Retreat from the Finland Station

Retreat from the Finland Station PDF Author: Kenneth Murphy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In examining the lives of leading revolutionaries - Nicolai Bukharin, Milovan Djilas, Imre Nagy, and Alexander Dubcek - and writers - Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and even the young Alexander Solzhenitsyn - who became prisoners rather than masters of the bloodshed their adherence to socialism seemed to unleash, Murphy reveals to us the terrible moral consequences they suffered as their faith in socialism crumbled. He compellingly shows how their idealistic vision spawned a world of want, anger, terror, and death. For blind obedience to the socialist cause allowed the new state to perpetuate, indeed to incarnate, the violence out of which it was born. In so doing, the idea of revolutionary liberty was devoured. Freedom surrendered to Stalinist terror, political innocence to Communist corruption, eloquence to the silence of the gulag.

Retreat from the Finland Station

Retreat from the Finland Station PDF Author: Kenneth Murphy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In examining the lives of leading revolutionaries - Nicolai Bukharin, Milovan Djilas, Imre Nagy, and Alexander Dubcek - and writers - Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and even the young Alexander Solzhenitsyn - who became prisoners rather than masters of the bloodshed their adherence to socialism seemed to unleash, Murphy reveals to us the terrible moral consequences they suffered as their faith in socialism crumbled. He compellingly shows how their idealistic vision spawned a world of want, anger, terror, and death. For blind obedience to the socialist cause allowed the new state to perpetuate, indeed to incarnate, the violence out of which it was born. In so doing, the idea of revolutionary liberty was devoured. Freedom surrendered to Stalinist terror, political innocence to Communist corruption, eloquence to the silence of the gulag.

Footsteps from the Finland Station

Footsteps from the Finland Station PDF Author: Michael Charlton
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412823692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


To the Finland Station

To the Finland Station PDF Author: Edmund Wilson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466899662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history. Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marx—along with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and more—all come to life in these pages. And in Wilson's telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.

The New Labor Radicalism and New York City's Garment Industry

The New Labor Radicalism and New York City's Garment Industry PDF Author: Leigh David Benin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317733606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
First published in 2000. This study examines how Progressive Labor, an antirevisionist offshoot of the Communist Party USA, attempted to revolutionize the labor front in New York City’s garment industry during the 1960s. An ideologically driven group, whose founders were loyal to Stalinism and attracted by Maoism, Progressive Labor set out in 1962 to become the vanguard of the American working class.

Deep Republicanism

Deep Republicanism PDF Author: Donald Hodges
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739130005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Deep Republicanism: Prelude to Professionalism establishes the importance of Machiavelli's radical republican agenda in understanding the major revolutions of the modern world. Donald Hodges's nuanced analysis of The Discourse of Livy reveals a subversive republicanism in Machiavelli's theorizing that is at odds with the demoliberalism often perceived as the work's primary political agenda. Hodges follows this strand of republicanism through history, providing a fascinating account of how these two political philosophies vied with each other throughout much of modern history in conflicts that culminated in the Russian and American Revolutions. A unique treatment of Machiavelli's political agenda, its implementation by numerous historical actors, and its legacy, professionalism,Deep Republicanism examines aspects of Machiavelli's work that have often been overlooked. It also sheds light on Machiavelli himself, whose famously devious and crafty writing style was partly motivated by his political vulnerability in fifteenth century Florence. Hodges's study is both a novel examination of the historical influence of Machiavelli's thought and a testament to the enduring power, influence, and subtlety of one of the best-known Western political philosophers.

Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe

Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe PDF Author: Dick Combs
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
"Reappraises the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union based on the author's 35-year career as a specialist in Soviet and post-Soviet affairs. Explores the psychological universe of Soviet rulers to clarify the nature of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms"--Provided by publisher.

Conditions of European Solidarity: What holds Europe together?

Conditions of European Solidarity: What holds Europe together? PDF Author: Krzysztof Michalski
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789637326479
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The book addresses contemporary developments in European identity politics as part of a larger historical trajectory of a common European identity based on the idea of 'solidarity.' The authors explain the special sense in which Europeans perceive their obligations to their less fortunate compatriots, to the new East European members, and to the world at large. An understanding of this notion of 'solidarity' is critical to understanding the specific European commitment to social justice and equality. The specificity of this term helps to distinguish between what the Germans call "social state" from the Anglo-Saxon, and particularly American, political and social system focused on capitalism and economic liberalism. This collection is the result of the work of an extremely distinguished group of scholars and politicians, invited by the previous President of the European Union, Romano Prodi, to reflect on some of the most important subjects affecting the future of Europe.

Transitions from Authoritarianism

Transitions from Authoritarianism PDF Author: Randall Baker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313073503
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Baker and his colleagues provide a blend of the theoretical and the empirical evidence in an examination of the nature of bureaucracy under non-democratic, authoritarian forms of government, whether on the right, as in Portugal, or the left, as in Bulgaria. In all these instances, the bureaucracy was constructed to serve the distorted interests of centralized, unaccountable power. Following the remarkable spread of democracy in the seventies in Iberia, the eighties in much of Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa, and the nineties in the former USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, the main focus was on reforming the economy and the political institutions. Distinguished scholars concentrate on the inherited bureaucracy--the arm of government with which the people most often have to deal. They highlight the undemocratic, and sometimes antidemocratic, nature of the civil service that is supposed to serve democracy. Others consider the nature of reform as experienced, and as needed, why there is no major policy for real reform of the bureaucracy in many countries, and the similar experience of reforming from the left and the right. Contributors discuss specific experiences as case studies and examine the more general question of what lessons can be learned from this unique perspective into comparative public administration reform. Essential reading for scholars, students, policy makers, and others involved with comparative government and public administration.

Meeting the Demands of Reason

Meeting the Demands of Reason PDF Author: Jay Bergman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457149
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The Soviet physicist, dissident, and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The first Russian to have been so recognized, Sakharov in his Nobel lecture held that humanity had a "sacred endeavor" to create a life worthy of its potential, that "we must make good the demands of reason," by confronting the dangers threatening the world, both then and now: nuclear annihilation, famine, pollution, and the denial of human rights.Meeting the Demands of Reason provides a comprehensive account of Sakharov's life and intellectual development, focusing on his political thought and the effect his ideas had on Soviet society. Jay Bergman places Sakharov's dissidence squarely within the ethical legacy of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, inculcated by his father and other family members from an early age.In 1948, one year after receiving his doctoral candidate's degree in physics, Sakharov began work on the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later received both the Stalin and the Lenin prizes for his efforts. Although as a nuclear physicist he had firsthand experience of honors and privileges inaccessible to ordinary citizens, Sakharov became critical of certain policies of the Soviet government in the late 1950s. He never renounced his work on nuclear weaponry, but eventually grew concerned about the environmental consequences of testing and feared unrestrained nuclear proliferation.Bergman shows that these issues led Sakharov to see the connection between his work in science and his responsibilities to the political life of his country. In the late 1960s, Sakharov began to condemn the Soviet system as a whole in the name of universal human rights. By the 1970s, he had become, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the most recognized Soviet dissident in the West, which afforded him a measure of protection from the authorities. In 1980, however, he was exiled to the closed city of Gorky for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1986, the new Gorbachev regime allowed him to return to Moscow, where he played a central role as both supporter and critic in the years of perestroika.Two years after Sakharov's death, the Soviet Union collapsed, and in the courageous example of his unyielding commitment to human rights, skillfully recounted by Bergman, Sakharov remains an enduring inspiration for all those who would tell truth to power.

Trapped in the Cold War

Trapped in the Cold War PDF Author: Hermann H. Field
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804744317
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
The disappearance behind the Iron Curtain of the American brothers Noel and Hermann Field in 1949, followed by that of Noel’s wife and their foster daughter, was one of the most publicized international mysteries of the Cold War. This dual memoir gives an intensely human dimension to that struggle, with Hermann narrating all that happened to him from the day he was abducted from the Warsaw airport to his release five years later, and Kate relating her unrelenting efforts to find her husband. Thousands of potential victims of Hitler’s dragnet were rescued in 1939 and during World War II through separate efforts of the Field brothers. Arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Noel was taken to Hungary and used as an example of American perfidy in show trials. Hermann went to Poland primarily to find out what had happened to his brother. After Hermann’s abduction, he was taken to the cellar of a secret Polish prison, where he was held for five years. He gives us a detailed account of his battle to survive, alternating despair and horror with mordant humor. Meanwhile, his family had no idea whether he was still alive and if so, where. This moving story, based on detailed notes made by the authors during and shortly after the events described, presents an inside-outside counterpoint, as Hermann’s chapters on his inward journey in his cellar world alternate with Kate’s efforts in London to find him by scrutinizing accounts of political events in Eastern Europe for clues and penetrating the diplomatic corridors of power in the West for help. Hermann had been arrested by a Polish security agent who later defected and became one of the West’s most important informants on Soviet operations in Eastern Europe. The search for the Field brothers was complicated by their history of leftist connections, for this tense period in the Cold War was also the era of McCarthyism in the United States. The book ends with an Epilogue that analyzes the events of fifty years ago in the light of what we know today, as the result of newly available archival material.