To Be or Not to Be in the Party

To Be or Not to Be in the Party PDF Author: Yuri Glazov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400929633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In March of 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Seviet Union. Initially, one could discern serious changes in the policy and statements of this new, young, and obviously efficient leader only with great difficulty. While abroad, Gorbachev had said that anti-Stalinism was a form of anti-Communism. The newspapers were filled with words lauding "the sacred traditions of the 1930's". At the same time, the campaign against drunkenness, corruption, and sloppiness launched by Yuri Andropov was given a new impetus and the highest Party support. In April, 1986, the Chernobyl tragedy took place. The first reaction of the Soviet authorities was the usual one. The Soviet public was not properly informed about the disaster and its unprecedented peril. Millions of jubilant Soviet citizens crowded the squares and streets of Kiev and Minsk during the May Day festivities. We can only guess what the reaction of the Kremlin authorities would have been had not Swedish scientists traced and announced to the world the threatening level of radioactivity. Would the terms "glasnost'" and "perestrojka" have spread through the world press with such intensity and alacrity? A popular Soviet author wrote a year later in the Soviet media: "Chernobyl appeared to be not only a national event, a disaster shared by each of us, but also a dividing line between two eras of time.

To Be or Not to Be in the Party

To Be or Not to Be in the Party PDF Author: Yuri Glazov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400929633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In March of 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Seviet Union. Initially, one could discern serious changes in the policy and statements of this new, young, and obviously efficient leader only with great difficulty. While abroad, Gorbachev had said that anti-Stalinism was a form of anti-Communism. The newspapers were filled with words lauding "the sacred traditions of the 1930's". At the same time, the campaign against drunkenness, corruption, and sloppiness launched by Yuri Andropov was given a new impetus and the highest Party support. In April, 1986, the Chernobyl tragedy took place. The first reaction of the Soviet authorities was the usual one. The Soviet public was not properly informed about the disaster and its unprecedented peril. Millions of jubilant Soviet citizens crowded the squares and streets of Kiev and Minsk during the May Day festivities. We can only guess what the reaction of the Kremlin authorities would have been had not Swedish scientists traced and announced to the world the threatening level of radioactivity. Would the terms "glasnost'" and "perestrojka" have spread through the world press with such intensity and alacrity? A popular Soviet author wrote a year later in the Soviet media: "Chernobyl appeared to be not only a national event, a disaster shared by each of us, but also a dividing line between two eras of time.

Soviet Samizdat

Soviet Samizdat PDF Author: Ann Komaromi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150176361X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Dissidence has been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant because it had little demonstrable impact on the Soviet regime. Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the kind of imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat could be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture so often sought to divide "political" from "cultural" samizdat. Her study provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat in terms of truth-telling, arguing that the act is experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers. This argument will challenge scholars in the field to respond to contentions that go against the grain of both anthropological and postmodern accounts. Komaromi's combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon of samizdat for readers today. Soviet Samizdat shows that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime. Instead, samizdat fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.

Foucault, Marxism and Critique

Foucault, Marxism and Critique PDF Author: Barry Smart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135174598
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
In this work, originally released in 1983, Barry Smart examines the relevance of Foucault's work for developing an understanding of those issues which lie beyond the limits of Marxist theory and analysis - issues such as 'individualising' forms of power, power-knowledge relations, the rise of 'the social', and the associated socialisation of politics. He argues that there exist clear and substantial differences between Foucault's genealogical analysis and that of Marxist theory. Smart thus presents Foucault's work as a new form of critical theory, whose object is a critical analysis of rationalities, and of how relations of power are rationalised.

Communism

Communism PDF Author: Mark Sandle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131786090X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Why did communism grow so quickly? Why did it spread to turn almost half of the world red by the mid-1970s? What impact did it have upon capitalism and capitalist society? Communism is a concise introduction to one of the most important and influential movements of the 20th century. It shows how the modern communist movement emerged out of radical millenarian movements of the Middle Ages and the English Civil War, becoming a mass movement of industrial society, seeking to overturn capitalism and replace it with a society of equality, justice, harmony and co-operation. It traces the growth of modern communism from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its position of global power at the end of the Second World War. Mark Sandle investigates the ultimate failure of communism as a political ideology, and concludes by asking how far the historical record of communism has been used to conceal the historical record of capitalism. Ideal for courses in both History and Politics.

Russia and Eastern Europe, 1789-1985

Russia and Eastern Europe, 1789-1985 PDF Author: Raymond Pearson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719017346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description


Western Europe’s Democratic Age

Western Europe’s Democratic Age PDF Author: Martin Conway
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

The Gulag at War

The Gulag at War PDF Author: Edwin Bacon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349142751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The Gulag at War reveals for the first time official documents kept in the archives of the Soviet forced labour system. An assessment of previous western and Russian studies of the Gulag is followed by a description of its origins. The bulk of the book then concentrates on the labour camps during the Second World War years. New information is revealed regarding prisoner numbers, living conditions, the organisation of forced labour, economic production, and rebellion in the camps.

Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union

Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union PDF Author: D. Zisserman-Brodsky
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403973628
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The 'nationality question' was long central to Soviet thought and policy, and the failure to provide a convincing answer played a major role in the break-up of the Soviet Union into ethnically or nationally defined states. Zisserman-Brodsky explores various explanations of nationalism and its resurgence through a close and unprecedented examination of dissident writings of diverse ethnic groups in the former Soviet Union, thereby bridging macro-theory with micro-politics. Dissident ethnic networks were a crucial independent institution in the Soviet Union, and a basis of civil society. Voicing the discontent and resentment of the periphery at the policies of the centre or metropole, the dissident writings, known as samizdat highlighted anger at deprivations imposed in the political, cultural, social and economic spheres. Ethnic dissident writings drew on values both internal to the Soviet system and international as sources of legitimation; they met a divided reaction among Russians, with some privileging the unity of the Soviet Union and others sympathetic to the rhetoric of national rights. This focus on national, rather than individual, rights helps explain developments since the fall of the Soviet Union, including the prevalence of authoritarian governments in newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.

Paperbacks in Print

Paperbacks in Print PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 1150

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Book Description


1974 Annual Supplement

1974 Annual Supplement PDF Author: Joan Schmitz Bergholt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1475769067
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 828

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Book Description