History (National Book Award Winner)

The Future Is History (National Book Award Winner) PDF Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 159463453X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Live Not by Lies

Live Not by Lies PDF Author: Rod Dreher
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087402
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers. For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation. In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance: • SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation. • JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true. • ACT: Take action to protect truth. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.

Feudal America

Feudal America PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
"Uses a feudal model to analyze contemporary American society, comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies"--Provided by publisher.

Democracy Incorporated

Democracy Incorporated PDF Author: Sheldon S. Wolin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178488
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.

Velvet Totalitarianism

Velvet Totalitarianism PDF Author: Claudia Moscovici
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 076184693X
Category : Human rights
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
This book introduces students and the general public to the post-Stalinist phase of totalitarianism, focusing on Romania under the Ceausescu dictatorship, through the dual optic of scholarship and fiction, in a story about a family surviving difficult times under a totalitarian regime due to the strength of their love.

The Demon in Democracy

The Demon in Democracy PDF Author: Ryszard Legutko
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039925
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature. In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared objectives between these two political systems, and explains how liberal democracy has over time lurched towards the same goals as communism, albeit without Soviet style brutality. Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of the common man, who is led to believe himself liberated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.

Green Tyranny

Green Tyranny PDF Author: Rupert Darwall
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641770457
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny traces the alarming origins of the green agenda, revealing how environmental scares have been deployed by our global rivals as a political instrument to contest American power around the world. Drawing on extensive historical and policy analysis, this timely and provocative book offers a lucid history of environmental alarmism and failed policies, explaining how “scientific consensus” is manufactured and abused by politicians with duplicitous motives and totalitarian tendencies.