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Book Russia in the Microphone Age

Download or read book Russia in the Microphone Age written by Stephen Lovell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first history in English of Soviet radio from its earliest days to the advent of television, showing the role played by broadcasting in establishing control of the Soviet State up to the 1970s: including the Cultural Revolution, Stalinist 1930s, World War II, the Cold War, and de-Stalinization.

Book Russia in the Microphone Age

Download or read book Russia in the Microphone Age written by Stephen Lovell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of radio begins alongside that of the Soviet state: Russia's first long-range transmission of the human voice occurred in 1919, during the civil war. Sound broadcasting was a medium of exceptional promise for this revolutionary regime. It could bring the Bolsheviks' message to the furthest corners of their enormous country. It had unprecedented impact: the voice of Moscow could now be wired into the very workplaces and living spaces of a population that was still only weakly literate. The liveness and immediacy of broadcasting also created vivid new ways of communicating 'Sovietness' - whether through May Day parades and elections, the exploits of aviators and explorers, or show trials and public criticism. Yet, in the USSR as elsewhere, broadcasting was a medium in flux: technology, the broadcasting profession, and the listening audience were never static. Soviet radio was quickly earmarked as the mouthpiece of Soviet power, yet its history is also full of unintended consequences. The supreme irony of Soviet 'radiofication' was that its greatest triumph - the expansion of the wireless-listening public in the Cold War era - made possible its greatest failure, by turning a part of the Soviet audience into devotees of Western broadcasting. Based on substantial original research in Moscow, St Petersburg, and Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia in the Microphone Age is the first full history of Soviet radio in English. In addition to the institutional and technological dimensions of the subject, it explores the development of programme content and broadcasting genres. It also goes in search of the mysterious figure of the Soviet listener. The result is a pioneering treatment of broadcasting as an integral part of Soviet culture from its early days in the 1920s until the dawn of the television age.

Book Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia

Download or read book Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia written by Brigid O'Keeffe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hoping to unite all of humankind and revolutionize the world, Ludwik Zamenhof launched a new international language called Esperanto from late imperial Russia in 1887. Ordinary men and women in Russia and all over the world soon transformed Esperanto into a global movement. Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia traces the history and legacy of this effort: from Esperanto's roots in the social turmoil of the pre-revolutionary Pale of Settlement; to its links to socialist internationalism and Comintern bids for world revolution; and, finally, to the demise of the Soviet Esperanto movement in the increasingly xenophobic Stalinist 1930s. In doing so, this book reveals how Esperanto – and global language politics more broadly – shaped revolutionary and early Soviet Russia. Based on extensive archival materials, Brigid O'Keeffe's book provides the first in-depth exploration of Esperanto at grassroots level and sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked area of Russian history. As such, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia will be of immense value to both historians of modern Russia and scholars of internationalism, transnational networks, and sociolinguistics.

Book Metropolitan Belgrade

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jovana Babović
  • Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
  • Release : 2018-06-12
  • ISBN : 0822983397
  • Pages : 379 pages

Download or read book Metropolitan Belgrade written by Jovana Babović and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society. As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade’s middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.

Book The Soviet Sixties

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert Hornsby
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2023-01-01
  • ISBN : 0300250525
  • Pages : 501 pages

Download or read book The Soviet Sixties written by Robert Hornsby and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a remarkable era of reform, controversy, optimism, and Cold War confrontation in the Soviet Union Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the "sixties" era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revived, with renewed emphasis on egalitarianism, equality, and the building of a communist utopia. Mass terror was reined in, great victories were won in the space race, Stalinist cultural dogmas were challenged, and young people danced to jazz and rock and roll. Robert Hornsby examines this remarkable and surprising period, showing that, even as living standards rose, aspects of earlier days endured. Censorship and policing remained tight, and massacres during protests in Tbilisi and Novocherkassk, alongside invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, showed the limits of reform. The rivalry with the United States reached perhaps its most volatile point, friendship with China turned to bitter enmity, and global decolonization opened up new horizons for the USSR in the developing world. These tumultuous years transformed the lives of Soviet citizens and helped reshape the wider world.

Book Transnational Russian Studies

Download or read book Transnational Russian Studies written by Andy Byford and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '[The book] shows that nationalist topoi inevitably have anti-transnational implications. [...] Vlad Strukov and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke look at Russian media ecology from the outside - from Latvia and the United Kingdom media ecology. Strukov's contribution conversely elaborates [...] the Russo-national centricity of the international media outlet of the Riga news portal Meduza, which he calls "transnational Russo-centrism".' Dirk Uffelmann, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie

Book The Soviet Century

    Book Details:
  • Author : Karl Schlögel
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2024-09-24
  • ISBN : 0691237298
  • Pages : 928 pages

Download or read book The Soviet Century written by Karl Schlögel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police. Drawing on Schlögel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.

Book  Singing a Different Tune

Download or read book Singing a Different Tune written by Helena Goscilo and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beneficiary of the pioneering incorporation of sound and synchronicity into cinema, the Hollywood musical became the most popular film genre in America’s thirties and forties. Its eastward migration resulted in a barrage of Polish screen musicals that relied on the country’s famous cabaret stars, while in the Soviet Union it inspired the audience-pleasing kolkhoz musicals of Ivan Pyr’ev and their urban counterpart, directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Like Stalin, Slavic moviegoers delectated tuneful melodies, mobile bodies in choreographed dance numbers, colorful costumes, and the notion that “all’s well that ends well.” Yet Slavic versions of the musical elaborated scenarios that differed from the Hollywood model. This volume examines the vagaries of this genre in both countries, from its early instantiations to its contemporary variations almost a century after its dramatic birth.

Book Russia

    Book Details:
  • Author : Christopher J. Ward
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2021-07-20
  • ISBN : 1000415392
  • Pages : 366 pages

Download or read book Russia written by Christopher J. Ward and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lucid account of Russian and Soviet history presents major trends and events from Kievan Rus’ to Vladimir Putin’s presidency in the twenty-first century. Directly addressing controversial topics, this book looks at issues such as the impact of the Mongol conquest, the paradoxes of Peter the Great, the “inevitability” of the 1917 Revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the Gorbachev reform effort. This new ninth edition has been updated to include a discussion of Russian participation in the War in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war, the rise of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s confirmation as “president for life,” recent Russian relations with the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Union as well as contemporary social and cultural trends. Distinguished by its brevity and supplemented with substantially updated suggested readings that feature new scholarship on Russia and a thoroughly updated index, this essential text provides balanced coverage of all periods of Russian history and incorporates economic, social, and cultural developments as well as politics and foreign policy. Suitable for undergraduates as well as the general reader with an interest in Russia, this text is a concise, single volume on one of the world’s most significant lands.

Book The DJ Who    Brought Down    the USSR

Download or read book The DJ Who Brought Down the USSR written by Michelle Daniel and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the many Cold War radio DJs who broadcast to the USSR, Seva Novgorodsev must be near the top of the list. A masterful BBC presenter, Seva was considered a sage of rock ‘n’ roll. His programs introduced forbidden western popular music and culture into the USSR, rendering him an “enemy voice” and ideological saboteur to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Despite KGB threats and constant media pillorying, Seva remained on the air for 38 years, acquiring millions of listeners all across the breadth of the USSR and beyond. He became a cult phenomenon, dismantling the Soviet way of life in the hearts and minds of youth. This is the story of Russia’s first and best-known DJ.

Book Historical Dictionary of Russian Music

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Russian Music written by Daniel Jaffé and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich is very much today’s lingua franca both in the concert hall and on the soundtracks of international blockbusters from Hollywood. Meanwhile, the innovations of Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the past century. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries for each of Russia’s major performing organizations and performance venues, and on specific genres such as ballet, film music, symphony and church music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Music.

Book To See Paris and Die

    Book Details:
  • Author : Eleonory Gilburd
  • Publisher : Belknap Press
  • Release : 2018-12-28
  • ISBN : 0674980719
  • Pages : 481 pages

Download or read book To See Paris and Die written by Eleonory Gilburd and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Cultural Studies Winner of the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies Winner of the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin’s death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. At the heart of this history is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political rabble-rouser; Rockwell Kent as a quintessential American painter; Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway as teachers of love and courage under fire; J. D. Salinger and Giuseppe De Santis as saviors from Soviet clichés. Imported novels challenged fundamental tenets of Soviet ethics, while modernist paintings tested deep-seated notions of culture. Western films were eroticized even before viewers took their seats. The drama of cultural exchange and translation encompassed discovery as well as loss. Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate belongings. With the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet West disappeared from the cultural map. Gilburd’s history reveals how domesticated Western imports defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, as well as its death and afterlife.

Book Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories

Download or read book Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories written by Ilya Yablokov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian international media outlet Russia Today (RT) has been widely accused in the Western world of producing government propaganda and conspiracy theories. This book explores for the first time the role that conspiracy theories actually play in the network’s broadcasts. More than this, it provides the first ever study of how the Russian government engages with conspiracy theories in the international arena, with a particular focus on the use of conspiracy theories as an instrument of public diplomacy. RT was established in 2005 to represent Russia to the world, and to present a Russian perspective on global events. Whilst some of RT’s more overtly conspiratorial output has been taken off the air, the network remains a source of significant concern for governments and intelligence agencies in Europe and North America. Now, more than ever, policymakers, journalists, academics, and intelligence services alike seek to understand the role RT plays in the Russian government’s foreign policy agenda. The authors use RT as a case study to investigate how global communication technologies influence the development and dissemination of conspiracy theories, which are also an important component of the post-Soviet Russian intellectual landscape and Kremlin-sponsored political discourse. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Politics and International Relations, Russian Studies, and Conspiracy Theories.

Book Material Culture in Russia and the USSR

Download or read book Material Culture in Russia and the USSR written by Graham H. Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Culture in Russia and the USSR comprises some of the most cutting-edge scholarship across anthropology, history and material and cultural studies relating to Russia and the Soviet Union, from Peter the Great to Putin.Material culture in Russia and the USSR holds a particularly important role, as the distinction between private and public spheres has at times developed in radically different ways than in many places in the more commonly studied West. With case studies covering alcohol, fashion, cinema, advertising and photography among other topics, this wide-ranging collection offers an unparalleled survey of material culture in Russia and the USSR and addresses core questions such as: what makes Russian and Soviet material culture distinctive; who produces it; what values it portrays; and how it relates to 'high culture' and consumer culture.

Book News from Moscow

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lecturer in Modern European History Simon Huxtable
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2022-04-28
  • ISBN : 019285769X
  • Pages : 266 pages

Download or read book News from Moscow written by Lecturer in Modern European History Simon Huxtable and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "News from Moscow: Journalism and the Fate of the Thaw Project is a history of the post-war Soviet press that takes readers from the tense ideological climate of the late Stalin era to the comparative freedom of the Thaw. Through a case study of one of the country's most innovative and popular titles, the youth daily Komsomol'skaia pravda, the book shows how journalists attempted to remake the Soviet newspaper after Stalin's death, but details the many obstacles they faced along the way. The book argues that Thaw journalism was characterised by an unresolvable tension between innovation and conservativism: the more journalists tried to devise new forms to attract readers, the more officials grew anxious about the potentially disruptive consequences of reform. Taking readers from the gloomy climate of late Stalinism to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book's six chapters offer examples of journalists attempts to innovate, from its advocacy for person-centred pedagogy in the late Stalin and Thaw periods, to the creation of the country's first polling institute and its support for Brezhnev's technocratic reforms in the 1960s. Drawing on a range of unseen internal documents, including transcripts of private editorial meetings, the book takes readers into the Soviet newsroom for the first time, and details the conversations - with colleagues, functionaries and readers - that characterised journalists' daily work, and the conflicts with officials that came to characterise the Thaw project"--.

Book Design History Beyond the Canon

Download or read book Design History Beyond the Canon written by Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design History Beyond the Canon subverts hierarchies of taste which have dominated traditional narratives of design history. The book explores a diverse selection of objects, spaces and media, ranging from high design to mass-produced and mass-marketed objects, as well as counter-cultural and sub-cultural material. The authors' research highlights the often marginalised role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice. The book is organised in three thematic sections: Consumers, Intermediaries and Designers. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy. The essays in all three sections utilise different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. Design History Beyond the Canon brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.

Book American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post Emancipation Imagination

Download or read book American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post Emancipation Imagination written by Amanda Brickell Bellows and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.