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Author: Andy Bruno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-04-11
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 110714471X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.
Author: Jonathan Steele
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1984-10-24
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 0671528130
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Simon & Schuster, Soviet Power is Jonathan Steele's exploration on the Kremlin's foreign policy from Brezhnev to Chernenko. This analysis points to a pattern of thwarted strategy and failed objectives, which has weakened the influence of the Soviet Union even while its military power has grown, but warns that the United States frequently misunderstands Soviet intentions and capabilities.
Author: Patryk Babiracki
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2015-05-15
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 1469620901
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConcentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.
Author: Edgar Snow
Publisher:
Published: 1945
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Susanne A. Wengle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-02-05
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 1316195236
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPost-Soviet Power tells the story of the Russian electricity system and examines the politics of its transformation from a ministry to a market. Susanne A. Wengle shifts our focus away from what has been at the center of post-Soviet political economy - corruption and the lack of structural reforms - to draw attention to political struggles to establish a state with the ability to govern the economy. She highlights the importance of hands-on economic planning by authorities - post-Soviet developmentalism - and details the market mechanisms that have been created. This book argues that these observations urge us to think of economies and political authority as mutually constitutive, in Russia and beyond. Whereas political science often thinks of market arrangements resulting from political institutions, Russia's marketization demonstrates that political status is also produced by the market arrangements that actors create. Taking this reflexivity seriously suggests a view of economies and markets as constructed and contingent entities.
Author: Katerina Clark
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2007-01-01
Total Pages: 576
ISBN-13: 0300106467
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLeaders 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.
Author: Sonja D. Schmid
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2015-02-06
Total Pages: 395
ISBN-13: 0262538806
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn examination of how the technical choices, social hierarchies, economic structures, and political dynamics shaped the Soviet nuclear industry leading up to Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. In Producing Power, Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts. Rather than pursue one “definitive” explanation, she investigates how each of these narratives makes sense in its own way and demonstrates that each implies adherence to a particular set of ideas—about high-risk technologies, human-machine interactions, organizational methods for ensuring safety and productivity, and even about the legitimacy of the Soviet state. She also shows how these attitudes shaped, and were shaped by, the Soviet nuclear industry from its very beginnings. Schmid explains that Soviet experts established nuclear power as a driving force of social, not just technical, progress. She examines the Soviet nuclear industry's dual origins in weapons and electrification programs, and she traces the emergence of nuclear power experts as a professional community. Schmid also fundamentally reassesses the design choices for nuclear power reactors in the shadow of the Cold War's arms race. Schmid's account helps us understand how and why a complex sociotechnical system broke down. Chernobyl, while unique and specific to the Soviet experience, can also provide valuable lessons for contemporary nuclear projects.
Author: Rachel Applebaum
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-04-15
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1501735586
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Author: Mark R. Beissinger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1988
Total Pages: 388
ISBN-13: 9780674794900
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow does the excessive bureaucratization of central planning affect politics in communist countries? Mark Beissinger suggests an answer through this history of the Soviet Scientific Management movement and its contemporary descendants, raising at the same time broader questions about the political consequences of economic systems. Beissinger traces the rise and decline of administrative strategies throughout Soviet history, focusing on the roles of managerial technique and disciplinary coercion. He argues that over-bureaucratization leads to a succession of national crises of effectiveness, which political leaders use to challenge the power of entrenched elites and to consolidate their rule. It also encourages leaders to resort to radical administrative strategies--technocratic utopias, mass mobilization, and discipline campaigns--and gives rise to a cycling syndrome, as similar problems and solutions reappear over time. Beissinger gives a new perspective and interpretation of Soviet history through the prism of organizational theory. He also provides a comprehensive history of the Soviet rationalization movement from Lenin to Gorbachev that describes the recurring attractions and tensions between politicians and management experts, as well as the reception accorded Western management techniques in the Soviet factory and management-training classroom. Beissinger uses a number of unusual sources: the personal archive of Aleksei Gastev, the foremost Soviet Taylorist of the 1920s; published Soviet archival documents; unpublished Soviet government documents and dissertations on management science and executive training; interviews with Soviet management scientists; and the author's personal observations of managers attending a three-month executive training program in the Soviet Union. Beissinger's skillful handling of this singular material will attract the attention of political scientists, historians, and economists, especially those working in Soviet studies.
Author: William J. Koenig
Publisher:
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780811905626
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe most significant strategic development in the second half of the twentieth century has been the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower. This dominant position is firmly founded on military strength, and the Soviet Union's relentless expansionist policies would be impossible without the support of strongly manned and well equipped armed forces. More than for any other nation, the USSR's political position, in Europe and throughout the world, depends on the might of the Soviet war machine. Even in internal affairs the generals and admirals have massive influence on the development of Soviet policy. - Jacket flap.
