Satellite Empire is an in-depth investigation of the political and social history of the area in southwestern Ukraine under Romanian occupation during World War II. Transnistria was the only occupied Soviet territory administered by a power other than Nazi Germany, a reward for Romanian participation in Operation Barbarossa. Vladimir Solonari's invaluable contribution to World War II history focuses on three main aspects of Romanian rule of Transnistria: with fascinating insights from recently opened archives, Solonari examines the conquest and delimitation of the region, the Romanian administration of the new territory, and how locals responded to the occupation. What did Romania want from the conquest? The first section of the book analyzes Romanian policy aims and its participation in the invasion of the USSR. Solonari then traces how Romanian administrators attempted, in contradictory and inconsistent ways, to make Transnistria "Romanian" and "civilized" while simultaneously using it as a dumping ground for 150,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma deported from a racially cleansed Romania. The author shows that the imperatives of total war eventually prioritized economic exploitation of the region over any other aims the Romanians may have had. In the final section, he uncovers local responses in terms of collaboration and resistance, in particular exploring relationships with the local Christian population, which initially welcomed the occupiers as liberators from Soviet oppression but eventually became hostile to them. Ever increasing hostility towards the occupying regime buoyed the numbers and efficacy of pro-Soviet resistance groups.

Satellite Empire is an in-depth investigation of the political and social history of the area in southwestern Ukraine under Romanian occupation during World War II. Transnistria was the only occupied Soviet territory administered by a power other than Nazi Germany, a reward for Romanian participation in Operation Barbarossa. Vladimir Solonari's invaluable contribution to World War II history focuses on three main aspects of Romanian rule of Transnistria: with fascinating insights from recently opened archives, Solonari examines the conquest and delimitation of the region, the Romanian administration of the new territory, and how locals responded to the occupation. What did Romania want from the conquest? The first section of the book analyzes Romanian policy aims and its participation in the invasion of the USSR. Solonari then traces how Romanian administrators attempted, in contradictory and inconsistent ways, to make Transnistria "Romanian" and "civilized" while simultaneously using it as a dumping ground for 150,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma deported from a racially cleansed Romania. The author shows that the imperatives of total war eventually prioritized economic exploitation of the region over any other aims the Romanians may have had. In the final section, he uncovers local responses in terms of collaboration and resistance, in particular exploring relationships with the local Christian population, which initially welcomed the occupiers as liberators from Soviet oppression but eventually became hostile to them. Ever increasing hostility towards the occupying regime buoyed the numbers and efficacy of pro-Soviet resistance groups.

During the most dangerous years of the Cold War, a handful of Americans secretly built machines that revolutionized spying and warfare while protecting the United States from a surprise nuclear attack. This is their story, told in full for the first time. of photos.

The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.

For nearly two decades, Jody Berland has been a leading voice in cultural studies and the field of communications. In North of Empire, she brings together and reflects on ten of her pioneering essays. Demonstrating the importance of space to understanding culture, Berland investigates how media technologies have shaped locality, territory, landscape, boundary, nature, music, and time. Her analysis begins with the media landscape of Canada, a country that offers a unique perspective for apprehending the power of media technologies to shape subjectivities and everyday lives, and to render territorial borders both more and less meaningful. Canada is a settler nation and world power often dwarfed by the U.S. cultural juggernaut. It possesses a voluminous archive of inquiry on culture, politics, and the technologies of space. Berland revisits this tradition in the context of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary media culture. Berland explores how understandings of space and time, empire and margin, embodiment and technology, and nature and culture are shaped by broadly conceived communications technologies including pianos, radio, television, the Web, and satellite imaging. Along the way, she provides a useful overview of the assumptions driving communications research on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, and she highlights the distinctive contributions of the Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Berland argues that electronic mediation is central to the construction of social space and therefore to anti-imperialist critique. She illuminates crucial links between how space is traversed, how it is narrated, and how it is used. Making an important contribution to scholarship on globalization, Berland calls for more sophisticated accounts of media and cultural technologies and their complex “geographies of influence.”

"Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union is the culmination of Jonas Bendiksen's fascinating seven-year photographic journey through the outlying republics held in orbit by the immense gravity of the Soviet Empire. When it dissolved, in 1991, these satellite states were sent into free space--and uncertain futures. Bendiksen explored six gray areas in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and far eastern Siberia. Many of these outposts are ostensibly state-less states, places where Soviet nostalgia looms large, self-styled brands of capitalism have emerged, where cities are scarred from bloody insurrections, and entire populations have fled in search of better lives. Hauntingly beautiful, these sixty-two arresting color photographs unsentimentally reveal the often grim circumstances in these half-forgotten regions that are uniformly poor and polluted--and often politically unstable. We may not hear much about them today, but we will certainly hear more from them in the near future as the fall of the Iron Curtain continues to reverberate throughout the region. This book was produced to accompany a traveling exhibition, which opened at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam."--Publisher's website.

The author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy reflects on America's waning power in a masterful collection of essays In his prophetic book Blowback, published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces. Our reliance on Pentagon economics, a global empire of bases, and war without end is, he declares, nothing short of "a suicide option." Dismantling the Empire explores the subjects for which Johnson is now famous, from the origins of blowback to Barack Obama's Afghanistan conundrum, including our inept spies, our bad behavior in other countries, our ill-fought wars, and our capitulation to a military that has taken ever more control of the federal budget. There is, he proposes, only one way out: President Obama must begin to dismantle the empire before the Pentagon dismantles the American Dream. If we do not learn from the fates of past empires, he suggests, our decline and fall are foreordained. This is Johnson at his best: delivering both a warning and an urgent prescription for a remedy.