Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era PDF Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498529941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era PDF Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498529941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.

Brezhnev Reconsidered

Brezhnev Reconsidered PDF Author: E. Bacon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230501087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for almost two decades when it was at the height of its powers. This book is a long overdue reappraisal of Brezhnev the man and the system over which he ruled. By incorporating much of the new material available in Russian, it challenges the received wisdom about the Brezhnev years, and provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of one of the twentieth century's most neglected political leaders.

Cold War Correspondents

Cold War Correspondents PDF Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421438445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era PDF Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498529952
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This collection brings together an interdisciplinary array of scholars of late socialism in the USSR and challenges the dominant narrative of stagnation during the Brezhnev era. It demonstrates that the political and intellectual class remained ideologically committed, recognized systemic challenges, and embarked on a creative search for solutions.

Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-1985

Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-1985 PDF Author: Neringa Klumbytė
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739175831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think--it also responded to and was shaped by individuals' needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.

From Washington to Moscow

From Washington to Moscow PDF Author: Louis Sell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
When the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks accords in 1972 it was generally seen as the point at which the USSR achieved parity with the United States. Less than twenty years later the Soviet Union had collapsed, confounding experts who never expected it to happen during their lifetimes. In From Washington to Moscow veteran US Foreign Service officer Louis Sell traces the history of US–Soviet relations between 1972 and 1991 and explains why the Cold War came to an abrupt end. Drawing heavily on archival sources and memoirs—many in Russian—as well as his own experiences, Sell vividly describes events from the perspectives of American and Soviet participants. He attributes the USSR's fall not to one specific cause but to a combination of the Soviet system's inherent weaknesses, mistakes by Mikhail Gorbachev, and challenges by Ronald Reagan and other US leaders. He shows how the USSR's rapid and humiliating collapse and the inability of the West and Russia to find a way to cooperate respectfully and collegially helped set the foundation for Vladimir Putin’s rise.

Khrushchev's Thaw and National Identity in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1954–1959

Khrushchev's Thaw and National Identity in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1954–1959 PDF Author: Jamil Hasanli
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498508146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
On February 25, 1956, Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev delivered the so-called “secret speech” in the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in which he denounced Stalin’s transgressions and the cult of personality around the deceased dictator. Replete with sharp criticism of the Terror of the late 1930s, the unpreparedness of the USSR for the Nazi invasion, numerous wartime blunders, and the deportation of various nationalities, the speech reverberated throughout the subordinate Soviet republics. For republics such as Azerbaijan, the speech was an unmistakable signal to readjust the entire political orientation and figure out ways to redefine governance in post-Stalin era. Previously frozen under the mortal threat of Stalinist persecution, various forms of national self-expression began to experience rapid revival under the Khrushchev thaw. Encouraged by the winds of change at the Center, the Azeris cautiously began to reclaim possession of their administrative domain. Among other local initiatives, the declaration of the Azerbaijani language as the official language was one step that stood out in its audacity, for it was not pre-arranged with the Kremlin and defied the modus operandi of the Soviet leadership. Somewhat reformist in his intentions yet ignorant of the non-Slavic peripheries, Mr. Khrushchev had not foreseen the scenarios that would unfold as a result of its new tone and the developments that would come to be interpreted as the rise of nationalism in the republics. Jamil Hasanli’s research on 1950s’ Azerbaijan sheds light on this watershed period in Soviet history while also furnishing the reader with a greater understanding of the root causes of the dissolution of the USSR.

News from Moscow

News from Moscow PDF Author: Lecturer in Modern European History Simon Huxtable
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019285769X
Category : Journalism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
"News from Moscow: Journalism and the Fate of the Thaw Project is a history of the post-war Soviet press that takes readers from the tense ideological climate of the late Stalin era to the comparative freedom of the Thaw. Through a case study of one of the country's most innovative and popular titles, the youth daily Komsomol'skaia pravda, the book shows how journalists attempted to remake the Soviet newspaper after Stalin's death, but details the many obstacles they faced along the way. The book argues that Thaw journalism was characterised by an unresolvable tension between innovation and conservativism: the more journalists tried to devise new forms to attract readers, the more officials grew anxious about the potentially disruptive consequences of reform. Taking readers from the gloomy climate of late Stalinism to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book's six chapters offer examples of journalists attempts to innovate, from its advocacy for person-centred pedagogy in the late Stalin and Thaw periods, to the creation of the country's first polling institute and its support for Brezhnev's technocratic reforms in the 1960s. Drawing on a range of unseen internal documents, including transcripts of private editorial meetings, the book takes readers into the Soviet newsroom for the first time, and details the conversations - with colleagues, functionaries and readers - that characterised journalists' daily work, and the conflicts with officials that came to characterise the Thaw project"--.

The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market

The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market PDF Author: Oscar Sanchez-Sibony
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100900218X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today.

Voices from the Soviet Edge

Voices from the Soviet Edge PDF Author: Jeff Sahadeo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Jeff Sahadeo reveals the complex and fascinating stories of migrant populations in Leningrad and Moscow. Voices from the Soviet Edge focuses on the hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and others who arrived toward the end of the Soviet era, seeking opportunity at the privileged heart of the USSR. Through the extensive oral histories Sahadeo has collected, he shows how the energy of these migrants, denigrated as "Blacks" by some Russians, transformed their families' lives and created inter-republican networks, altering society and community in both the center and the periphery of life in the "two capitals." Voices from the Soviet Edge connects Leningrad and Moscow to transnational trends of core-periphery movement and marks them as global cities. In examining Soviet concepts such as "friendship of peoples" alongside ethnic and national differences, Sahadeo shows how those ideas became racialized but could also be deployed to advance migrant aspirations. He exposes the Brezhnev era as a time of dynamism and opportunity, and Leningrad and Moscow not as isolated outposts of privilege but at the heart of any number of systems that linked the disparate regions of the USSR into a whole. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union crumbled, migration increased. These later migrants were the forbears of contemporary Muslims from former Soviet spaces who now confront significant discrimination in European Russia. As Sahadeo demonstrates, the two cities benefited from 1980s' migration but also became communities where racism and exclusion coexisted with citizenship and Soviet identity.