Russia Forever

Russia Forever PDF Author: Ashish Shukla
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Ukraine Conflict isn’t what you have been told. This book could completely change your worldview. Hopefully our kids won’t be fooled as we all have been.

Russia Forever

Russia Forever PDF Author: Ashish Shukla
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Ukraine Conflict isn’t what you have been told. This book could completely change your worldview. Hopefully our kids won’t be fooled as we all have been.

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More PDF Author: Alexei Yurchak
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

Russia

Russia PDF Author: Gregory Carleton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067497848X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war. While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride. War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.

Forever Flowing

Forever Flowing PDF Author: Vasiliĭ Grossman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810115033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The novel tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to Russia after thirty years in the Gulag. After short and unsatisfying visits to familiar places and persons in Moscow and Leningrad, the hero settles in a southern provincial town where he briefly establishes a new life with a war widow. Ivan Grigoryevich eventually returns to his boyhood home on the Black Sea, where he is finally able to come to terms with the inhumanity of the new Russian regime.

Two Decades of Re-Emerging Russia: Challenges and Prospects

Two Decades of Re-Emerging Russia: Challenges and Prospects PDF Author: Mr Sanjay Deshpande
Publisher: KW Publishers Pvt Ltd
ISBN: 9385714147
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Russia has been re-emerging as a major political and economic power during the last decade. The leadership of Russia claims that the objectives of transition from the former one-party socialist system to a plural multiparty democratic system and centralised planning to market economy are largely achieved. Russia is politically stable and has demonstrated how new political institutions, multiparty system are functioning under three presidents. In the initial years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy passed through different phases such as crisis, boom and recovery. Russia has largely succeeded in managing its political and economic relations with “Near Abroad” which have witnessed considerable complexities over the last two decades. Russia has demonstrated that its bilateral ties with India in the political and defence sectors have been consistently cordial and close. However, trade and economic relations need to be strengthened. Notwithstanding its major achievements, Russia has been facing several problems, both in its domestic front and in its foreign relations. Some of the major problems on the domestic front are: over centralisation of power, nexus between state authorities, oligarchs and the bureaucracy, growing menace of corruption, surging political reactions by political parties and some former powerful leaders on various political issues, growing social discontent, issues between different ethnic groups, widening economic disparities among various sections of society and regions. On the external front, Russia has conflicts of interest with some former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and the Baltic states. Russia’s relations with the US and NATO have been highly critical on political and security related issues. There is a need for an objective and critical evaluation of how Russia has managed its domestic and foreign affairs after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What were the successes and failures of Russia in its policies and performance with regard to the social, political and economic developments in the country? This book is as attempt to assess those developments.

The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia

The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia PDF Author: Vladimir Gel'man
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902989
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In this book, Vladimir Gel’man considers bad governance as a distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly intentionally because the political leaders of these countries establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their own self-interests. Gel’man considers bad governance as a primarily agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days, bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are short and the external constraints on their behavior are not especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives. Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel’man discusses the logic of building and maintaining the politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative perspective.

The Russian Origins of the First World War

The Russian Origins of the First World War PDF Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674072332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

Troubled Water

Troubled Water PDF Author: Jens Mühling
Publisher: Haus Publishing
ISBN: 1909961779
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A history of the countries bordering the Black Sea told through the stories of the people who live there. Fringing the Black Sea is a diverse array of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jens Mühling travels through this region, telling the stories of the people he meets along the way in order to paint a picture of the mix of cultures found here and to understand the present against a history stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond. A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Mühling brings together a cast of characters as diverse as the stories he hears, all of whom are willing to tell him their complex, contradictory, and often fantastical tales full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities like the Georgian Mingrelians or Bulgarian Muslims, expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Mühling captures the region’s uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity and the diverse humanity of those who live there.

Current Opinion

Current Opinion PDF Author: Edward Jewitt Wheeler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description


Authoritarian Russia

Authoritarian Russia PDF Author: Vladimir Gel'man
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822980932
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.