Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822980967
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.
Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822963639
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.
Author: S. Gerovitch
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113748179X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this remarkable oral history, Slava Gerovitch presents interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand. Rather than comprising a "master narrative," these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.
Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262572255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."
Author: Svetlana BOYM
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Get Book Here
Book Description
Boym provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, she conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality.
Author: Dmitri V. Trenin
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 087003345X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Get Book Here
Book Description
The war in Georgia. Tensions with Ukraine and other nearby countries. Moscow's bid to consolidate its "zone of privileged interests" among the Commonwealth of Independent States. These volatile situations all raise questions about the nature of and prospects for Russia's relations with its neighbors. In this book, Carnegie scholar Dmitri Trenin argues that Moscow needs to drop the notion of creating an exclusive power center out of the post-Soviet space. Like other former European empires, Russia will need to reinvent itself as a global player and as part of a wider community. Trenin's vision of Russia is an open Euro-Pacific country that is savvy in its use of soft power and fully reconciled with its former borderlands and dependents. He acknowledges that this scenario may sound too optimistic but warns that the alternative is not a new version of the historic empire but instead is the ultimate marginalization of Russia.
Author: Norman Spinrad
Publisher: Gateway
ISBN: 0575117281
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 547
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the near future, the debt-laden U.S. owns a technology that renders it "the world's best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya's star has risen with the Euro-Russians' while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father's space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered - politics forced Jerry and Sonya's divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.
Author: Erich von Daniken
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Jerome Slater
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190459085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 515
Get Book Here
Book Description
The history of modern Israel is a fiercely contested subject. From the Balfour declaration to the Six-Day War to the recent assault on Gaza, ideologically-charged narratives and counter-narratives battle for dominance not just in Israel itself but throughout the world. In the United States and Israel, the Israeli cause is treated as the more righteous one, albeit with important qualifiers and caveats. In Mythologies Without End, Jerome Slater, a senior scholar on the conflict and a perceptive critic of Israel, takes stock of the conflict over time and argues that US policies in the region are largely a product of mythologies that are often flatly wrong. Because of their widespread acceptance, there have been devastating consequences to the true interests of both countries. However, the historical truth is very nearly the converse: it is Israel and the US that have repeatedly lost, discarded, or even deliberately sabotaged many opportunities to reach fair compromise settlements of the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. As Slater reexamines the entire history of the conflict from its onset at the end of WWI through today, he argues that a refutation of the many mythologies is a necessary first step toward solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Focusing on US role in the conflict, this book exposes the self-defeating policies of both the US and Israel, which have served to prolong the conflict far beyond when it should have been resolved.
Author: Olga Baysha
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558941
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Get Book Here
Book Description
Miscommunicating Social Change analyzes the discourses of three social movements and the alternative media associated with them, revealing that the Enlightenment narrative, though widely critiqued in academia, remains the dominant way of conceptualizing social change in the name of democratization in the post-Soviet terrain. The main argument of this book is that the “progressive” imaginary, which envisages progress in the unidirectional terms of catching up with the “more advanced” Western condition, is inherently anti-democratic and deeply antagonistic. Instead of fostering an inclusive democratic process in which all strata of populations holding different views are involved, it draws solid dividing frontiers between “progressive” and “retrograde” forces, deepening existing antagonisms and provoking new ones; it also naturalizes the hierarchies of the global neocolonial/neoliberal power of the West. Using case studies of the “White Ribbons” social movement for fair elections in Russia (2012), the Ukrainian Euromaidan (2013–2014), and anti-corruption protests in Russia organized by Alexei Navalny (2017) and drawing on the theories of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Nico Carpentier, this book shows how “progressive” articulations by the social movements under consideration ended up undermining the basis of the democratic public sphere through the closure of democratic space.
