Download or read book The Russian Totalitarianism Freedom here and now written by Dmitrii Shusharin and published by Litres. This book was released on 2018-04-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author regards the Russian totalitarianism as a socio-political structure, originated in Russia in 1917, a phenomenon that exerted a demonstration effect on other countries of the Judeo-Christian civilization. The main attention is paid to the first decades of the 21st century, when a new totalitarian model is emerging in the country, having an increasing influence on the rest of the world.
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 The Road to Unfreedom written by Timothy Snyder and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America. “A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies. In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.
Download or read book We written by Yevgeny Zamyatin and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Live Not by Lies written by Rod Dreher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers. For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation. In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance: • SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation. • JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true. • ACT: Take action to protect truth. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.
Download or read book Freedom Repression and Private Property in Russia written by Vladimir Shlapentokh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates how the emergence of private property and a market economy after the Soviet Union's collapse enabled a degree of freedom while simultaneously supporting authoritarianism.
Download or read book The Great Lie written by F. Flagg Taylor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Most Insightful and Profound Reflections on Tyranny. Totalitarianism was the dominant phenomenon of the twentieth century. Deeply troubling questions endure regarding the nature of such tyrannical regimes: What enabled human beings to carry out such horrific crimes against their fellow man? What does the endurance of Communism reveal about human liberty? Why did human beings suffer rule by ideological lies for so long, and what kept them open to the truth? What are we to make of the relationship between totalitarianism and the foundational principles of democratic modernity? Some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century sought answers to these haunting questions. Now, for the first time ever, their incisive and profound reflections on totalitarianism have been brought together in one book. The Great Lie showcases the insights of such giants as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, Czeslaw Milosz, Leo Strauss, and Raymond Aron, along with neglected but important thinkers such as Waldemar Gurian, Aurel Kolnai, Leszek Kolakowski, Pierre Manent, Claude Lefort, and Chantal Delsol. The brilliant essays in this volume illuminate the very nature of totalitarian regimes, and the monstrous ideology that is their defining feature. The Great Lie allows readers to make sense of political evil and how it can attract so many people into its ideological fold. This is not a matter of mere academic interest in an age when we confront totalitarianism in such regimes as North Korea and Cuba—and, arguably, in radical Islamist movements.
Download or read book Churchill and Orwell written by Thomas E. Ricks and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller! A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike. Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's—Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. In a crucial moment, they responded first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscations, and then they acted on their beliefs. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the West's compass set toward freedom as its due north. It's not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930's, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini "men we could do business with," if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom—that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted. In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their age's necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940's to triumph over freedom's enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwell's reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Ricks's masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin. Churchill and Orwell is a perfect gift for the holidays!
Download or read book Surviving Autocracy written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.
Download or read book A Time for Choosing written by Ronald Reagan and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Totalitarian Rule written by Hans Buchheim and published by Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1968 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Prevention of Literature written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In The Prevention of Literature, the third in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell considers the freedom of thought and expression. He discusses the effect of the ownership of the press on the accuracy of reports of events, and takes aim at political language, which ‘consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together.’ The Prevention of Literature is a stirring cry for freedom from censorship, which Orwell says must start with the writer themselves: ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly.’ 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
Download or read book Democracy Incorporated written by Sheldon S. Wolin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.
Download or read book Dictators Democracy and American Public Culture written by Benjamin Leontief Alpers and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the la
Download or read book Lenin written by Victor Sebestyen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man. Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Lenin's personal papers and those of other leading political figures now available, Sebestyen gives is new details that bring to life the dramatic and gripping story of how Lenin seized power in a coup and ran his revolutionary state. The product of a violent, tyrannical, and corrupt Russia, he chillingly authorized the deaths of thousands of people and created a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater ideal. An old comrade what had once admired him said that Lenin "desired the good . . . but created evil." This included his invention of Stalin, who would take Lenin's system of the gulag and the secret police to horrifying new heights. In Lenin, Victor Sebestyen has written a brilliant portrait of this dictator as a complex and ruthless figure, and he also brings to light important new revelations about the Russian Revolution, a pivotal point in modern history. (With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs)
Download or read book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible written by Peter Pomerantsev and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship-far subtler than twentieth-century strains-that is rapidly rising to challenge the West. When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system. Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.
Download or read book Totalitarianism written by Abbott Gleason and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than six decades, the term "totalitarian" was applied to everything from Franco's Spain to Stalin's Soviet Union. One of the most enigmatic and yet compelling ideas of our time, it has been both an almost meaningless political catcall and an indispensable concept for understanding the dictatorships that have marred the history of this century. Now historian Abbott Gleason provides a fascinating account of the life of this idea. Totalitarianism offers a penetrating chronicle of the central concept of our era--an era shaped by our conflict first with fascism and then with communism. Interweaving the story of intellectual debates with the international history of the twentieth century, Gleason traces the birth of the term to Italy in the first years of Mussolini's rule. Created by Mussolini's enemies, the word was appropriated by the Fascists themselves to describe their program in what turned out to be one of the less totalitarian of the European dictatorships. He follows the growth and expansion of the concept as it was picked up in the West and applied to Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union. Gleason's account takes us through the debates of the early postwar years, as academics in turn adopted the term--notably Hannah Arendt. The idea of totalitarianism came to possess novelists such as Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon) and George Orwell (whose Nineteen Eighty-Four was interpreted by conservatives as an attack on socialism in general, and subsequently suffered criticism from left-leaning critics). The concept fully entered the public consciousness with the opening of the Cold War, as Truman used the rhetoric of totalitarianism to sell the Truman Doctrine to Congress. Gleason takes a fascinating look at the notorious brainwashing episodes of the Korean War, which convinced Americans that Communist China too was a totalitarian state. As he takes his account through to the 1990s, he offers an inner history of the Cold War, revealing the political charge the term carried for writers on both the left and right. He also explores the intellectual struggles that swirled around the idea in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. When the Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s, Gleason writes, the concept lost much of its importance in the West even as it flourished in Russia, where writers began to describe their own collapsing state as totalitarian--though left-wing Western thinkers had long resisted doing so. Abbott Gleason is a leading scholar of Soviet and Russian history and a contributor to periodicals ranging from The Russian Review to The Atlantic Monthly. In this stimulating intellectual history, he offers a revealing look at one of the central concepts of modern times.
