Return From The USSR

Return From The USSR PDF Author: Andre Gide
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1447492552
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 79

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Book Description
During the 1930s, Gide briefly became a communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveller (he never formally joined the Communist Party). As a distinguished writer sympathising with the cause of communism, he was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of writers. The tour disillusioned him and he subsequently became quite critical of Soviet Communism. This criticism of Communism caused him to lose socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in this book Return From The USSR first published in the 1930's.

Return from the U.S.S.R.

Return from the U.S.S.R. PDF Author: André Gide
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description


André Gide's Return From the USSR

André Gide's Return From the USSR PDF Author: André Gide
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781304805188
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 - 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). His work "Retour de l' U.R.S.S." (1936) is a simple, yet important testimony to life inside a totalitarian society and the ensuing disillusionment felt by those who believed in the socialist utopia. Gide's informal style allows the reader to travel inside Stalin's Soviet Union and understand the disillusionment that Gide and others felt at seeing hopes dash upon the rocks of reality. It is a must read for anyone interested in learning about totalitarianism from inside a system.

The Last Empire

The Last Empire PDF Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal) On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades -- with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. Bush, in fact, was firmly committed to supporting Gorbachev as he attempted to hold together the USSR in the face of growing independence movements in its republics. Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months, providing invaluable insight into the origins of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the outset of the most dangerous crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Choice Outstanding Academic Title BBC History Magazine Best History Book of the Year

The Return

The Return PDF Author: Daniel Treisman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416560726
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Professor Daniel Treisman answers some of scholars' most pressing questions that haunt modern day Russia. Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate, and could its collapse have been avoided? Did Yeltsin destroy too much or too little of the Soviet political order? What explains Putin's unprecedented popularity with the Russian public? How did the "oligarchs" reshape the Russian economy? Treisman suggests that these questions can be answered by looking back through the dynamic political and social traditions of the region. Rigorous rather than rhetorical, this book uses historically documented evidence with modern day conditions to paint a complete picture of Russia today. In a time when global politics are more important than ever, it is critical for us to understand the inner workings.

Back in the USSR

Back in the USSR PDF Author: Artemy Troitsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
First hand account of the history of rock music in the Soviet Union.

Return from the U. S. S. R. and Afterthoughts on My Return

Return from the U. S. S. R. and Afterthoughts on My Return PDF Author: Andre Gide
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN: 9780374249502
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description


Return to the Motherland

Return to the Motherland PDF Author: Seth Bernstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501767402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Return to the Motherland follows those who were displaced to the Third Reich back to the Soviet Union after the victory over Germany. At the end of World War II, millions of people from Soviet lands were living as refugees outside the borders of the USSR. Most had been forced laborers and prisoners of war, deported to the Third Reich to work as racial inferiors in a crushing environment. Seth Bernstein reveals the secret history of repatriation, the details of the journey, and the new identities, prospects, and dangers for migrants that were created by the tumult of war. He uses official and personal sources from declassified holdings in post-Soviet archives, more than one hundred oral history interviews, and transnational archival material. Most notably, he makes extensive use of secret police files declassified only after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. The stories described in Return to the Motherland reveal not only how the USSR grappled with the aftermath of war but also the universality of Stalinism's refugee crisis. While arrest was not guaranteed, persecution was ubiquitous. Within Soviet society, returnees met with a cold reception that demanded hard labor as payment for perceived disloyalty, soldiers perpetrated rape against returning Soviet women, and ordinary people avoided contact with repatriates, fearing arrest as traitors and spies. As Bernstein describes, Soviet displacement presented a challenge to social order and the opportunity to rebuild the country as a great power after a devastating war.

Return to Cold War

Return to Cold War PDF Author: Robert Legvold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509501924
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The 2014 crisis in Ukraine sent a tottering U.S.-Russian relationship over a cliff - a dangerous descent into deep mistrust, severed ties, and potential confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War period. In this incisive new analysis, leading expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, Robert Legvold, explores in detail this qualitatively new phase in a relationship that has alternated between hope and disappointment for much of the past two decades. Tracing the long and tortured path leading to this critical juncture, he contends that the recent deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations deserves to be understood as a return to cold war with great and lasting consequences. In drawing out the commonalities between the original cold war and the current confrontation, Return to Cold War brings a fresh perspective to what is happening between the two countries, its broader significance beyond the immediate issues of the day, and how political leaders in both countries might adjust their approaches in order, as the author urges, to make this new cold war "as short and shallow as possible."

Age of Delirium

Age of Delirium PDF Author: David Satter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300147899
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The first state in history to be based explicitly on atheism, the Soviet Union endowed itself with the attributes of God. In this book, David Satter shows through individual stories what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea, how people were forced to act out this fictitious reality, and the tragic human cost of the Soviet attempt to remake reality by force. “I had almost given up hope that any American could depict the true face of Russia and Soviet rule. In David Satter’s Age of Delirium, the world has received a chronicle of the calvary of the Russian people under communism that will last for generations.†?—Vladimir Voinovich, author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin “Spellbinding. . . . Gives one a visceral feel for what it was like to be trapped by the communist system.†?—Jack Matlock, Washington Post “Satter deserves our gratitude. . . . He is an astute observer of people, with an eye for essential detail and for human behavior in a universe wholly different from his own experience in America.†?—Walter Laqueur, Wall Street Journal “Every page of this splendid and eloquent and impassioned book reflects an extraordinarily acute understanding of the Soviet system.†?—Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Times

Stalin's Quest for Gold

Stalin's Quest for Gold PDF Author: Elena Osokina
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501758527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism. Driven by the state's hunger for gold and the people's starvation, Torgsin rejected Marxist postulates of the socialist political economy: the notorious class approach and the state hard-currency monopoly. In its pursuit for gold, Torgsin advertised in the capitalist West, encouraging foreigners to purchase goods for their relatives in the USSR; and its seaport shops and restaurants operated semilegally as brothels, inducing foreign sailors to spend hard currency for Soviet industrialization. Examining Torgsin from multiple perspectives—economic expediency, state and police surveillance, consumerism, even interior design and personnel—Stalin's Quest for Gold radically transforms the stereotypical view of the Soviet economy and enriches our understanding of everyday life in Stalin's Russia.