Download or read book Ukraine Perestroika to Independence written by T. Kuzio and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ukrainian vote for independence in December 1991 effectively ended the existence of the Soviet Union, and propelled one of Europe's submerged nations on to the world stage. The main theme of the book is the transition in Ukraine from the policies of 'Perestroika' and 'Glasnost' to the ultimate break with Moscow.
Download or read book The Future Is History written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Download or read book Gorbachev His Life and Times written by William Taubman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev. "Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]." —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.
Download or read book End of History and the Last Man written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. "Profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world." —The Washington Post Book World Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
Download or read book The Human Factor written by Archie Brown and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human Factor tells the dramatic story about the part played by political leaders - particularly the three very different personalities of Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher - in ending the standoff that threatened the future of all humanity
Download or read book Late Soviet Culture written by Thomas Lahusen and published by Post-Contemporary Intervention. This book was released on 1993 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the visions of past and future that informed Soviet culture. With Dystopia left behind and Utopia forsaken, where do the writers, artists, and critics who once inhabited them stand? In an "advancing present," answers editor Thomas Lahusen. Just what that present might be--in literature and film, criticism and theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, and in the politics that somehow speaks to all of these--is the subject of this collection of essays. Leading scholars from the former Soviet Union and the West gather here to consider the fate of the people and institutions that constituted Soviet culture. Whether the speculative glance goes back (to czarist Russia or Soviet Freudianism, to the history of aesthetics or the sociology of cinema in the 1930s) or forward (to the "market Stalinism" one writer predicts or the "open text of history" another advocates), a sense of immediacy, or history-in-the-making animates this volume. Will social and cultural institutions now develop organically, the authors ask, or is the society faced with the prospect of even more radical reforms? Does the present rupture mark the real moment of Russia's encounter with modernity? The options explored by literary historians, film scholars, novelists, and political scientists make this book a heady tour of cultural possibilities. An expanded version of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 1991), with seven new essays, Late Soviet Culture will stimulate scholar and general reader alike. Contributors. Katerina Clark, Paul Debreczeny, Evgeny Dobrenko, Mikhail Epstein, Renata Galtseva, Helena Goscilo, Michael Holquist, Boris Kagarlitsky, Mikhail Kuraev, Thomas Lahusen, Valery Leibin, Sidney Monas, Valery Podoroga, Donald Raleigh, Irina Rodnyanskaya, Maya Turovskaya
Download or read book Glasnost Perestroika and the Soviet Media written by Brian McNair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-14 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have brought tumultuous change to political, social and economic life in the Soviet Union. But how have these changes affected Soviet press and television reporting? Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media examines the changing role of Soviet journalism from its theoretical origins in the writings of Marx and Lenin to the new freedoms of the Gorbachev era. The book includes detailed analysis of contemporary Soviet media output, as well as interviews with Soviet journalists.
Download or read book What Went Wrong with Perestroika written by Marshall I. Goldman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1992 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A political commentator discusses the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, revealing Gorbachev as a reluctant reformer, who did nothing to counter the nation's overindulgence of heavy industry.
Download or read book The Myth of the Strong Leader written by Archie Brown and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world's preeminent political historians, a magisterial study of political leadership around the world from the advent of parliamentary democracy to the age of Obama. All too frequently, leadership is reduced to a simple dichotomy: the strong versus the weak. Yet, there are myriad ways to exercise effective political leadership -- as well as different ways to fail. We blame our leaders for economic downfalls and praise them for vital social reforms, but rarely do we question what makes some leaders successful while others falter. In this magisterial and wide-ranging survey of political leadership over the past hundred years, renowned Oxford politics professor Archie Brown challenges the widespread belief that strong leaders -- meaning those who dominate their colleagues and the policy-making process -- are the most successful and admirable. In reality, only a minority of political leaders will truly make a lasting difference. Though we tend to dismiss more collegial styles of leadership as weak, it is often the most cooperative leaders who have the greatest impact. Drawing on extensive research and decades of political analysis and experience, Brown illuminates the achievements, failures and foibles of a broad array of twentieth century politicians. Whether speaking of redefining leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher, who expanded the limits of what was politically possible during their time in power, or the even rarer transformational leaders who played a decisive role in bringing about systemic change -- Charles de Gaulle, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela, among them -- Brown challenges our commonly held beliefs about political efficacy and strength. Overturning many of our assumptions about the twentieth century's most important figures, Brown's conclusions are both original and enlightening. The Myth of the Strong Leader compels us to reassess the leaders who have shaped our world - and to reconsider how we should choose and evaluate those who will lead us into the future.
Download or read book A World Transformed written by George H. W. Bush and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was one of the pivotal times of the twentieth century--during George Bush's presidency, an extraordinary series of international events took place that materially changed the face of the world. Now, former President Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, tell the story of those tumultuous years. Here are behind-the-scenes accounts of critical meetings in the White House and of summit conferences in Europe and the United States, interspersed with excerpts from Mr. Bush's diary. We are given fresh and intriguing views of world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and François Mitterrand--and witness the importance of personal relationships in diplomacy. There is the dramatic description of how President Bush put together the alliance against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. There are the intensive diplomatic exchanges with Beijing following the events of Tiananmen Square, and the intricate negotiations leading up to German reunification. And there is the sometimes poignant, sometimes grim portrayal of Gorbachev's final years in power. A World Transformed is not simply a record of accomplishment; Bush and Scowcroft candidly recount how the major players sometimes disagreed over issues, and analyze what mistakes were made. This is a landmark book on the conduct of American foreign policy--and how that policy is crucial to the peace of the world. It is a fascinating inside look at great events that deepens our understanding of today's global issues.
Download or read book The Cold War a Very Short Introduction written by Robert J. McMahon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vividly written and based on up-to-date scholarship, this title provides an interpretive overview of the international history of the Cold War.
Download or read book The Gorbachev Factor written by Archie Brown and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author writes about Gorbachev, both as the statesman and as the man. He explores how an ordinary man can become a world leader, wielding enormous power.
Download or read book Revolution 1989 written by Victor Sebestyen and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the collapse of the Soviet Union's European empire (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslvakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and the transition of each to independent states, drawing on interviews and newly uncovered archival material to offer insight into 1989's rapid changes and the USSR's minimal resistance.
Download or read book Late Stalinism written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the last years of Stalin’s rule led to the formation ofan imperial Soviet consciousness In this nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period—beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March 1953—Evgeny Dobrenko analyzes key cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet consciousness that, he argues, still defines the political and cultural profile of modern Russia.
Download or read book Revelations from the Russian Archives written by Diane P. Koenker and published by . This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Economic Policy Making and Business Culture written by David A. Dyker and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses one of the fundamental problems in Russian society, and in Russia's relations with the rest of the world. Why do Russians tend to react differently from ?us? in given diplomatic or business situations? Why do they find the notion of a contract difficult to grasp? Why do they seem hostile to the principle of the level playing field? How do they see Russia's position within the globalised economy? In order to probe these issues, the author begins with a historical analysis, looking at the pattern of political and economic development since Tsarist times, always asking the questions: What is unique to Russia in all this, and which unique features tend to recur in different periods? In seeking to illuminate the interface between Russia and the world, the author also examines Russia's attitude to itself, and to its own resources ? natural and human ? to land as an agricultural resource, and later oil and gas; and to people ? as cheap labour and as highly trained scientific personnel. This book is firmly based on scholarly sources, in English, French and Russian, but aims to go beyond the academic audience to address the concerns of people encountering Russians and Russian organizations in their everyday lives.
Download or read book Sovereignty After Empire written by Galina Vasilevna Starovotova and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
