Download or read book Stalin s Quest for Gold written by Elena Osokina and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism. Driven by the state's hunger for gold and the people's starvation, Torgsin rejected Marxist postulates of the socialist political economy: the notorious class approach and the state hard-currency monopoly. In its pursuit for gold, Torgsin advertised in the capitalist West, encouraging foreigners to purchase goods for their relatives in the USSR; and its seaport shops and restaurants operated semilegally as brothels, inducing foreign sailors to spend hard currency for Soviet industrialization. Examining Torgsin from multiple perspectives—economic expediency, state and police surveillance, consumerism, even interior design and personnel—Stalin's Quest for Gold radically transforms the stereotypical view of the Soviet economy and enriches our understanding of everyday life in Stalin's Russia.
Download or read book In Search of Soviet Gold written by John D. Littlepage and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ukraine s Many Faces written by Olena Palko and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia's large-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022 once again made Ukraine the focus of world media. Behind those headlines remain the complex developments in Ukraine's history, national identity, culture and society. Addressing readers from diverse backgrounds, this volume approaches the history of Ukraine and its people through primary sources, from the early modern period to the present. Each document is followed by an essay written by an expert on the period, and a conversational piece touching on the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine. In this ground-breaking collection, Ukraine's history is sensitively accounted for by scholars inviting the readers to revisit the country's history and culture. With a foreword by Olesya Khromeychuk.
Download or read book Autocracy and Health Governance in Russia written by Vlad Kravtsov and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is the first attempt to investigate how and to what extent authoritarian (personalistic) regimes fail to provide fundamental goods and services. For two decades, Russian authorities spent much effort and money to improve health administration, but most success stories are borderline fake. The failure is by design; because personalistic regimes rely on personalized exchanges and bargains instead of impersonal rules and permanent organizations, all actors put self-interest ahead of patients’ needs. It is a severe problem because authoritarian principals proclaim social betterment as their central goal -- and many Russians take such claims at face value -- but incentivize their agents to imitate progress and tolerate slipshod performance. The benefits of this investigation are three-fold. First, the book provides an analytical framework of bad governance rooted in the rational institutionalist tradition and connected to competence-control theory. Second, it gives a general readership interested in how Russia works a sense of the key political players’ mindset and the regime-induced constraints under which elites operate. Third, although the book investigates health governance exclusively, its analytical framework is portable to other issue areas and could be applied to explain how and why Russia evolved into an ineffective, coercive, and predatory state under Putin’s leadership.
Download or read book On Stony Ground written by James Urry and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2024-03-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Stony Ground presents a historical ethnographic account of a generation of Mennonites from the Soviet Union who, following Russia’s revolution and civil war, immigrated to Manitoba during the 1920s. James Urry examines how they came to terms with a new land and with their new neighbours, including other Mennonites, Ukrainians, French Canadians, and Indigenous Peoples. The book discusses the impact of the Great Depression and how the immigrants struggled with their identity in Canada as Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Germany and the USSR. It reveals the immigrants’ desire to maintain their faith, language, and culture while encouraging their children to take advantage of an education conducted mainly in English. On Stony Ground explores how prosperity following the Second World War helped the immigrants to build a community in conjunction with others, including Mennonites and non-Mennonites, and to accept their new home in Canada.
Download or read book Red Arctic written by John McCannon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of refreshing originality and vivid appeal, Red Arctic tells the story of Stalinist Russia's massive campaign to explore and develop its Northern territories during the 1930s. Author John McCannon recounts the dramatic stories of the polar expeditions--conducted by foot, ship, and plane--that were the pride of Stalinist Russia, in order to expose the reality behind them: chaotic blunders, bureaucratic competition, and the eventual rise of the Gulag as the dominant force in the North. Red Arctic also traces the development of the polar-based popular culture of the decade, making use of memoirs, films, radio broadcasts, children's books, and cultural ephemera ranging from placards to postage stamps to show how Russia's "Arctic Myth" became an integral part of the overall socialist-realist aesthetic that animated Stalinist culture throughout the 1930s.
Download or read book Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia written by Helena Goscilo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to explore the phenomenon of glamour and celebrity in contemporary Russian culture, ranging across media forms, disciplinary boundaries and modes of inquiry, with particular emphasis on the media personality. The book demonstrates how the process of ‘celebrification’ in Russia coincides with the dizzying pace of social change and economic transformation, the latter enabling an unprecedented fascination with glamour and its requisite extravagance; how in the 1990s and 2000s, celebrities - such as film or television stars - moved away from their home medium to become celebrities straddling various media; and how celebrity is a symbol manipulated by the dominant culture and embraced by the masses. It examines the primacy of the visual in celebrity construction and its dominance over the verbal, alongside the interdisciplinary, cross-media, post-Soviet landscape of today’s fame culture. Taking into account both general tendencies and individual celebrities, including pop-diva Alla Pugacheva and ex-President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the book analyses the internal dynamics of the institutions involved in the production, marketing, and maintenance of celebrities, as well as the larger cultural context and the imperatives that drive Russian society’s romance with glamour and celebrity.
Download or read book Kashmir s Untold Story written by Iqbal Chand Malhotra and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has this state of siege in the Kashmir valley continued for 72 years since the Partition of India? What role has Pakistan played in it all of these years? And will there ever be a resolution to the militancy in the state? How will Islamabad get the forces of Islamic jihad-nurtured and based in Pakistan-to ever reconcile to the existing boundaries of J&K? How important is the ownership of the waters of the rivers of the Indus system for Pakistan-despite generous supplies under the Indus Waters Treaty-in determining an end to the siege within Kashmir? What are China's interests in J&K and how does the success of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) for oil and gas supplies hinge on Pakistan's occupation of northern areas of Kashmir? Why does the future survival and growth of the Chinese microchip industry depend upon the continuance of China's control of the waters and dams in the Indus river system? Kashmir's Untold Story: Declassified provides answers to these gripping questions and joins the dots in presenting the matrix of a consistent and compelling argument regarding the future of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Today, the state's water resources are coveted by the beleaguered Chinese microchip industry and it appears that this is going to determine the continuing militancy in the state. Malhotra and Raza argue that China and its client Pakistan will actively back the militancy, come what may. Delving deeper, the book also reveals amazing insights into the Government of India's policy towards the state, right from 1889, when it first imposed central rule and dispossessed the rule of the then Maharaja, till date. Owing to its strategic location, the intrigues within the state and the machinations of its neighbours have resulted in the government directly administering its affairs, one way or the other, for the last 130 years. It is a riveting account of the history of Jammu and Kashmir, from the time of its political and geographic consolidation under Maharaja Gulab Singh to present-day India.
Download or read book Contemporary Japan written by and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Holocaust Memories written by Claudia Moscovici and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly eighty years have passed since the Holocaust. There have been hundreds of memoirs, histories and novels written about it, yet many fear that this important event may fall into oblivion. As Holocaust survivors pass away, their legacy of suffering, tenacity and courage could be forgotten. It is up to each generation to commemorate the victims, preserve their life stories and hopefully help prevent such catastrophes. These were my main motivations in writing this book, Holocaust Memories, which includes reviews of memoirs, histories, biographies, novels and films about the Holocaust. It was difficult to choose among the multitude of books on the subject that deserve our attention. I made my selections based partly on the works that are considered to be the most important on the subject; partly on wishing to offer some historical background about the Holocaust in different countries and regions that were occupied by or allied themselves with Nazi Germany, and partly on my personal preferences, interests and knowledge. The Nazis targeted European Jews as their main victims, so my book focuses primarily on them. At the same time, since the Nazis also targeted other groups they considered dangerous and inferior, I also review books about the sufferings of the Gypsies, the Poles and other groups that fell victim to the Nazi regimes. In the last part, I review books that discuss other genocides and crimes against humanity, including the Stalinist mass purges, the Cambodian massacres by the Pol Pot regime and the Rwandan genocide. I want to emphasize that history can, indeed, repeat itself, even if in different forms and contexts. Just as the Jews of Europe were not the only targets of genocide, Fascist regimes were not its only perpetrators.
Download or read book China s Quest written by John W. Garver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'China's Quest', the result of over a decade of research, writing, and analysis, is both sweeping in breadth and encyclopedic in detail.
Download or read book The Age of Anxiety written by Mark Galeotti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The geography of Russia -- vast, unwieldy, exposed -- and her tragic history of foreign invasion have created an overriding sense of military vulnerability amongst her leaders that, after the horrors of the Second World War, amounted almost to paranoia. This important study of the years since Brezhnev shows how this obsession with national security have been at the core of Russian thinking right through the reforms of the Gorbachev era and the eventual collapse of the USSR, and continues to dominate the turbulent politics of post-Soviet Russia today.
Download or read book The Communist Quest for National Legitimacy in Europe 1918 1989 written by Martin Mevius and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed "socialist patriotism," a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception. The study of communist national legitimacy is an exciting new field. This book presents examples of communist attempts to co-opt nationalism from both sides of the iron curtain and lays bare the striking similarities between such diverse cases as the socialist patriotism of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the national line of the Portuguese communists, between Romanian communist nation building and the national ideology of the Spanish Communist Party. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.
Download or read book The Lady in Gold written by Anne-Marie O'Connor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor. Winner of the Marfield National Award for Arts Writing. Winner of a California Book Award.
Download or read book The Forsaken written by Tim Tzouliadis and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal. In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice.
Download or read book Quest for Life a Record of Five Months in the Soviet Union written by S. Mahmuduzzafar and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Full Value Ruble written by Kristy Ironside and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history shows that, despite MarxismÕs rejection of money, the ruble was critical to the Soviet UnionÕs promise of shared prosperity for its citizens. In spite of Karl MarxÕs proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lost on Soviet leaders, despite official Communist Party dogma. Money, Ironside demonstrates, mediated the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens and was at the center of both the governmentÕs and the peopleÕs visions for the maturing Communist project. A strong rubleÑone that held real value in workersÕ hands and served as an effective labor incentiveÑwas seen as essential to the economic growth that would rebuild society and realize CommunismÕs promised future of abundance. Ironside shows how Soviet citizens turned to the state to remedy the damage that the ravages of the Second World War had inflicted upon their household economies. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, progress toward Communism was increasingly measured by the health of its citizensÕ personal finances, such as greater purchasing power, higher wages, better pensions, and growing savings. However, the increasing importance of money in Soviet life did not necessarily correlate to improved living standards for Soviet citizens. The Soviet governmentÕs achievements in Òraising the peopleÕs material welfareÓ continued to lag behind the WestÕs advances during a period of unprecedented affluence. These factors combined to undermine popular support for Soviet power and confidence in the Communist project.
