Download or read book Controversies in Soviet Social Thought Democratization Social Justice and the Erosion of Official Ideology written by Murray Yanowitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past several years observers have become aware of what might be called the "expansionary logic" of the reform debate in the Soviet Union. Punctuated by periods of reaction and retreat, successive phases of reform momentum have brought to the fore ideas and proposals that only months before had been considered too radically unorthodox for prudent discussion. In this account, Murray Yanowitch traces the dynamic evolution of reform thinking and the emergence of liberal and social-democratic schools of thought on several pivotal issues. He shows how the contemporary debate over a recurrent theme - workplace democracy - escalated into demands for democratization of the society and political pluralism, and how similarly time-honoured discussions of the problem of economic inequality took unexpected turns, leading to reconsideration of notions of social justice, attacks on privilege, and, ultimately, demands for destatization and property reform. The cumulative impact of these developments, Yanowitch shows, has not only delegitimated the monopoly of the Communist party but has destroyed the sacral character of Marxism-Leninism itself.
Download or read book New Directions in Soviet Social Thought An Anthology written by Murray Yanowitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume illustrate the kind of expansionary logic that has characterized Soviet reformist thinking in the social sciences in the 1980s. The themes discussed show the wide-ranging and multidisciplinary nature of reformist currents in the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Controversies in Soviet Social Thought written by Murray Yanowitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past several years observers have become aware of what might be called the "expansionary logic" of the reform debate in the Soviet Union. Punctuated by periods of reaction and retreat, successive phases of reform momentum have brought to the fore ideas and proposals that only months before had been considered too radically unorthodox for prudent discussion. In this account, Murray Yanowitch traces the dynamic evolution of reform thinking and the emergence of liberal and social-democratic schools of thought on several pivotal issues. He shows how the contemporary debate over a recurrent theme - workplace democracy - escalated into demands for democratization of the society and political pluralism, and how similarly time-honoured discussions of the problem of economic inequality took unexpected turns, leading to reconsideration of notions of social justice, attacks on privilege, and, ultimately, demands for destatization and property reform. The cumulative impact of these developments, Yanowitch shows, has not only delegitimated the monopoly of the Communist party but has destroyed the sacral character of Marxism-Leninism itself.
Download or read book The Slavophile Controversy written by Andrzej Walicki and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book State of Madness written by Rebecca Reich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.
Download or read book Revelations from the Russian Archives written by Diane P. Koenker and published by . This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Soviet Union A Very Short Introduction written by Stephen Lovell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a fresh approach to the study of the Soviet Union, this Very Short Introduction blends political history with an investigation into Soviet society and culture from 1917 to 1991. Stephen Lovell examines aspects of patriotism, political violence, poverty, and ideology, and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience. Throughout, the book takes a refreshing thematic approach to the Soviet Union and provides an up-to-date consideration of the Soviet Union's impact and what we have learnt since its end.
Download or read book Soviet Politics written by Richard Sakwa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Politics in Perspective is a new edition of Richard Sakwas successful textbook Soviet Politics: an introduction. Thoroughly revised and updated it builds on the previous editions comprehensive and accessible exploration of the Soviet system, from its rise in 1919 to its collapse in 1991. The book is divided into five parts, which focus on key aspects of Soviet politics. They are: * historical perspectives, beginning with the Tsarist regime on the eve of Revolution, the rise and development of Stalinism, through to the decline of the regime under Brezhnev and his successors and Gorbachev's attempts to revive the system * institutions of Government, such as the Communist Party, security apparatus, the military, the justice system, local government and participation * theoretical approaches to Soviet politics, including class and gender politics, the role of ideology and the shift from dissent to pluralism * key policy areas: the command economy and reform; nationality politics; and foreign and defence policy * an evaluation of Soviet rule, and reasons for its collapse. Providing key texts and bibliographies, this book offers the complete history and politics of the Soviet period in a single volume. It will be indispensable to students of Soviet and post-Soviet politics as well as the interested general reader.
Download or read book Stalin s Genocides written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.
Download or read book Economic problems of Socialism in the USSR written by Joseph Stalin and published by Newcomb Livraria Press. This book was released on 1952-01-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation from the original Russian manuscript with a new afterword by the translator and a timeline of Stalin's life and works. In one of his last works written in 1952, Stalin addresses various economic challenges facing the Soviet Union in its pursuit of socialism. He discusses topics ranging from commodity production under socialism to the role of the law of value, offering insights and solutions based on Marxist-Leninist theory.
Download or read book Soviet Constitutional Crisis written by Robert Sharlet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from the adoption of the "post-Stalin" Constitution of 1977 through its subsequent implementation under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko to the radical legal "restructuring" of the Gorbachev years, Robert Sharlet traces the gradual evolution of a nascent constitutionalism in the erstwhile USSR. Sharlet, a noted authority on Soviet law and constitutional development, demonstrates the gradual transformation of law from an instrument of Communist Party rule into the new "rules of the game" for nonauthoritarian political development. In effect, he argues, one of Gorbachev's most durable achievements may be his redefinition of Soviet politics into a legal idiom along with his relocation of policymaking from behind the closed doors of Party conclaves into the more open, emergent arena of constitutional government. In analyzing the politics of law from the Brezhnev era to the rise of Yeltsin, the author takes account of the "war of laws", the symbolic uses of the Soviet constitution, and even the fact that the leaders of the failed coup attempted to justify their seizure of power on constitutional grounds. Constitutionalism has sufficiently suffused Soviet public life, the book concludes, that most of the sovereign republics as successors to the former USSR, have begun designing their futures - to varying degrees - in constitutional forms.
Download or read book Brezhnev Reconsidered written by E. Bacon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for almost two decades when it was at the height of its powers. This book is a long overdue reappraisal of Brezhnev the man and the system over which he ruled. By incorporating much of the new material available in Russian, it challenges the received wisdom about the Brezhnev years, and provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of one of the twentieth century's most neglected political leaders.
Download or read book A Short History Of Soviet Socialism written by Mark Sandle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-16 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Sandle is Lecturer in Russian and East European History at De Montfort University.; This book is intended for undergraduate courses on 20th century Soviet history/the Cold War/European history/Soviet studies/History of political thought/Marxism-Leninism. The Left.
Download or read book Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism written by Bertram Silverman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aiming to explain many Russians' ambivalence to recent changes, this work examines the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of reform, its impact on the socioeconomic structure of the population, and the ways in which these changes violate social perceptions of equity and fairness.
Download or read book When Ideas Fail written by Joachim Zweynert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the history of Russian economic ideas, a peculiar mix of anthropocentrism and holism provided fertile breeding ground for patterns of thought that were in potential conflict with the market. These patterns, did not render the emergence of capitalism in Russia impossible. But they entailed a deep intellectual division between adherents and opponents of Russia’s capitalist transformation that made Russia’s social evolution unstable and vulnerable to external shocks. This study offers an ideational explanation of Russia’s relative failure to establish a functioning market economy and thus sets up a new and original perspective for discussion. In post-Soviet Russia, a clash between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic background ideas has led to an ideational division among the elite of the country. Within economic science, this led to the emergence of two thought collectives, (in the sense of Ludvik Fleck), with entirely different understandings of social reality. This ideational division translated into incoherent policy measures, the emergence of institutional hybrids and thus, all in all, into institutional instability. Empirically, the book is based on a systematic, qualitative analysis of the writings of Soviet/Russian economists between 1987 and 2012. This groundbreaking book makes an important contribution to Central Eastern and Eastern European area studies and to the current debate on ideas and institutions in the social sciences.
Download or read book Labor and Democracy in the Transition to a Market System written by Bertram Silverman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowhere is the tension attending simultaneous political democratization and economic liberalization more sharply felt than in the realm of labour relations. What is happening in Soviet trade unions today? How will the emerging independent unions respond to anticipated rises in unemployment? What kind of social regulation of the labour market will be appropriate in the future? These papers from a pathbreaking US-Soviet conference on labour issues reveal a considerable diversity of views on questions whose resolution will be essential to social peace in this period of transition. Among the noted contributors are Joseph Berliner, Sam Bowles, Richard Freeman, Leonid Gordon, V.L.Kosmarskii, Alla Nazimova, Michael Piore, Boris Rakitskii, Iurii Volkov, Ben Ward and Tatiana Zaslavskaia.
Download or read book New Rich New Poor New Russia Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism written by Bertram Silverman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now expanded to cover the consequences of Russia's 1998 financial collapse, this book focuses on the social consequences of a modern-day great depression. The text examines the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of Russia's leap into capitalism. The topics covered include: the emergence of the "new poor"; the recruitment of a business elite; the changing social and economic status of women; and the impact of marketization on employment. The study draws on a range of statistics and survey research data to present a portrait of the lives and circumstances of comtemporary Russians.
