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Book The Soviet Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Isaiah Berlin
  • Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
  • Release : 2004
  • ISBN : 9780815709046
  • Pages : 296 pages

Download or read book The Soviet Mind written by Isaiah Berlin and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaiah Berlins response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Never before collected, Berlins writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalins manipulative artificial dialectic; portraits of Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more.

Book The Soviet Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Henry Hardy
  • Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
  • Release : 2016-08-23
  • ISBN : 0815728883
  • Pages : 183 pages

Download or read book The Soviet Mind written by Henry Hardy and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Berlin’s great powers of observation combine with his great knowledge and literary gifts to provide us with a fascinating series of insights.” —Geoffrey Riklin George Kennan, the architect of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, called Isaiah Berlin “the patron saint among the commentators of the Russian scene.” In The Soviet Mind, Berlin proves himself worthy of that accolade. Although the essays in this book were originally written to explore tensions between Soviet communism and Russian culture, the thinking about the Russian mind that emerges is as relevant today under Putin’s post-communist Russia as it was when this book first appeared more than a decade ago. This Brookings Classic brings together Berlin's writings about the Soviet Union. Among the highlights are accounts of Berlin's meetings with Russian writers in the aftermath of the war; a celebrated memorandum written for the British Foreign Office in 1945 about the state of the arts under Stalin; Berlin's account of Stalin's manipulative "artificial dialectic"; portraits of Pasternak and poet Osip Mandel’shtam; Berlin's survey of Russian culture based on a visit in 1956; and a postscript reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and other events in 1989. Henry Hardy prepared the essays for publication; his introduction describes their history. In his revised foreword, Brookings’ Strobe Talbott, a longtime expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, relates the essays to Berlin's other work. The essays and other pieces in The Soviet Mind—including a new essay, “Marxist versus Non-Marxist Ideas in Soviet Policy”—represent Berlin at his most brilliant and are invaluable for policymakers, students, and anyone interested in Russian politics and thought—past, present, and future.

Book Homo Sovieticus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Wladimir Velminski
  • Publisher : MIT Press
  • Release : 2017-02-10
  • ISBN : 0262035693
  • Pages : 129 pages

Download or read book Homo Sovieticus written by Wladimir Velminski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Soviet scientists and pseudoscientists pursued telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and mass hyptonism over television to control the minds of citizens. In October 1989, as the Cold War was ending and the Berlin Wall about to crumble, television viewers in the Soviet Union tuned in to the first of a series of unusual broadcasts. “Relax, let your thoughts wander free...” intoned the host, the physician and clinical psychotherapist Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky. Moscow's Channel One was attempting mass hypnosis over television, a therapeutic session aimed at reassuring citizens panicked over the ongoing political upheaval—and aimed at taking control of their responses to it. Incredibly enough, this last-ditch effort to rally the citizenry was the culmination of decades of official telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and coded messages undertaken to reinforce ideological conformity. In Homo Sovieticus, the art and media scholar Wladimir Velminski explores these scientific and pseudoscientific efforts at mind control. In a fascinating series of anecdotes, Velminski describes such phenomena as the conflation of mental energy and electromagnetism; the investigation of aura fields through the “Aurathron”; a laboratory that practiced mind control methods on dogs; and attempts to calibrate the thought processes of laborers. “Scientific” diagrams from the period accompany the text. In all of the experimental methods for implanting thoughts into a brain, Velminski finds political and metaphorical contaminations. These apparently technological experiments in telepathy and telekinesis were deployed for purely political purposes.

Book The Soviet Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2006-05-01
  • ISBN : 9780815709039
  • Pages : pages

Download or read book The Soviet Mind written by Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir and published by . This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaiah Berlin's response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Never before collected, Berlin's writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalin's manipulative 'artificial dialectic'; portraits of Osip Mandel4shtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more.

Book Revolution on My Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jochen Hellbeck
  • Publisher : Harvard University Press
  • Release : 2009-06-30
  • ISBN : 0674038533
  • Pages : 449 pages

Download or read book Revolution on My Mind written by Jochen Hellbeck and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolution on My Mind is a stunning revelation of the inner world of Stalin's Russia, showing us the minds and hearts of Soviet citizens who recorded their lives in diaries during an extraordinary period of revolutionary fervor and state terror. Jochen Hellbeck brings us face to face with gripping and unforgettably poignant life stories. This book brilliantly explores the forging of the revolutionary self in a study that speaks to the evolution of the individual in mass movements of our own time.

Book Russian Orientalism

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2010-04-20
  • ISBN : 0300162898
  • Pages : 310 pages

Download or read book Russian Orientalism written by David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the author examines Russian thinking about the Orient before the Revolution of 1917. He argues that the Russian Empire's bi-continental geography and the complicated nature of its encounter with Asia have all resulted in a variegated understanding of the East among its people.

Book The Making of Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Aleksandr Romanovich Lurii︠a︡
  • Publisher : Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
  • Release : 1979
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 248 pages

Download or read book The Making of Mind written by Aleksandr Romanovich Lurii︠a︡ and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luria looks back on his life and career in psychology, drawing attention to the Soviet scientific establishment and his struggle to formulate a new psychological theory concerning memory, language, and intelligence.

Book Ethnicity  Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union

Download or read book Ethnicity Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union written by Valery Tishkov and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valery Tishkov is a well-known Russian historian and anthropologist, and former Minister of Nationalities in Yeltsin's government. This book draws on his inside knowledge of major events and extensive primary research. Tishkov argues that ethnicity has a multifaceted role: it is the most accessible basis for political mobilization; a means of controlling power and resources in a transforming society; and therapy for the great trauma suffered by individuals and groups under previous regimes. This complexity helps explain the contradictory nature and outcomes of public ethnic policies based on a doctrine of ethno-nationalism.

Book The Mind and Face of Bolshevism

Download or read book The Mind and Face of Bolshevism written by René Fülöp-Miller and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Cinematic Cold War

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tony Shaw
  • Publisher : University Press of Kansas
  • Release : 2014-08-15
  • ISBN : 0700620206
  • Pages : 312 pages

Download or read book Cinematic Cold War written by Tony Shaw and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War was as much a battle of ideas as a series of military and diplomatic confrontations, and movies were a prime battleground for this cultural combat. As Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood show, Hollywood sought to export American ideals in movies like Rambo, and the Soviet film industry fought back by showcasing Communist ideals in a positive light, primarily for their own citizens. The two camps traded cinematic blows for more than four decades. The first book-length comparative survey of cinema's vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies, Shaw and Youngblood's study focuses on ten films—five American and five Soviet—that in both obvious and subtle ways provided a crucial outlet for the global "debate" between democratic and communist ideologies. For each nation, the authors outline industry leaders, structure, audiences, politics, and international reach and explore the varied relationships linking each film industry to its respective government. They then present five comparative case studies, each pairing an American with a Soviet film: Man on a Tightrope with The Meeting on the Elbe; Roman Holiday with Spring on Zarechnaya Street; Fail-Safe with Nine Days in One Year; Bananas with Officers; Rambo: First Blood Part II with Incident at Map Grid 36-80. Shaw breathes new life into familiar American films by Elia Kazan and Woody Allen, while Youngblood helps readers comprehend Soviet films most have never seen. Collectively, their commentaries track the Cold War in its entirety—from its formative phase through periods of thaw and self-doubt to the resurgence of mutual animosity during the Reagan years-and enable readers to identify competing core propaganda themes such as decadence versus morality, technology versus humanity, and freedom versus authority. As the authors show, such themes blurred notions regarding "propaganda" and "entertainment," terms that were often interchangeable and mutually reinforcing during the Cold War. Featuring engaging commentary and evocative images from the films discussed, Cinematic Cold War offers a shrewd analysis of how the silver screen functioned on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As such it should have great appeal for anyone interested in the Cold War or the cinematic arts.

Book Brutal Minds

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stanley K. Ridgley
  • Publisher : Humanix Books
  • Release : 2023-05-16
  • ISBN : 1630062278
  • Pages : 273 pages

Download or read book Brutal Minds written by Stanley K. Ridgley and published by Humanix Books. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you are scratching your head as to how radicals could have seized control in Washington, and of American media, while defaming American democracy as a ‘white supremacist’ nightmare, look no further than the left’s transformation of American universities into ideological boot camps for Marxist treachery. Brutal Minds is a model of clarity and straight talk about this national tragedy, whose destructive energies have yet to run their course.” —DAVID HOROWITZ, Bestselling Author of Final Battle Much of university life is controlled by subsidized paranoiacs, amateur psychotherapists, neo-Marxist totalitarians, “student affairs professionals” imbued with authoritarian mentality, and racialist thought reformers who run workshops that destroy family ties and traditional beliefs to clear the way for new relationships grounded in racialist ideology. These are the brutal minds who threaten and abuse students in the name of an academic fraud called “antiracist pedagogy.” In Brutal Minds, award-winning professor Stanley K. Ridgley exposes the dangers of radicalization, cancel culture, academic censorship, and the growing influence of socialists “boldly transforming” colleges across the country into reeducation camps of dull conformity. An educational charade masks activities and ideology as dangerous as those that inspired Communist China’s tragic Cultural Revolution. This book strips away the façade of the modern American university to reveal the malignant bureaucratic viscera inside the institution. It is a dark world, an anti-intellectualist sanctuary where brutal minds find purpose, protection, camaraderie, subsidy, and power. Dr. Ridgley’s book calls us to action to halt this anti-intellectual takeover of higher education and to restore the greatness of one of Western civilization’s most brilliant creations, the American University. “A tale of how one of history’s great institutions—the American university—is undergoing an infiltration by an army of mediocrities whose goal is to destroy it as an institution of knowledge creation and replace it with an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda.” —From the Preface to Brutal Minds

Book The Lost Khrushchev

    Book Details:
  • Author : Nina L. Khrushcheva
  • Publisher : Tate Publishing & Enterprises
  • Release : 2014
  • ISBN : 9781629945446
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book The Lost Khrushchev written by Nina L. Khrushcheva and published by Tate Publishing & Enterprises. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author presents her personal memories and her research into her family's history, including the mysterious circumstances surrounding the fate of her grandfather, Leonid Khrushchev, as well as the legacy of her great grandfather, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Book How Not to Network a Nation

Download or read book How Not to Network a Nation written by Benjamin Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

Book Meltdown

    Book Details:
  • Author : Paul Craig Roberts
  • Publisher : Cato Institute
  • Release : 1990-09-01
  • ISBN : 1937184188
  • Pages : 173 pages

Download or read book Meltdown written by Paul Craig Roberts and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 1990-09-01 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the irrational life of Soviet producers, the monstrous deprivation of Soviet consumers, and the ideological origins of the Soviet economy that have resulted in a system unable to bear the weight of being a superpower. The authors spell out the challenges that Gorbachev and his successors face. The penultimate chapter deals with the privatization of the Soviet economy. In the last chapter they document the failure of Western experts and pundits to create a true picture of the Soviet system.

Book Inside the Soviet Army

Download or read book Inside the Soviet Army written by Viktor Suvorov and published by Berkley. This book was released on 1984 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The War of Nerves

    Book Details:
  • Author : Martin Sixsmith
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 2022-07-05
  • ISBN : 1639361820
  • Pages : 469 pages

Download or read book The War of Nerves written by Martin Sixsmith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new history of the Cold War that explores the conflict through the minds of the people who lived through it. More than any other conflict, the Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. And, nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its legacy still endures—not only in our politics, but in our own thoughts and fears. Drawing on a vast array of untapped archives and unseen sources, Martin Sixsmith vividly recreates the tensions and paranoia of the Cold War, framing it for the first time from a psychological perspective. Revisiting towering, unique personalities like Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Nixon, as well as the lives of the unknown millions who were caught up in the conflict, this is a gripping narrative of the paranoia of the Cold War—and in today's uncertain times, this story is more resonant than ever.

Book Arctic Mirrors

    Book Details:
  • Author : Yuri Slezkine
  • Publisher : Cornell University Press
  • Release : 2016-11-01
  • ISBN : 1501703307
  • Pages : 475 pages

Download or read book Arctic Mirrors written by Yuri Slezkine and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern—and hence their own—otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism.