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Gorbachev: The Man and the System portrays Gorbachev's rise to power and his tenure in office against the background of a period of critical change and development in the Soviet system. The research is primarily based on Soviet materials, supplemented and critically compared with a wide range of Western press and academic studies. Both Zemtsov and Farrar bring to the analysis their own experiences, acquired under different circumstances. Part I focuses on a selected chronology of significant events from Gorbachev's assumption of power in March 1985 to June 1987. They examine leadership and personnel changes, the economy, the society, and the arts. Part II takes a look at foreign policies by ...
Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, a figure who appeared to the outside worid as a commonplace Russian bureaucrat cut from the mold of a Gogol short story, was elevated in 1984 to the post of general sec retary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Thus, a post held by such awesome, fearsome figures as Lenin and Stalin passed into the hands of someone perceived as a nondescript bureaucrat, de void of ideas or initiative, and crippled by old age and infirmity.A singular merit of this work is that it shows how far from the mark were these perceptions. This is the only full-length treatment of Chernenko. in contrast to the vast tomes written on his five predecessors as well as on the presen...
The personal memoir of Aryeh Levin, Israel's first Ambassador to Russia since the severance of relations between the two countries in 1967. Aryeh Levin's four-year tenure as Ambassador to Moscow coincided with great upheavals in the life and times of both Israel and Russia. He was witness to the momentous events that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire and was instrumental in facilitating the immigration of almost half a million Jews to Israel.
Russian Leaders A Bibliography With Indexes
In Soviet times, anthropologists in the Soviet Union were closely involved in the state's work of nation building. They helped define official nationalities, and gathered material about traditional customs and suitably heroic folklore, whilst at the same time refraining from work on the reality of contemporary Soviet life. Since the end of the Soviet Union anthropology in Russia has been transformed. International research standards have been adopted, and the focus of research has shifted to include urban culture and difficult subjects, such as xenophobia. However, this transformation has been, and continues to be, controversial, with, for example, strongly contested debates about the relevance of Western anthropology and cultural theory to post-Soviet reality. This book presents an overview of how anthropology in Russia has changed since Soviet times, and showcases examples of important Russian anthropological work. As such, the book will be of great interest not just to Russian specialists, but also to anthropologists more widely, and to all those interested in the way academic study is related to prevailing political and social conditions.
Gorbachev: The Man and the System portrays Gorbachev's rise to power and his tenure in office against the background of a period of critical change and development in the Soviet system. The research is primarily based on Soviet materials, supplemented and critically compared with a wide range of Western press and academic studies. Both Zemtsov and Farrar bring to the analysis their own experiences, acquired under different circumstances. Part I focuses on a selected chronology of significant events from Gorbachev's assumption of power in March 1985 to June 1987. The authors examine leadership and personnel changes, the economy, the society, and the arts. Part II takes a look at foreign polic...
One third of the world's population today lives under governments that consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninist. In many of these places, severe poverty was endemic in the years before Communist authorities came to power. Communist governments claim to have a special understanding into and effectiveness in dealing with problems of poverty. Marxist-Leninist rulers have been in power for nearly thirty years in Cuba, nearly forty years in China, and over sixty-five years in the Soviet Union. How do the poor fare in such places today?Western intellectuals often assume there is an inevitable tradeoff between bread and freedom under communism. What populations lose in the way of civil and politi...
Wandering in Circles: Venichka’s Journey of Redemption in “Moskva-Petushki” examines the definition of redemption in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki. By placing Erofeev’s poema in conversation with other travel narratives from Russia and the West, the book explores the meaning of redemption across societies and cultures, and how Erofeev creates a commentary on the possibility of redemption in a broken political and social system. Through this comparative approach to Moskva-Petushki, this work offers a new reading of the text as a journey of failed social and personal redemption.
Why did the Soviet system fail? How is it that a political order, born of revolution, perished from stagnation? What caused a seemingly stable polity to collapse? Philip Roeder finds the answer to these questions in the Bolshevik "constitution"--the fundamental rules of the Soviet system that evolved from revolutionary times into the post-Stalin era. These rules increasingly prevented the Communist party from responding to the immense social changes that it had itself set in motion: although the Soviet political system initially had vast resources for transforming society, its ability to transform itself became severely limited. In Roeder's view, the problem was not that Soviet leaders did n...