Download or read book The Fate of Russia written by Nicholas Berdyaev and published by Frsj Publications. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1st English Translation from Russian: "The Fate of Russia" is an insightful book by the eminent Russian religious philosopher, Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948). There is an "irony of fate" regarding the book in its "untimely" timeliness -- a collection of WWI related articles from 1914-1916, it was published in 1918 only after the Russian Communist 1917 Revolution and Russia's subsequent dropping out of the war, but before the total closure of independent presses.Thus, "untimely" at the moment of its appearance, it is at present quite "timely" as regards an understanding of the enigmatic visage of post-Soviet Russia for the world. "The Fate of Russia" is divided into five segments, first exploring the psychology of the "Russian Soul", the vastness of the Russian Land, a great East-West historically conflicted between its European and Asiatic-Mongol inheritance, the choice, as expressed by Vl. Solov'ev, between Xerxes or Christ. WWI proved to be the "graveyard of empires", spawning further historical nightmares into our own time. Like Spengler, Berdyaev had presentiments of the "End of Europe", which in modern a perspective has seemed a slow-motion spiritual and cultural collapse. In our own time, particularly acute has become the question whether the nation state has become obsolete, to be subsumed and replaced by ideological concerns. Berdyaev addresses various aspects of "nationalness", its various guises. We live increasingly in a world of mass society beset by a totalitarian stifling and intrusion upon the person, by both technology and the state. Two of Berdyaev's articles in the final segment speak of "Spirit and the Machine", and "Democracy and the Person". Other articles address the contrast between words and reality in societal life, its political abstractive manifestations and the conventional lie. Throughout all his many writings over his lifetime, Berdyaev was a champion of authentic freedom of person at spiritual and creative a depth, innate to the dignity of the person, the freedom of conscience, a responsible freedom not bestowed by some whatever social concordat. For both Russia and the modern world, it remains the choice between the barbaric totalitarianism of Xerxes, or the innate freedom preached by Christ.
Download or read book The Fate of Marxism in Russia written by Alexander Yakovlev and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-09-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Yakovlev, a major architect of perestroika and a leading sponsor of glasnost, was a senior Soviet official who worked at the highest echelon of government side by side with Mikhail Gorbachev. In this powerful book, Yakovlev acknowledges the decay of his country and reveals his painful intellectual and political odyssey as he progressed from stalwart Party ideologist and propagandist to disillusioned critic of Marxism and Communism. Yakovlev vividly describes the ways that Marxism has proven to be not only wrong but ruinous to Russia, as it demolished civil society and ruthlessly replaced it with immorality and state-supported atheism. He discusses the pervasive, historical roots of the Russian authoritarian consciousness that helps explain why Russian society was so susceptible to the totalitarian implications of Marxism. He describes the triumvirate structure of power in the USSR before and during perestroika, the political reforms that were initiated, the ways that Soviet attitudes toward glasnost and perestroika evolved in both the reformist and conservative wings of the Party, and the reasons for the seemingly final swift collapse of the old ruling structures--the crushing defeat of the Party--in August 1991. Assessing the situation in Russia now that Marx's teachings and the Communist Party have been rejected, Yakovlev warns that if the economic situation worsens further, Russian society will be prepared to sacrifice democracy for even modest economic growth. He urges the restructuring of Soviet society on a new basis of democracy, morality, common sense, and economic efficiency. The book includes as appendixes five speeches given by Yakovlev in the West between November 1991 and January 1992 that provide further insight into his thinking after the collapse of the Communist Party.
Download or read book Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire written by Daniel Brower and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central argument of this book is that the half-century of Russian rule in Central Asia was shaped by traditions of authoritarian rule, by Russian national interests, and by a civic reform agenda that brought to Turkestan the principles that informed Alexander II's reform policies. This civilizing mission sought to lay the foundations for a rejuvenated, 'modern' empire, unified by imperial citizenship, patriotism, and a shared secular culture. Evidence for Brower's thesis is drawn from major archives in Uzbekistan and Russia. Use of these records permitted him to develop the first interpretation, either in Russian or Western literature, of Russian colonialism in Turkestan that draws on the extensive archival evidence of policy-making, imperial objectives, and relations with subject peoples.
Download or read book Russia s Fate Through Russian Eyes written by Heyward Isham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The young Russian men and women who record in these pages the hopes, fears, triumphs, and tragedies their country has undergone in recent years-altering their own lives profoundly in the process-all come from the first post-Soviet generation to achieve positions of leadership in Russia. They report on five challenges central to Russia's survival and stabilization: reshaping the state, coping with new economic rules, striving toward the rule of law, building a civil society, and preserving the national culture and educational capacity. They love their country, while understanding all too well the crippling psychological legacy of seventy years of a dictatorship that was both cunning and cruel in dispensing a plausible utopian myth and exacting extraordinary sacrifices in the name of that myth. They understand the acute sense of disorientation that overcame all generations when the USSR abruptly dissolved in 1991 and the Communist Party simultaneously lost much, if not all, of its power. As several of our authors recall, it was like waking up one morning and finding yourself a citizen of an entirely different country, meanwhile discovering that your parents were not your real parents and that you had acquired a brand new surname.
Download or read book The End of Tsarist Russia written by Dominic Lieven and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Winner of the the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize An Amazon Best Book of the Month (History) One of the world’s leading scholars offers a fresh interpretation of the linked origins of World War I and the Russian Revolution "Lieven has a double gift: first, for harvesting details to convey the essence of an era and, second, for finding new, startling, and clarifying elements in familiar stories. This is history with a heartbeat, and it could not be more engrossing."—Foreign Affairs World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the twentieth century in profound ways. In The End of Tsarist Russia, acclaimed scholar Dominic Lieven connects for the first time the two events, providing both a history of the First World War’s origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened. Based on exhaustive work in seven Russian archives as well as many non-Russian sources, Dominic Lieven’s work is about far more than just Russia. By placing the crisis of empire at its core, Lieven links World War I to the sweep of twentieth-century global history. He shows how contemporary hot issues such as the struggle for Ukraine were already crucial elements in the run-up to 1914. By incorporating into his book new approaches and comparisons, Lieven tells the story of war and revolution in a way that is truly original and thought-provoking.
Download or read book With and Without Galton written by Krementsov Nikolai and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1865, British polymath Francis Galton published his initial thoughts about the scientific field that would become 'eugenics.' The same year, Russian physician Vasilii Florinskii addressed similar issues in a sizeable treatise, entitled Human Perfection and Degeneration. Initially unheralded, Florinskii's book would go on to have a remarkable afterlife in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia. In this lucid and insightful work, Nikolai Krementsov argues that the concept of eugenics brings together ideas, values, practices, and fears energised by a focus on the future. It has proven so seductive to different groups over time because it provides a way to grapple with fundamental existential questions of human nature and destiny. With and Without Galton develops this argument by tracing the life-story of Florinskii's monograph from its uncelebrated arrival amid the Russian empire's Great Reforms, to its reissue after the Bolshevik Revolution, its decline under Stalinism, and its subsequent resurgence: first, as a founding document of medical genetics, and most recently, as a manifesto for nationalists and racial purists. Krementsov's meticulously researched 'biography of a book' sheds light not only on the peculiar fate of eugenics in Russia, but also on its convoluted transnational history, elucidating the field's protean nature and its continuing and contested appeal to diverse audiences, multiple local trajectories, and global trends. It is required reading for historians of eugenics, science, medicine, education, literature, and Russia, and it will also appeal to the general reader looking for a deeper understanding of this challenging subject.
Download or read book Russia and the Idea of the West written by Robert D. English and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.
Download or read book The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution written by Lara Douds and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
Download or read book Stalin and the Fate of Europe written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It can seem as though the Cold War division of Europe was inevitable. But Stalin was more open to a settlement on the continent than is assumed. In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order, Norman Naimark returns to the four years after WWII to illuminate European leaders' efforts to secure national sovereignty amid dominating powers.
Download or read book Citizen Countess written by Adele Lindenmeyr and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countess Sofia Panina lived a remarkable life. Born into an aristocratic family in imperial Russia, she found her true calling in improving the lives of urban workers. Her passion for social service and reputation as the "Red Countess" led her to political prominence after the fall of the Romanovs. She became the first woman to hold a cabinet position and the first political prisoner tried by the Bolsheviks. The upheavals of the 1917 Revolution forced her to flee her beloved country, but instead of living a quiet life in exile she devoted the rest of her long life to humanitarian efforts on behalf of fellow refugees. Based on Adele Lindenmeyr's detailed research in dozens of archival collections, Citizen Countess establishes Sofia Panina as an astute eyewitness to and passionate participant in the historical events that shaped her life. Her experiences shed light on the evolution of the European nobility, women's emancipation and political influence of the time, and the fate of Russian liberalism.
Download or read book The Fate of the Romanovs written by Greg King and published by Wiley (TP). This book was released on 2003-09-12 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Both historians who specialize in Imperial Russia, King and Wilson wade through the oceans of propaganda that have washed over the past 85 years and piece together what actual evidence exists for the captivity and execution of the last Russian tsar and his family." -- Publisher.
Download or read book Red Flag Wounded written by Ronald Suny and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracking the degeneration of the Russian Revolution Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism. Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.
Download or read book The Tsar s Foreign Faiths written by Paul W. Werth and published by . This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the scope and character of religious freedom for Russia's diverse non-Orthodox religions during the tzarist regime.
Download or read book Former People written by Douglas Smith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heart-breaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries'-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called "former people" and "class enemies"—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia's most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.
Download or read book Night of Stone written by Catherine Merridale and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2002 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative book, the author asks Russians difficult questions about how their country's volatile past has affected their everyday lives, their aspirations, their dreams, and their nightmares.
Download or read book RUSSIA S FATE THROUGH RUSSIAN EYES written by HEYWARD. ISHAM and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reinventing Russia written by Yitzhak M. BRUDNY and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused the emergence of nationalist movements in many post-communist states? What role did communist regimes play in fostering these movements? Why have some been more successful than others? To address these questions, Yitzhak Brudny traces the Russian nationalist movement from its origins within the Russian intellectual elite of the 1950s to its institutionalization in electoral alliances, parliamentary factions, and political movements of the early 1990s. Brudny argues that the rise of the Russian nationalist movement was a combined result of the reinvention of Russian national identity by a group of intellectuals, and the Communist Party's active support of this reinvention in order to gain greater political legitimacy. The author meticulously reconstructs the development of the Russian nationalist thought from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, as well as the nature of the Communist Party response to Russian nationalist ideas. Through analysis of major Russian literary, political, and historical writings, the recently-published memoirs of the Russian nationalist intellectuals and Communist Party officials, and documents discovered in the Communist Party archives, Brudny sheds new light on social, intellectual, and political origins of Russian nationalism, and emphasizes the importance of ideas in explaining the fate of the Russian nationalist movement during late communist and early post-communist periods. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments 1. Russian Nationalists in Soviet Politics 2. The Emergence of Politics by Culture, 1953-1964 3. The First Phase of Inclusionary Politics, 1965-1970 4. The Rise and Fall of Inclusionary Politics, 1971-1985 5. What Went Wrong with the Politics of Inclusion? 6. What Is Russia, and Where Should It Go? Political Debates, 1971-1985 7. The Zenith of Politics by Culture, 1985-1989 8. The Demise of Politics by Culture, 1989-1991 Epilogue: Russian Nationalism in Postcommunist Russia Notes Index Reviews of this book: Mr. Brudny provides a salient background to understanding one of the great phenomena of post-1945 history: how Russians arrive at their view of the West. --Ron Laurenzo, Washington Times Reviews of this book: Brudny is a good guide to the origins of what probably lies ahead. --Geoffrey A. Hosking, Times Literary Supplement Reviews of this book: If readers think that today's anti-Western, antimarket, antisemitic variety of Russian nationalism is simply the fallout from the country's current misery, they should think again. With care and intelligence, Brudny traces its lineage back to the Khrushchev years. What began among the so-called village prose writers as a lament for a rural past ravaged by Stalin's experimentation gradually accumulated further grievances: the devastation of Russian culture and monuments, the infiltration of 'corrupting' Western values, and ultimately under Gorbechev the 'criminal' destruction of Russian power. Much of the book concentrates on how Khrushchev and Brezhnev tried--but ultimately failed--to harness this discontent for their own purposes. --Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs Reviews of this book: Brudny's survey of relations between Russian nationalism and the Soviet state provides an in-depth insight into one of the most complicated aspects of the Soviet multi-national state. --Taras Kuzio, International Affairs Reviews of this book: A thought-provoking book. --Virginia Quarterly Reviews of this book: Brudny shows that Russian cultural nationalism was a powerful force in the post-Stalin years, with ultimate political consequences. In meticulous detail Brudny sets out the various strains of Russian nationalism and points to the regime's encouragement of a certain kind of nationalism as a means of bolstering legitimacy through the 'politics of inclusion'...This volume is a significant contribution to the literature. --R. J. Mitchell, Choice Reviews of this book: In Reinventing Russia, situated at the intersection of culture (specifically the literature of the village prose movement) and politics, Brudny has managed admirably to draw out the wider implications of his inquiry and provided an extremely useful set of orientation points in the current, seemingly so chaotic, political debate in Russia. --Hans J. Rindisbacher, European Legacy Reviews of this book: Brudny's book paints a fascinating picture. It delineates a rich Soviet culture and society, one that is much more varied than has been previously depicted by most Western researchers. The overriding importance of the book derives from its argument that the post-Stalinist cultural debate in the Soviet Union is what created the infrastructure for the seemingly odd alliance between communist ideology and the nationalist intelligentsia--today's 'red-brown' alliance. It's a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the nationalist idea...[Reinventing Russia provides] an enthralling overview of a historic development that has been neglected by most Western researchers...His book proves once more that anyone who seeks to understand developments in Eastern Europe cannot do so by merely analyzing the economic policy of the political maneuvers of the governing elite. --Shlomo Avineri, Ha'aretz Book Review Yitzhak Brudny offers us a most persuasive attempt to explain the intricate, often puzzling relation between Soviet political and cultural bureaucracy and the rise of Russian nationalism in the post-Stalin era. His analysis of Russian nationalist ideology and its role in the corrosion of the official Soviet dogmas is uniquely insightful and provocative. Students of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs will find in Brudny's splendidly researched book an indispensable instrument to grasp the meaning of the still perplexing developments that led to the breakdown of the Leninist state. In the growing body of literature dealing with nationalism and national identity, this one stands out as boldly innovative, theoretically challenging, and culturally sophisticated. --Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland, College Park, author of Fantasies of Salvation Yitzhak Brudny has produced an impressive and scholarly account of the divisions within the Russian political and cultural elite during the last four decades of the Soviet Union's existence. His book is important both for the fresh light it throws on that period and as essential context for interpreting the debates on nationhood and statehood which rage in Russia today. --Archie Brown, University of Oxford Reinventing Russia provides us with a vivid portrayal of the politics behind the rise of Russian nationalism in post-Stalinist Russia. It is a finely detailed study of not only the relationship of political authority to the spread of nationalist ideas, but also reciprocally of the role played by these ideas in shaping the political. --Mark Beissinger, University of Wisconsin-Madison Rival nationalists literally shook the Soviet Union apart. The very structure of the Soviet state encouraged all major ethnic groups--including the Russians--to view battles over resources in terms of ethnic and national conflict. Brudny, in this important study, explores precisely how rival nationalist claims emerged during the years following Stalin's death, and why they proved to be simultaneously so robust and pernicious. --Blair Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center
