The Nature of Soviet Power
Title | The Nature of Soviet Power PDF eBook |
Author | Andy Bruno |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 311 |
Release | 2016-04-11 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 110714471X |
This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.
Soviet Power and the Countryside
Title | Soviet Power and the Countryside PDF eBook |
Author | N. Melvin |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 291 |
Release | 2003-11-04 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0230598528 |
Drawing upon extensive archival and other original sources, Soviet Power and the Countryside offers a new approach to understanding the political dynamics that led to the collapse of the Soviet order. A detailed analysis of the design, implementation and collapse of Soviet policy toward the countryside is used to explore the implications of a broadening of participation in the policy process from the 1960s. Neil J. Melvin argues that the new knowledge about rural society created as a result of this process provided the basis for a fundamental change in the nature of power relations in the Soviet order, leading to the decay and eventual collapse of policy making institutions.
Revelations from the Russian Archives
Title | Revelations from the Russian Archives PDF eBook |
Author | Diane P. Koenker |
Publisher | |
Pages | 836 |
Release | 2011-03-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781780393803 |
Empire of Friends
Title | Empire of Friends PDF eBook |
Author | Rachel Applebaum |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 290 |
Release | 2019-04-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1501735586 |
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.
Soviet Union
Title | Soviet Union PDF eBook |
Author | Raymond E. Zickel |
Publisher | |
Pages | 1182 |
Release | 1991 |
Genre | Russia |
ISBN |
Thank You, Comrade Stalin!
Title | Thank You, Comrade Stalin! PDF eBook |
Author | Jeffrey Brooks |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 340 |
Release | 2021-04-13 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1400843928 |
Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader. Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities. The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.
Soviet Culture and Power
Title | Soviet Culture and Power PDF eBook |
Author | Katerina Clark |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 576 |
Release | 2007-01-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0300106467 |
Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many. The documents presented in this volume reflect the progression of Party control in the arts. They include decisions of the Politburo, Stalin’s correspondence with individual intellectuals, his responses to particular plays, novels, and movie scripts, petitions to leaders from intellectuals, and secret police reports on intellectuals under surveillance. Introductions, explanatory materials, and a biographical index accompany the documents.