Download or read book Russia Against Modernity written by Alexander Etkind and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putin’s war is a “special operation” against modernity. The invasion has been directed against Ukraine, but the war has a broader target: the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor. By trading oil and gas, promoting Trump and Brexit, spreading corruption, boosting inequality and homophobia, subsidizing far-right movements and destroying Ukraine, Putin’s clique aims at suppressing the ongoing transformation of modern societies. Alexander Etkind distinguishes between Russia’s pompous, weaponized paleomodernity, on the one hand, and the lean, decentralized gaiamodernity of the Anthropocene, on the other. Putin’s clique has used various strategies – from climate denialism and electoral interference to war and genocide – to resist and subvert modernity. Working on political, cultural and even demographic levels, social mechanisms convert the vicious energy of the oil curse into all-out aggression. Dissecting these mechanisms, Etkind’s brief but rigorous analyses of social structuration, cultural dynamics and family models reveal the agency that drives the Russian war against modernity. This short, sharp critique of the Russian regime combines political economy, social history and demography to predict the decolonizing and defederating of Russia.
Download or read book Nature s Evil written by Alexander Etkind and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and wide-ranging book views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises go to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works.
Download or read book The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity written by Regina Elsner and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-10-20 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) faced various iterations of modernization throughout its history. This conflicted encounter continues in the ROC’s current resistance against—what it perceives as—Western modernity including liberal and secular values. This study examines the historical development of the ROC’s arguments against—and sometimes preferences for—modernization and analyzes which positions ended up influencing the official doctrine. The book’s systematic analysis of dogmatic treatises shows the ROC’s considerable ability of constructive engagement with various aspects of the modern world. Balancing between theological traditions of unity and plurality, the ROC’s today context of operating within an authoritarian state appears to tip the scale in favor of unity.
Download or read book Russia s Bitter Path to Modernity written by Alexander Chubarov and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will it follow the model of the Western capitalist democracies, as those who applied the economic shock therapy of the early 90s hoped, or will it chose its own distinct path of development? In this history of Russia from 1917 to the present, Alexander Chubarov teases out certain themes developed in his previous book on tsarist Russia (The Fragile Empire). One of the key factors to Russia's distinctiveness is its halfway location in the center of the Eurasian landmass. This lends an inevitability to the traditional cultural schism between Westernizing reformers and Slavophiles. Neither approach, says Chubarov, will work on its own. Chubarov offers "a balanced view, abstaining from narrow, ideologically biased assessments," and examines the triumphs (yes) and failures of Russia's Soviet development "within Russia's own cultural and historical context." Without ever minimizing the brutalities of the Soviet period-the state terror, the collectivizations, the labor camps, the deportations of whole peoples-Chubarov demonstrates much continuity between tsarist and Soviet Russia, with the latter often repeating the former's mistakes. Russia, says Chubarov, cannot turn its back on its Soviet experience. Far from being a blind alley or "aberrant phase," the Soviet period was an organic part of Russia history and "was largely successful in turning Russia and most of the other Soviet republics into modern states.">
Download or read book Russian Modernity written by D. Hoffmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-07-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian Modernity places Imperial and Soviet Russia in a European context. Russia shared in a larger European modernity marked by increased overlap and sometimes merger of realms that had previously been treated as discrete entities: the social and the political, state and society, government and economy, and private and public. These were attributes of Soviet dictatorship, but their origins can be located in a larger European context and in the emergence of modern forms of government in Imperial Russia.
Download or read book The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity 1850 1900 written by Daniel R. Brower and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
Download or read book Russia on the Eve of Modernity written by Leonid Heretz and published by . This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering history of the ordinary Russians and their pre-modern, non-Western culture in late Imperial Russia.
Download or read book Internal Colonization written by Alexander Etkind and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a radically new reading of Russia’s culturalhistory. Alexander Etkind traces how the Russian Empire conqueredforeign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, therebycolonizing many peoples, Russians included. This vision ofcolonization as simultaneously internal and external, colonizingone’s own people as well as others, is crucial for scholarsof empire, colonialism and globalization. Starting with the fur trade, which shaped its enormous territory,and ending with Russia’s collapse in 1917, Etkind exploresserfdom, the peasant commune, and other institutions of internalcolonization. His account brings out the formative role of foreigncolonies in Russia, the self-colonizing discourse of Russianclassical historiography, and the revolutionary leaders’illusory hopes for an alliance with the exotic, pacifistsectarians. Transcending the boundaries between history andliterature, Etkind examines striking writings about Russia’simperial experience, from Defoe to Tolstoy and from Gogol toConrad. This path-breaking book blends together historical, theoretical andliterary analysis in a highly original way. It will be essentialreading for students of Russian history and literature and foranyone interested in the literary and cultural aspects ofcolonization and its aftermath.
Download or read book Anarchist Modernity written by Sho Konishi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations.Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences.Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the “logic” of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West."
Download or read book The Keys to Happiness written by Laura Engelstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolution of 1905 challenged not only the social and political structures of imperial Russia but the sexual order as well. Throughout the decade that followed-in the salons of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde, on the pages of popular romances, in the staid assemblies of physicians, psychiatrists, and legal men—the talk everywhere was of sex. This eagerly awaited book, echoing the title of a pre-World War I bestseller, The Keys to Happiness, marks the first serious attempt to understand the intense public interest in sexuality as a vital dimension of late tsarist political culture. Drawing on a strong foundation of historical sources—from medical treatises and legal codes to anti-Semitic pamphlets, commercial fiction, newspaper advertisements, and serious literature—Laura Engelstein shows how Western ideas and attitudes toward sex and gender were transformed in the Russian context as imported views on prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and other themes took on distinctively Russian hues. Engelstein divides her study into two parts, the first focusing on the period from the Great Reforms to 1905 and on the two professional disciplines most central to the shaping of a modern sexual discourse in Russia: law and medicine. The second part describes the complicated sexual preoccupations that accompanied the mobilization leading up to 1905, the revolution itself, and the aftermath of continued social agitation and intensified intellectual doubt. In chapters of astonishing richness, the author follows the sexual theme through the twists of professional and civic debate and in the surprising links between high and low culture up to the eve of the First World War. Throughout, Engelstein uses her findings to rethink the conventional wisdom about the political and cultural history of modern Russia. She maps out new approaches to the history of sexuality, and shows, brilliantly, how the study of attitudes toward sex and gender can help us to grasp the most fundamental political issues in any society.
Download or read book Renovating Russia written by Daniel Beer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renovating Russia is a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics. In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering. Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization. Renovating Russia thus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.
Download or read book We Modern People written by Anindita Banerjee and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How science fiction forged a unique Russian vision of modernity distinct from Western models Science fiction emerged in Russia considerably earlier than its English version and instantly became the hallmark of Russian modernity. We Modern People investigates why science fiction appeared here, on the margins of Europe, before the genre had even been named, and what it meant for people who lived under conditions that Leon Trotsky famously described as "combined and uneven development." Russian science fiction was embraced not only in literary circles and popular culture, but also by scientists, engineers, philosophers, and political visionaries. Anindita Banerjee explores the handful of well-known early practitioners, such as Briusov, Bogdanov, and Zamyatin, within a much larger continuum of new archival material comprised of journalism, scientific papers, popular science texts, advertisements, and independent manifestos on social transformation. In documenting the unusual relationship between Russian science fiction and Russian modernity, this book offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between science, technology, the fictional imagination, and the consciousness of being modern.
Download or read book Reframing Russian Modernism written by Irina Shevelenko and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modernity Domesticity and Temporality in Russia written by Rebecca Friedman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolution, war, dislocation, famine, and rivers of blood: these traumas dominated everyday life at turn-of-the-century Russia. As Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia explains, amidst such public turmoil Russians turned inwards, embracing and carefully curating the home in an effort to express both personal and national identities. From the nostalgic landed estate with its backward gaze to the present-focused and efficient urban apartment to the utopian communal dreams of a Soviet future, the idea of time was deeply embedded in Russian domestic life. Rebecca Friedman is the first to weave together these twin concepts of time and space in relation to Russian culture and, in doing so, this book reveals how the revolutionary domestic experiments reflected a desire by the state and by individuals to control the rapidly changing landscape of modern Russia. Drawing on extensive popular and literary sources, both visual and textual, this fascinating book enables readers to understand the reshaping of Russian space and time as part of a larger revolutionary drive to eradicate, however ambivalently, the 19th-century gentrified sloth in favour of the proficient Soviet comrade.
Download or read book A History of Modern Russia written by Robert Service and published by ePenguin. This book was released on 2003-09-04 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of twentieth-century Russian history that treats the years from 1917 to 2000 as a single period and analyses the peculiar mixture of political, economic and social ingredients that made up the Soviet compound. It takes the reader from the age of communist rule to the changes that occurred in 1991 and the more uncertain world of Yeltsin and Putin.
Download or read book Crossing Borders written by Michael David-Fox and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis. Discussions of Soviet modernity have tended to see the Soviet state either as an archaic holdover from the Russian past, or as merely another form of conventional modernity. David-Fox instead considers the Soviet Union in its own light—as a seismic shift from tsarist society that attracted influential visitors from the pacifist Left to the fascist Right. By reassembling Russian legacies, as he shows, the Soviet system evolved into a complex "intelligentsia-statist" form that introduced an array of novel agendas and practices, many embodied in the unique structures of the party-state. Crossing Borders demonstrates the need for a new interpretation of the Russian-Soviet historical trajectory—one that strikes a balance between the particular and the universal.
Download or read book The Icon and the Square written by Maria Taroutina and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.
