Download or read book Ideology and Soviet Politics written by Alex Pravda and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1988-07-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The official ideology of Marxism-Leninism is central to Soviet politics and yet its development in recent years has received very little scholarly attention. In this book a group of leading specialists drawn from both sides of the Atlantic advance decisively upon all earlier discussions of this subject to provide both an authoritative and detailed picture of the development of official ideology from the early years up to Gorbachev's 1986 Party Programme, as well as a consideration of the changing role of ideology in Soviet foreign and domestic policy-making. The book will be required reading for all students of Soviet and communist politics; it should also be of interest to a wider non-specialist audience.
Download or read book Ideology Politics and Government in the Soviet Union written by John Alexander Armstrong and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics written by Graeme Gill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics analyses the way in which Soviet symbolism and ritual changed from the regime's birth in 1917 to its fall in 1991. Graeme Gill focuses on the symbolism in party policy and leaders' speeches, artwork and political posters, and urban redevelopment, and on ritual in the political system. He shows how this symbolism and ritual were worked into a dominant metanarrative which underpinned Soviet political development. Gill also shows how, in each of these spheres, the images changed both over the life of the regime and during particular stages: the Leninist era metanarrative differed from that of the Stalin period, which differed from that of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, which was, in turn, changed significantly under Gorbachev. In charting this development, the book lays bare the dynamics of the Soviet regime and a major reason for its fall.
Download or read book Dissidents among Dissidents written by Ilya Budraitskis and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have the fall of the USSR and the long dominance of Putin reshaped Russian politics and culture? Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country's most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists and contradictions of the Kremlin's geopolitical fantasies, which blend up-to-date references to "information wars" with nostalgic celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reactionary thinkers such as the White émigré Ivan Ilyin. Budraitskis makes an invaluable contribution by reconstructing the forgotten history of the USSR's dissident left, mapping an entire alternative tradition of heterodox Marxist and socialist thought from Khrushchev's Thaw to Gorbachev's perestroika. Doubly outsiders, within an intelligentsia dominated by liberal humanists, they offer a potential way out of the impasse between condemnations of the entire Soviet era and blanket nostalgia for Communist Party rule--suggesting new paths for the left to explore.
Download or read book The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics 1789 1989 written by Mark L. Haas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do leaders perceive threat levels in world politics, and what effects do those perceptions have on policy choices? Mark L. Haas focuses on how ideology shapes perception. He does not delineate the content of particular ideologies, but rather the degree of difference among them. Degree of ideological difference is, he believes, the crucial factor as leaders decide which nations threaten and which bolster their state's security and their own domestic power. These threat perceptions will in turn impel leaders to make particular foreign-policy choices. Haas examines great-power relations in five periods: the 1790s in Europe, the Concert of Europe (1815–1848), the 1930s in Europe, Sino-Soviet relations from 1949 to 1960, and the end of the Cold War. In each case he finds a clear relationship between the degree of ideological differences that divided state leaders and those leaders' perceptions of threat level (and so of appropriate foreign-policy choices). These relationships held in most cases, regardless of the nature of the ideologies in question, the offense-defense balance, and changes in the international distribution of power.
Download or read book The Vernaculars of Communism written by Petre Petrov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political revolutions which established state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were accompanied by revolutions in the word, as the communist project implied not only remaking the world but also renaming it. As new institutions, social roles, rituals and behaviours emerged, so did language practices that designated, articulated and performed these phenomena. This book examines the use of communist language in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. It goes beyond characterising this linguistic variety as crude "newspeak", showing how official language was much more complex – the medium through which important political-ideological messages were elaborated, transmitted and also contested, revealing contradictions, discursive cleavages and performative variations. The book examines the subject comparatively across a range of East European countries besides the Soviet Union, and draws on perspectives from a range of scholarly disciplines – sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, historiography, and translation studies. Petre Petrov is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin. Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Head of Russian and Academic Director of the Princess Dashkova Russia Centre in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.
Download or read book Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics written by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Law Rights and Ideology in Russia written by Bill Bowring and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the destiny of a great power brings into sharp focus several key episodes in Russia’s vividly ideological engagement with law and rights. Drawing on 30 years of experience of consultancy and teaching in many regions of Russia and on library research in Russian-language texts, Bill Bowring provides unique insights into people, events and ideas. The book starts with the surprising role of the Scottish Enlightenment in the origins of law as an academic discipline in Russia in the eighteenth century. The Great Reforms of Tsar Aleksandr II, abolishing serfdom in 1861 and introducing jury trial in 1864, are then examined and debated as genuine reforms or the response to a revolutionary situation. A new interpretation of the life and work of the Soviet legal theorist Yevgeniy Pashukanis leads to an analysis of the conflicted attitude of the USSR to international law and human rights, especially the right of peoples to self-determination. The complex history of autonomy in Tsarist and Soviet Russia is considered, alongside the collapse of the USSR in 1991. An examination of Russia’s plunge into the European human rights system under Yeltsin is followed by the history of the death penalty in Russia. Finally, the secrets of the ideology of ‘sovereignty’ in the Putin era and their impact on law and rights are revealed. Throughout, the constant theme is the centuries long hegemonic struggle between Westernisers and Slavophiles, against the backdrop of the Messianism that proclaimed Russia to be the Third Rome, was revived in the mission of Soviet Russia to change the world and which has echoes in contemporary Eurasianism and the ideology of sovereignty.
Download or read book Soviet Politics 1917 1991 written by Mary McAuley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the space of mere months in 1991, the Soviet Union saw an attempted coup fail, Gorbachev leave office, the Baltic states acquire independence, Leningrad vote to rename itself St Petersburg, the Communist Party disband, and the Russian flag fly over the Kremlin. One of the world's great powers--a country of some 200 nationalities stretching across a dozen time zones--had simply disintegrated, ending an epoch in world history. Now, for the first time, we are able to look back and assess the complete 75 year experiment with communism. Based on extensive research and a first-hand knowledge of the Soviet system, Soviet Politics: 1917-1991 offers an authoritative and lively history of the entire spectrum of Soviet politics, from the October Revolution and the rise of Lenin to the emergence of the Commonwealth of Independent States. McAuley ranges from the Revolution to the unprecedented crash industrialization and social mobility, to dictatorship and mass terror under Stalin, to conservative state control under Krushchev, Kosygin, and Brezhnev, and finally to the swift collapse of the state. The author offers a particularly stimulating analysis of the developments that brought an end to communist party rule and the breakup of the Soviet Union. She describes, for instance, how the 1989 elections undermined the Communist Party's assumption of unqualified popular support (Yeltsin, the bete noire of the Moscow party, was swept in, and Soloviev, a deputy member of the Politburo, who ran unopposed in Leningrad, failed to garner 50% of the vote). She shows how the Congress of that year, televised nationally, revealed to a wrapt nation a Party no longer solidly united behind one stand, where deputies openly criticized the government, the KGB, and the Afghan war. And she paints a striking portrait of Gorbachev trying to reconcile irreconcilable interests, to heal the rift between Democrats and Party conservatives, as the center began to unravel. By the end of 1991, the USSR was gone forever, with momentous and unpredictable consequences not only for the peoples of the former Soviet Union, but for the world as a whole. Soviet Politics helps readers make sense of the developments since 1985, showing how and why the system fell apart. It will interest anyone wanting a full understanding of current world events.
Download or read book Propaganda State in Crisis written by David Brandenberger and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An exposé of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, Propaganda State in Crisis ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.
Download or read book Einstein and Soviet Ideology written by Alexander Vucinich and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the historical trajectory of one of the most momentous confrontations in the intellectual life of the Soviet Union—the conflict between Einstein's theory of relativity and official Soviet ideology embodied in dialectical materialism. It describes how Soviet attitudes toward Einstein's theory of relativity changed again and again during the eras of Soviet history: pre-Stalin, Stalin, post-Stalin, and perestroika.
Download or read book Geopolitical Imagination written by Mikhail Suslov and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his timely book, Mikhail Suslov discusses contemporary Russian geopolitical culture and argues that a better knowledge of geopolitical concepts and fantasies is instrumental for understanding Russia’s policies. Specifically, he analyzes such concepts as “Eurasianism,” “Holy Russia,” “Russian civilization,” “Russia as a continent,” “Novorossia,” and others. He demonstrates that these concepts reached unprecedented ascendance in the Russian public debates, tending to overshadow other political and domestic discussions. Suslov argues that the geopolitical imagination, structured by these concepts, defines the identity of post-Soviet Russia, while this complex of geopolitical representations engages, at the same time, with the broader, international criticism of the Western liberal world order and aligns itself with the conservative defense of cultural authenticity across the globe. Geopolitical ideologies and utopias discussed in the book give the post-Soviet political mainstream the intellectual instruments to think about Russia’s exclusion—imaginary or otherwise—from the processes of a global world which is re-shaping itself after the end of the Cold War; they provide tools to construct the self-perception of Russia as a sovereign great-power, a self-sufficient civilization, and as one of the poles in a multipolar world; and they help to establish the Messianic vision of Russia as the beacon of order, tradition, and morality in a sea of chaos and corruption.
Download or read book Turkey Kemalism and the Soviet Union written by Vahram Ter-Matevosyan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Kemalist ideology of Turkey from two perspectives. It discusses major problems in the existing interpretations of the topic and how the incorporation of Soviet perspectives enriches the historiography and our understanding of that ideology. To address these questions, the book looks into the origins, evolution, and transformational phases of Kemalism between the 1920s and 1970s. The research also focuses on perspectives from abroad by observing how republican Turkey and particularly its founding ideology were viewed and interpreted by Soviet observers. Paying more attention to the diplomatic, geopolitical, and economic complexities of Turkish-Soviet relations, scholars have rarely problematized those perceptions of Turkish ideological transformations. Looking at various phases of Soviet attitudes towards Kemalism and its manifestations through the lenses of Communist leaders, party functionaries, diplomats and scholars, the book illuminates the underlying dynamics of Soviet interpretations.
Download or read book Russian Eurasianism written by Marlène Laruelle and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of axes: European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.
Download or read book Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union written by Mary Buckley and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ideologies of Race written by David Rainbow and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the concept of "race" applicable to Russia and the Soviet Union? Citing the idea of Russian exceptionalism, many would argue that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while nationalities mattered, race did not. Others insist that race mattered no less in Russia than it did for European neighbours and countries overseas. These conflicting notions have made it difficult to understand rising racial tensions in Russian and Eurasian societies in recent years. A collection of new studies that reevaluate the meaning of race in Russia and the Soviet Union, Ideologies of Race brings together historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists of Russia, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The essays shift the principle question from whether race meant the same thing in the region as it did in the "classic" racialized regimes such as Nazi Germany and the United States, to how race worked in Russia and the Soviet Union during various periods in time. Approaching race as an ideology, this book illuminates the complicated and sometimes contradictory intersection between ideas about race and racializing practices. An essential reminder of the tensions and biases that have had a direct and lasting impact on Russia, Ideologies of Race yields crucial insights into the global history of race and its ongoing effects in the contemporary world. Contributors include Adrienne Edgar (University of California, Santa Barbara), Aisha Khan (New York University), Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan), Susanna Soojung Lim (University of Oregon), Marina Mogilner (University of Illinois, Chicago), Brigid O'Keeffe (Brooklyn College), David Rainbow (University of Houston), Gunja SenGupta (Brooklyn College), Vera Tolz (University of Manchester), Anika Walke (Washington University, St. Louis), Barbara Weinstein (New York University), and Eric Weitz (City University of New York).
Download or read book The Landscape of Stalinism written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet �culture.� In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and �sold� as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls �a cartography of power� -- an organization of the entire country into �a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness,� with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers� magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.
