Download or read book The Soviet Syndrome written by Alain Besançon and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1978 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oversat af Patricia Ranum
Download or read book Resisting the State written by Kathryn Stoner-Weiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-19 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do new, democratizing states often find it so difficult to actually govern? Why do they so often fail to provide their beleaguered populations with better access to public goods and services? Using original and unusual data, this book uses post-communist Russia as a case in examining what the author calls this broader 'weak state syndrome' in many developing countries. Through interviews with over 800 Russian bureaucrats in 72 of Russia's 89 provinces, and a highly original database on patterns of regional government non-compliance to federal law and policy, the book demonstrates that resistance to Russian central authority not so much ethnically based (as others have argued) as much as generated by the will of powerful and wealthy regional political and economic actors seeking to protect assets they had acquired through Russia's troubled transition out of communism.
Download or read book The Russian Syndrome written by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse and published by Holmes & Meier Publishers. This book was released on 1992 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, as we confront the social and political upheaval that has led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a deeper understanding of Russia's turbulent past is more essential than ever. In this fascinating book, Russian history unfolds as a "continuous history of political murder" as the author, Helene Carrere d'Encausse, focuses on this dramatic theme from its origins in Kievan Rus to the threshold of the Gorbachev era. Since the eleventh century - when dynastic murder was used to settle questions of inheritance and succession in Kiev - through the regimes of Stalin and Brezhnev, there has been a tragic relation between politics, violence, and terror. The Russian Syndrome's riveting narrative not only brings to life extraordinary personalities and events - Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Bakunin, Rasputin, Lenin, the Stalinist terror, for example - but also serves as the framework for comparing and contrasting Russian historical patterns with those of Western Europe. Demonstrating in vivid detail the continuity and force of recurrent historical patterns that link the Soviet era with its prerevolutionary past, d'Encausse shows how terror and political violence, used by the tsars to consolidate their power and to unify the state, became the instruments of totalitarian successors as well as of those revolutionaries who aimed to destroy the state and bring about radical social and political change. Exploring the beliefs, ideology, and political culture of monarchs, dictators, revolutionaries, and reformers, this provocative and timely work illuminates the complex and traumatic course of Russian history as it sheds light on the Soviet state's enigmatic future.
Download or read book The Psychic Soviet written by Ian F. Svenonius and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reissue of Ian F. Svenonius’s cult-classic debut essay collection, including brand-new writing in this expanded edition. “Everything author-slash-punk-icon Ian Svenonius says is interesting, and this book of satirical essays—originally published in 2006, now back in print—proves it . . . You’ll laugh until you cry.” —Washington Post A new, expanded collection of essays and articles from one of the mainstays of the Washington, DC, underground rock and roll scene, The Psychic Soviet is Ian F. Svenonius’s groundbreaking first book of writings. The selections are written in a lettered yet engaging style, filled with parody and biting humor that subvert capitalist culture, and cover such topics as the ascent of the DJ as a star, the “cosmic depression” that followed the defeat of the USSR, how Seinfeld caused the bankruptcy of modern pop culture, and the status of rock and roll as a religion. The pocket-sized book is bound with a durable bright-pink plastic cover, recalling the aesthetics of Mao’s Little Red Book, and perfect for carrying into the fray of street battle, classroom, or lunch-counter argument.
Download or read book Reinventing Collapse written by Dmitry Orlov and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the decline of the American empire for individuals, families and communities The United States is in steep decline. Plagued by runaway debt, a shrinking economy, and environmental catastrophes to rival Chernobyl, the United States has been retracing the trajectory of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s toward national bankruptcy and political dissolution. By comparing a collapse that has run its course to one that is now unfolding, Dmitry Orlov holds a unique lens up to America's present and future. As Orlov's predictions continue to come true, his writing continues to gain mainstream acceptance. This revised and updated edition of Reinventing Collapse examines the circumstances of the demise of the Soviet superpower and offers clear insights into how we might prepare for the events that are unfolding here. Orlov gives no quarter to prophets of doom and gloom, finding plenty of room for optimism, if only we focus our efforts on personal and cultural transformation instead of trying to perpetuate an impossible status quo. This challenging yet inspiring and surprisingly upbeat work is a must-read for anyone concerned about peak oil, the environment, geopolitics, international relations, and life in a resource-constrained world. Dmitry Orlov is an American engineer who was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse and has written extensively on the subject of the impending collapse of the United States.
Download or read book Superpower Syndrome written by Robert Jay Lifton and published by Nation Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one is better equipped than psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton-a leading scholar of thought control and mass violence- to make sense of the extreme moment. From Hiroshima survivors to Nazi doctors, from Vietnam veterans to the cult that sarin-gassed the Tokyo subways, he has explained to us global apocalyptic urges, the ravages of psychic numbness, and the psychology of the survivor. Now, as al- Qaeda's desire to purify the earth of "evil" meets the unilateral urge to dominate the globe's sole superpower, Lifton believes we have arrived at a remarkably perilous moment. The United States-from its leaders to much of its people-feels itself painfully vulnerable and thinks of itself as a survivor nation. The combination of such feelings roiling through the land over the last year and an administration with unprecedented military power bent on dominating and purifying the earth adds up to an intensely dangerous atmosphere-in fact, a "syndrome." Unfortunately, there is no therapy available for empires-or rather, the only therapy available is self-prescribed. But while Lifton can't be therapist to the earth's last superpower, he can bring together a half century of wisdom and apply it to Superpower Syndrome.
Download or read book Scientific Management Socialist Discipline and Soviet Power written by Mark R. Beissinger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the excessive bureaucratization of central planning affect politics in communist countries? Mark Beissinger suggests an answer through this history of the Soviet Scientific Management movement and its contemporary descendants, raising at the same time broader questions about the political consequences of economic systems. Beissinger traces the rise and decline of administrative strategies throughout Soviet history, focusing on the roles of managerial technique and disciplinary coercion. He argues that over-bureaucratization leads to a succession of national crises of effectiveness, which political leaders use to challenge the power of entrenched elites and to consolidate their rule. It also encourages leaders to resort to radical administrative strategies--technocratic utopias, mass mobilization, and discipline campaigns--and gives rise to a cycling syndrome, as similar problems and solutions reappear over time. Beissinger gives a new perspective and interpretation of Soviet history through the prism of organizational theory. He also provides a comprehensive history of the Soviet rationalization movement from Lenin to Gorbachev that describes the recurring attractions and tensions between politicians and management experts, as well as the reception accorded Western management techniques in the Soviet factory and management-training classroom. Beissinger uses a number of unusual sources: the personal archive of Aleksei Gastev, the foremost Soviet Taylorist of the 1920s; published Soviet archival documents; unpublished Soviet government documents and dissertations on management science and executive training; interviews with Soviet management scientists; and the author's personal observations of managers attending a three-month executive training program in the Soviet Union. Beissinger's skillful handling of this singular material will attract the attention of political scientists, historians, and economists, especially those working in Soviet studies.
Download or read book The Russian Vodka Syndrome written by Joseph L. Sitali and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Vodka Syndrome is a literary political story, a novel, a spy thriller about an African student in the former communist Soviet Union whom the KGB—the Soviet government security agency, wants to recruit into the KGB at any cost to progress communism in his country. No other place; film, video, or book, has so vividly and with so much clarity ever told the story of the sufferings of Africans under Soviet communism as it is revealed here. The book is full of experiences of pain, violence, racism, strong racial language, racial prejudice, sympathy, bitterness, remorse, romance, anxiety, nostalgia, great admirations and expectations, frustrations, horror, revulsion, surprise, anger, betrayal, oppression, fear, fatigue, dread, alarm, uncertainty, conflict, confusion, hopelessness, helplessness, misery, dejection, desperation, shock, apprehension, disbelief, discomfort, blackmail, treachery, despair, agony and finally, total disillusionment. It is a gripping tale about how African students unintentionally assisted the West to bring down the Soviet Union. It also provides insights into the similarities between the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. This story was written to show the impact of Soviet Communism on African students living in the former Soviet Union and by extension, on African students living in the former communist bloc countries of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. This story is completely captivating and convincing. Seven chances out of ten, you will shed emotional tears before you complete reading it!
Download or read book Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking written by Anya von Bremzen and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations “Delicious . . . A banquet of anecdote that brings history to life with intimacy, candor, and glorious color.”—NPR’s All Things Considered Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Havana Syndrome written by Robert W. Baloh and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involves an array of complaints including brain damage, the authors present compelling evidence that mass psychogenic illness was the cause of “Havana Syndrome.” This mysterious condition that has baffled experts is explored across 11-chapters which offer insights by a prominent neurologist and an expert on psychogenic illness. A lively and enthralling read, the authors explore the history of similar scares from the 18th century belief that sounds from certain musical instruments were harmful to human health, to 19th century cases of “telephone shock,” and more contemporary panics involving people living near wind turbines that have been tied to a variety of health complaints. The authors provide dozens of examples of kindred episodes of mass hysteria throughout history, in addition to psychosomatic conditions and even the role of insects in triggering outbreaks. Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria is a scientific detective story and a case study in the social construction of mass psychogenic illness.
Download or read book Katyn written by Wojciech Materski and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.
Download or read book Gorky Park written by Martin Cruz Smith and published by Pocket Books. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “gripping, romantic, and dazzlingly original” (Cosmopolitan) Arkady Renko book that started it all: the #1 bestseller Gorky Park, an espionage classic that begins the series, by Martin Cruz Smith, “the master of the international thriller” (The New York Times). It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and the New York City police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fur dealer. Meanwhile, Renko is falling in love with a beautiful, headstrong dissident for whom he may risk everything. “Brilliant...there are enough enigmas within enigmas within enigmas to reel the mind” (The New Yorker) in this wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain. “Once one gets going, one doesn’t want to stop...The action is gritty, the plot complicated, and the overriding quality is intelligence” (The Washington Post). The first in a classic series, Gorky Park “reminds you just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be” (The New York Times Book Review).
Download or read book Global Health and International Relations written by Colin McInnes and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long separation of health and International Relations, as distinct academic fields and policy arenas, has now dramatically changed. Health, concerned with the body, mind and spirit, has traditionally focused on disease and infirmity, whilst International Relations has been dominated by concerns of war, peace and security. Since the 1990s, however, the two fields have increasingly overlapped. How can we explain this shift and what are the implications for the future development of both fields? Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee examine four key intersections between health and International Relations today - foreign policy and health diplomacy, health and the global political economy, global health governance and global health security. The explosion of interest in these subjects has, in large part, been due to "real world" concerns - disease outbreaks, antibiotic resistance, counterfeit drugs and other risks to human health amid the spread of globalisation. Yet the authors contend that it is also important to understand how global health has been socially constructed, shaped in theory and practice by particular interests and normative frameworks. This groundbreaking book encourages readers to step back from problem-solving to ask how global health is being problematized in the first place, why certain agendas and issue areas are prioritised, and what determines the potential solutions put forth to address them? The palpable struggle to better understand the health risks facing a globalized world, and to strengthen collective action to deal with them effectively, begins - they argue - with a more reflexive and critical approach to this rapidly emerging subject.
Download or read book Laboratory of Socialist Development written by Artemy M. Kalinovsky and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, this book places the Soviet development of Central Asia, and the Soviet hope for communism's bringing prosperity to a supposedly backward area, in global context"--
Download or read book It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway written by David Satter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A veteran writer on Russia and the Soviet Union explains why Russia refuses to draw from the lessons of its past and what this portends for the future Russia today is haunted by deeds that have not been examined and words that have been left unsaid. A serious attempt to understand the meaning of the Communist experience has not been undertaken, and millions of victims of Soviet Communism are all but forgotten. In this book David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent and longtime writer on Russia and the Soviet Union, presents a striking new interpretation of Russia's great historical tragedy, locating its source in Russia's failure fully to appreciate the value of the individual in comparison with the objectives of the state. Satter explores the moral and spiritual crisis of Russian society. He shows how it is possible for a government to deny the inherent value of its citizens and for the population to agree, and why so many Russians actually mourn the passing of the Soviet regime that denied them fundamental rights. Through a wide-ranging consideration of attitudes toward the living and the dead, the past and the present, the state and the individual, Satter arrives at a distinctive and important new way of understanding the Russian experience.
Download or read book The Afghan Syndrome written by Cāṇakya Sena and published by Vikas Publishing House Private. This book was released on 1982 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Book, Published In 1982, Is Not On Afghanistan But Is A Study Of The Soviet Union In The Context Of Soviet Military Intervention In Afghanistan In December 1979. Without Dustjacket.
Download or read book Return to Cold War written by Robert Legvold and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-03-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2014 crisis in Ukraine sent a tottering U.S.-Russian relationship over a cliff - a dangerous descent into deep mistrust, severed ties, and potential confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War period. In this incisive new analysis, leading expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, Robert Legvold, explores in detail this qualitatively new phase in a relationship that has alternated between hope and disappointment for much of the past two decades. Tracing the long and tortured path leading to this critical juncture, he contends that the recent deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations deserves to be understood as a return to cold war with great and lasting consequences. In drawing out the commonalities between the original cold war and the current confrontation, Return to Cold War brings a fresh perspective to what is happening between the two countries, its broader significance beyond the immediate issues of the day, and how political leaders in both countries might adjust their approaches in order, as the author urges, to make this new cold war "as short and shallow as possible."
