Download or read book The Faustian Bargain of the Soviet Automobile written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Faustian Bargain written by Ian Ona Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launching World War Two, its army seemed an unstoppable force. The Luftwaffe bombed towns and cities across the country, and fifty divisions of the Wehrmacht crossed the border. Yet only two decades earlier, at the end of World War One, Germany had been an utterly and abjectly defeated military power. Foreign troops occupied its industrial heartland and the Treaty of Versailles reduced the vaunted German army of World War One to a fraction of its size, banning it from developing new military technologies. When Hitler came to power in 1933, these strictures were still in effect. By 1939, however, he had at his disposal a fighting force of 4.2 million men, armed with the most advanced weapons in the world. How could this nearly miraculous turnaround have happened? The answer lies in Russia. Beginning in the years immediately after World War One and continuing for more than a decade, the German military and the Soviet Union--despite having been mortal enemies--entered into a partnership designed to overturn the order in Europe. Centering on economic and military cooperation, the arrangement led to the establishment of a network of military bases and industrial facilities on Soviet soil. Through their alliance, which continued for over a decade, Germany gained the space to rebuild its army. In return, the Soviet Union received vital military, technological and economic assistance. Both became, once again, military powers capable of a mass destruction that was eventually directed against one another. Drawing from archives in five countries, including new collections of declassified Russian documents, The Faustian Bargain offers the definitive exploration of a shadowy but fateful alliance.
Download or read book Stuck on Communism written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century—from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up through the implosion of the Soviet Union and beyond. Siegelbaum recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery in the tumult of student rebellion at Columbia University during the Vietnam War, graduate study at Oxford, and Moscow at the height of détente. His story takes the reader into the Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and the newly independent Uzbekistan. An intellectual autobiography that is also a biography of the field of Anglophone Soviet history, Stuck on Communism is a guide for how to lead a life on the Left that integrates political and professional commitments. Siegelbaum reveals the attractiveness of Communism as an object of study and its continued relevance decades after its disappearance from the landscape of its origin. Through the journey of a book that is in the end a romance, Siegelbaum discovers the truth in the notion that no matter what historians take as their subject, they are always writing about themselves.
Download or read book The Faustian Bargain written by Jonathan Petropoulos and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann--a leading art historian--was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still "missing" today. Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.
Download or read book Stalin s Last Generation written by Juliane Fürst and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Stalin's last generation' was the last generation to come of age under Stalin, yet it was also the first generation to be socialized in the post-war period. Its young members grew up in a world that still carried many of the hallmarks of the Soviet Union's revolutionary period, yet their surroundings already showed the first signs of decay, stagnation, and disintegration. Stalin's last generation still knew how to speak 'Bolshevik', still believed in the power of Soviet heroes and still wished to construct socialism, yet they also liked to dance and dress in Western styles, they knew how to evade boring lectures and lessons in Marxism-Leninism, and they were keen to forge identities that were more individual than those offered by the state. In this book, Juliane Fürst creates a detailed picture of late Stalinist youth and youth culture, looking at young people from a variety of perspectives: as children of the war, as recipients and creators of propaganda, as perpetrators of crime, as representatives of fledgling subcultures, as believers, as critics, and as drop-outs. In the process, she illuminates not only the complex relationship between the Soviet state and its youth, but also provides a new interpretative framework for understanding late Stalinism - the impact of which on Soviet society's subsequent development has hitherto been underestimated, including its role in the ultimate demise of the USSR.
Download or read book Cars for Comrades written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism 1964 1985 written by Neringa Klumbytė and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think--it also responded to and was shaped by individuals' needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.
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 The Shadow of War written by Stephen Lovell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the achievements, ambiguities, and legacies of World War II as a point of departure, The Shadow of War: The Soviet Union and Russia, 1941 to the Present offers a fresh new approach to modern Soviet and Russian history. Presents one of the only histories of the Soviet Union and Russia that begins with World War II and goes beyond the Soviet collapse through to the early twenty-first century Innovative thematic arrangement and approach allows for insights that are missed in chronological histories Draws on a wide range of sources and the very latest research on post-Soviet history, a rapidly developing field Supported by further reading, bibliography, maps and illustrations.
Download or read book The Red Flag written by David Priestland and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best and the most accessible one-volume history of communism now available . . . A far-reaching, vividly written account.” —Foreign Affairs In The Red Flag, Oxford professor David Priestland tells the epic story of a movement that has taken root in dozens of countries across two hundred years, from its birth after the French Revolution to its ideological maturity in nineteenth-century Germany to its rise to dominance (and subsequent fall) in the twentieth century. Beginning with the first modern Communists in the age of Robespierre, Priestland examines the motives of thinkers and leaders including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che Guevara, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, and many others. Priestland also shows how Communism, in all its varieties, appealed to different societies for different reasons, in some as a response to inequalities and in others more out of a desire to catch up with the West. But paradoxically, while destroying one web of inequality, Communist leaders were simultaneously weaving another. It was this dynamic, together with widespread economic failure and an escalating loss of faith in the system, that ultimately destroyed Soviet Communism itself. At a time when global capitalism is in crisis and powerful new political forces have arisen to confront Western democracy, The Red Flag is essential reading if we are to apply the lessons of the past to navigating the future. “Detailed and scholarly but written in lively prose, this is a rich, satisfying account of the most successful utopian political movement in history.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption written by Frank Trentmann and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption offers a timely overview of how our understanding of consumption in history has changed in the last generation.
Download or read book Warriors of Disinformation written by Alvin A. Snyder and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warriors of Disinformation is a scrupulous, honest, and fascinating account of what we have been missing all these years. Snyder reveals both the high-minded principles and the lowbrow comedy and establishes the credit that disinformation's warriors deserve for helping to bring an end to the cold war.
Download or read book Queer Cities Queer Cultures written by Jennifer V. Evans and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer Cities, Queer Cultures examines the formation and make-up of urban subcultures and situates them against the stories we typically tell about Europe and its watershed moments in the post 1945 period. The book considers the degree to which the iconic events of 1945, 1968 and 1989 influenced the social and sexual climate of the ensuing decades, raising questions about the form and structure of the 1960s sexual revolution, and forcing us to think about how we define sexual liberalization - and where, how and on whose terms it occurs. An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet. By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.
Download or read book The Socialist Car written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. In The Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.
Download or read book Borders of Socialism written by L. Siegelbaum and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book argues that in Russia the relations between culture and nation, art and life, commodity and trash, often diverged from familiar Western European or American versions of modernity. The essays show how public and private overlapped and shaped each other, creating new perspectives on individuals and society in the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Cultural Histories of Sociabilities Spaces and Mobilities written by Colin Divall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the majority of us the opportunity to travel has never been greater, yet differences in mobility highlight inequalities that have wider social implications. Exploring how and why attitudes towards movement have evolved across generations, the case studies in this essay collection range from medieval to modern times and cover several continents.
Download or read book A Faustian Bargain written by William I Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating analysis of the controversial U.S. role in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections-the most closely monitored in history-this book exposes the intervention in the electoral process of a sovereign nation by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, and private U.S.-based organizations. Robins
