Download or read book The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class written by György Péteri and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.
Download or read book Private Life under Socialism written by Yunxiang Yan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.
Download or read book Remembering Communism written by Maria N. Todorova and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.
Download or read book Uncivil Society written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies–East Germany, Romania, and Poland–to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany’s pseudotechnocracy to Romania’s megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland’s cult of Mary to the Kremlin’s surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.
Download or read book Russians in Cold War Australia written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russians in Cold War Australia explores the time during the Cold War when Russian displaced persons, including former Soviet citizens, were amongst the hundreds of thousands of immigrants given assisted passage to Australia and other Western countries in the wake of the Second World War. With the Soviet Union and Australia as enemies, skepticism surrounding the immigrants’ avowed anti-communism introduced new hardships and challenges. This book examines Russian immigration to Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s, both through their own eyes and those of Australia's security service (ASIO), to whom all Russian speakers were persons of interest.
Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Download or read book Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union written by Gyorgy Peteri and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents work from an international group of writers who explore conceptualizations of what defined "East" and "West" in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production. They reveal that the roots of an East/West cultural divide were present many years prior to the rise of socialism and the Cold War. The chapters offer insights into the complex stages of adoption and rejection of Western ideals in areas such as architecture, travel writings, film, music, health care, consumer products, political propaganda, and human rights. They describe a process of mental mapping whereby individuals "captured and possessed" Western identity through cultural encounters and developed their own interpretations from these experiences. Despite these imaginaries, political and intellectual elites devised responses of resistance, defiance, and counterattack to defy Western impositions. Socialists believed that their cultural forms and collectivist strategies offered morally and materially better lives for the masses and the true path to a modern society. Their sentiments toward the West, however, fluctuated between superiority and inferiority. But in material terms, Western products, industry, and technology, became the ever-present yardstick by which progress was measured. The contributors conclude that the commodification of the necessities of modern life and the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century made it impossible for communist states to meet the demands of their citizens. The West eventually won the battle of supply and demand, and thus the battle for cultural influence.
Download or read book The Emergence of the Modern Central Bank and Global Cooperation written by Barry Eichengreen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides new analysis of the spread of central banking beyond Western Europe and North America in the 1920s and 1930s.
Download or read book Nomenklatura written by M. S. Voslenskiĭ and published by Hutchinson. This book was released on 1984 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Communism s Shadow written by Grigore Pop-Eleches and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.
Download or read book The Party written by Richard McGregor and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China’s Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future. China’s political and economic growth in the past three decades has been one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China’s inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military and keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CCP remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law and unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world’s only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is primed to think the worst of the West.
Download or read book Privilege in the Soviet Union Routledge Revivals written by Mervyn Matthews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1978, this unique work throws much-needed light upon the exact nature of privilege and elite life-styles in the contemporary Soviet Union, under the Communist regime. Dr Matthews' study places these life-styles in a historical perspective, and characterises, in sociological terms, the people who enjoyed them. This study is based on an extensive programme of personal interviews among emigré groups and a close analysis of original and little-known legal historical sources. There are special sections on the nature of change in the Soviet elite and on social mobility. This reissue will attract interest amongst students and scholars concerned with the history, politics and sociology of the Soviet Union; it will also be of value to all those concerned with the age-old problem of social equality.
Download or read book What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules written by Göran Therborn and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intricate practices of the elite and how they maintain their dominance. In his new book, Göran Therborn – author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society – looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis – input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows – to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal state, the capitalist state and the socialist state. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn’s enquiry in the ‘Future as History’. Written with lucidity and economy, What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules? represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis.
Download or read book Academia in Upheaval written by Michael David-Fox and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism written by S. A. Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.
Download or read book The Principles of Communism written by Friedrich Engels and published by Sanage Publishing House Llp. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Principles of Communism; Principles of Communism; Friedrich Engels; Engels; Friedrich; Principles Communism; The Communist Manifesto; Communist Manifesto; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; Engels; Friedrich; Communism & Socialism; Communism; Socialism; Political Philosophy; History & Theory of Politics; History; Theory of Politics; One-Hour Politics & Social Sciences Short Reads; One-Hour Politics; Social Sciences Short Reads; Economic Conditions; Business Economics; Ideologies; Ideologies & Doctrines eBooks; Ideologies & Doctrines Books; Ideologies Books; Doctrines Books; Ideologies eBooks; Doctrines eBooks
Download or read book Ship of Fools written by Tucker Carlson and published by Free Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller from FOX News star of Tucker Carlson Tonight offers “a targeted snipe at the Democrats and Republicans and their elite enablers” (New York Journal of Books) in a funny political commentary on how America’s ruling class has failed everyday Americans. “Informal and often humorous…an entertainingly told narrative of elite malfeasance” (Publishers Weekly), Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools tells the truth about the new American elites, a group whose power and wealth has grown beyond imagination even as the rest of the country has withered. The people who run America now barely interact with it. They fly on their own planes, ski on their own mountains, watch sporting events far from the stands in sky boxes. They have total contempt for you. In Ship of Fools, Tucker Carlson offers a blistering critique of our new overlords and answers the all-important question: How do we put the country back on course? Traditional liberals are gone, he writes. The patchouli-scented hand-wringers who worried about whales and defended free speech have been replaced by globalists who hide their hard-edged economic agenda behind the smokescreen of identity politics. They’ll outsource your job while lecturing you about transgender bathrooms. Left and right, Carlson says, are no longer meaningful categories in America. “The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t.” Our leaders are fools, Carlson concludes, “unaware that they are captains of a sinking ship.” But in the signature and witty style that viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight enjoy so much, Ship of Fools is “bulging with big and interesting ideas, presented succinctly with wit and precision, each chapter a potential book in itself” (The Washington Times).
