Behind the Urals

Behind the Urals PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253351258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
John Scott's classic account of his five years as a worker in the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the 1930s, first published in 1942, is enhanced in this edition by Stephen Kotkin's introduction, which places the book in context for today's readers; by the texts of three debriefings of Scott conducted at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1938 and published here for the first time; and by a selection of photographs showing life in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. No other book provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five-Year Plan.

Behind the Urals

Behind the Urals PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253351258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
John Scott's classic account of his five years as a worker in the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the 1930s, first published in 1942, is enhanced in this edition by Stephen Kotkin's introduction, which places the book in context for today's readers; by the texts of three debriefings of Scott conducted at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1938 and published here for the first time; and by a selection of photographs showing life in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. No other book provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five-Year Plan.

Beyond the Urals

Beyond the Urals PDF Author: Reggie Gibbs
Publisher: Life Rich Publishing
ISBN: 9781489732842
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Russia, 1942. Outside Stalingrad, Arkady's unit is ambushed and destroyed. The only survivor, the young soldier is faced with a choice: return to the war effort, or try and find his wife, Natasha, located in a factory city somewhere far to the east of the Ural Mountains. Disillusioned and hating the war, Arkady chooses the arduous task of searching for the only person he feels gives him peace. But as he embarks on thea perilous journey into Siberia's vastness, he unwittingly becomes enmeshed in a spiritual and political battle for his nation's soul, a battle being waged not only in the present, but also by towering figures from Russia's past. Meanwhile, Natasha struggles against her own loneliness and despair as intrigue develops around her city's eventual role in a post-war Soviet Union. Told in parallel, Arkady's journey and Natasha's trials form an allegory for the spirit's quest for peace in a world consumed with the pursuit of power. With the forces of history and the world aligned against the individual, how is victory claimed? To this, an unconventional answer is offered - an ancient crucifix. A sweeping portrait of Russia, Beyond the Urals is a journey into the soul itself, probing untouched regions, while exploring the forces vying to occupy and control them.

Travels in Siberia

Travels in Siberia PDF Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429964316
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

The Depths of Russia

The Depths of Russia PDF Author: Douglas Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701568
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
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.

Europe from the Balkans to the Urals

Europe from the Balkans to the Urals PDF Author: Renéo Lukic
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198292005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991 shed entirely new light on the character of their political systems. There is now a need to re-examine many of the standard interpretations of Soviet and Yugoslav politics. This book is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union - as multinational, federal communist states - and the reaction of European and US foreign policy to the parallel collapses of these nations. The authors describe the structural similarities in the destabilization of the two countries, providing great insight into the demise of both.

Stalin's Curse

Stalin's Curse PDF Author: Robert Gellately
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307962350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

The Old Faith and the Russian Land

The Old Faith and the Russian Land PDF Author: Douglas Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical—in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities—about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation—have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

Venona

Venona PDF Author: John Earl Haynes
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300129874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
This groundbreaking historical study reveals the shocking infiltration of Soviet spies in America—and the top-secret cryptography program that caught them. Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years. Hidden in a former girls’ school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode thousands of intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the Soviet code, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide the most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage in the early Cold War years.

The Last of the Tsars

The Last of the Tsars PDF Author: Robert Service
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681775727
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A riveting account of the last eighteen months of Tsar Nicholas II's life and reign from one of the finest Russian historians writing today. In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated and the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution. Now Robert Service, the eminent historian of Russia, examines Nicholas's life and thought from the months before his momentous abdication to his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The story has been told many times, but Service's deep understanding of the period and his forensic examination of previously untapped sources, including the Tsar's diaries and recorded conversations, as well as the testimonies of the official inquiry, shed remarkable new light on his troubled reign, also revealing the kind of Russia that Nicholas wanted to emerge from the Great War. The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political ferment in Russia that followed the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet socialist republic.

Nuclear Disaster in the Urals

Nuclear Disaster in the Urals PDF Author: Zhores Medvedev
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393334111
Category : Radioactive pollution
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Late in 1957 a huge explosion occurred in the disposal section of the Soviet atomic weapons industry located in the Southern Urals where atomic wastes had been stored for over ten years. The result was devastating. The primary radioactive contamination covered between 800 and 1200 square miles, an area almost as large as Rhode Island. People died--whole villages had to be evacuated and bulldozed. All that remained, both plant and animal life, received such a massive dose of radiation that its effects will probably be felt for as long as a century.