Download or read book Collapse written by Vladislav M. Zubok and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise “A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart.”—Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times “[A] masterly analysis.”—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances—and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
Download or read book 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post Soviet Countries written by Jeroen Huisman and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is a result of the first ever study of the transformations of the higher education institutional landscape in fifteen former USSR countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores how the single Soviet model that developed across the vast and diverse territory of the Soviet Union over several decades has evolved into fifteen unique national systems, systems that have responded to national and global developments while still bearing some traces of the past. The book is distinctive as it presents a comprehensive analysis of the reforms and transformations in the region in the last 25 years; and it focuses on institutional landscape through the evolution of the institutional types established and developed in Pre-Soviet, Soviet and Post-Soviet time. It also embraces all fifteen countries of the former USSR, and provides a comparative analysis of transformations of institutional landscape across Post-Soviet systems. It will be highly relevant for students and researchers in the fields of higher education and and sociology, particularly those with an interest in historical and comparative studies. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
Download or read book Stalin s Genocides written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.
Download or read book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy written by Chris Miller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For half a century the Soviet economy was inefficient but stable. In the late 1980s, to the surprise of nearly everyone, it suddenly collapsed. Why did this happen? And what role did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms play in the country's dissolution? In this groundbreaking study, Chris Miller shows that Gorbachev and his allies tried to learn from the great success story of transitions from socialism to capitalism, Deng Xiaoping's China. Why, then, were efforts to revitalize Soviet socialism so much less successful than in China? Making use of never-before-studied documents from the Soviet politburo and other archives, Miller argues that the difference between the Soviet Union and China--and the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse--was not economics but politics. The Soviet government was divided by bitter conflict, and Gorbachev, the ostensible Soviet autocrat, was unable to outmaneuver the interest groups that were threatened by his economic reforms. Miller's analysis settles long-standing debates about the politics and economics of perestroika, transforming our understanding of the causes of the Soviet Union's rapid demise.
Download or read book What Happened to the Soviet University written by Maia Chankseliani and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Happened to the Soviet University? explores how one of the largest geopolitical changes of the twentieth century-- the dissolution of the Soviet Union-- triggered and inspired the reconfiguration of the Soviet university. The reader is invited to engage in a historical and sociological analysis of radical and incremental changes affecting sixty-nine former Soviet universities since the early 1990s. The study departs from traditional deficit-oriented, internalist explanations of change and illustrates how global flows of ideas, people, and finances have impacted higher education transformations in this region. It also identifies areas of persistence. The processes of marketisation, internationalisation, and academic liberation are analysed to show that universities have maintained certain traditions while adopting and internalising new ways of fulfilling their education and research functions. Soviet universities have survived chaotic processes of post-Soviet transformation and have self-stabilised with time. Most of them remain flagship institutions with large numbers of students and relatively high research productivity. At the same time, the majority of these universities operate in a top-down, one-man management environment with limited institutional autonomy and academic freedom. As the homes of intellectuals, universities represent a duality of opportunity and threat. Universities can nurture collective possibilities, imagining and bringing about different futures. At the same time, or perhaps because of this, the probability is high that universities will continue to be perceived as threats to governments with authoritarian inclinations. One message to take away from this monograph is that the time is ripe for former Soviet universities to loosen their last remaining chains.
Download or read book Stealing the State written by Steven Lee Solnick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solnick argues that the Soviet system fell victim not to stalemate at the top nor to revolution from below, but to opportunism from within. In case studies on the Communist Youth League, the system of job assignments for university graduates, and military conscription, he tells the story from a new perspective, testing Western theories of reform.
Download or read book Making the Soviet Intelligentsia written by Benjamin Tromly and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these fêted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state.
Download or read book The Unmaking of Soviet Life written by Caroline Humphrey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten essays from award-winning author Caroline Humphrey. Humphrey explores such topics as the mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism, locating them in the experiences of a wide range of subjects.
Download or read book Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse Understanding Historical Change written by Robert Strayer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event of the recent past - as a case study, this text engages students in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation and explanation. In exploring the question posed by the title, the author introduces and applies such organizing concepts as great power conflict, imperial decline, revolution, ethnic conflict, colonialism, economic development, totalitarian ideology, and transition to democracy in a most accessible way. Questions and controversies, and extracts from documentary and literary sources, anchor the text at key points. This book is intended for use in history and political science courses on the Soviet Union or more generally on the 20th century.
Download or read book How the Soviet Union Disappeared written by Wisła Suraska and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the result of an attempt by Gorbachev to concentrate political power, and that the breakdown of the economy was a consequence not a cause of his reforms.
Download or read book Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921 1934 written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-16 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of Soviet education policy 1921-34, this is a sequel to the author's highly praised Commissariat of Enlightenment.
Download or read book Soviet Soft Power in Poland written by Patryk Babiracki and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.
Download or read book The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed written by Linda J. Cook and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract. Linda Cook pursues the idea from Brezhnev's day to our own, and considers the constraining effect it may have had on Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet economy.
Download or read book The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention written by Anton Weiss-Wendt and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How both the Soviet Union and the United States manipulated and weakened the drafting of the United Nations Genocide Convention treaty in the midst of the Cold War.
Download or read book The Patriotism of Despair written by Serguei Alex. Oushakine and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia. In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair. The Patriotism of Despair examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices? Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the "neocoms": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.
Download or read book Hungary s Cold War written by Csaba Békés and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this magisterial and pathbreaking work, Csaba Bekes shares decades of his research to provide a sweeping examination of Hungary's international relations with both the Soviet Bloc and the West from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unlike many studies of the global Cold War that focus on East-West relationships—often from the vantage point of the West—Bekes grounds his work in the East, drawing on little-used, non-English sources. As such, he offers a new and sweeping Cold War narrative using Hungary as a case study, demonstrating that the East-Central European states have played a much more important role in shaping both the Soviet bloc's overall policy and the East-West relationship than previously assumed. Similarly, he shows how the relationship between Moscow and its allies, as well as among the bloc countries, was much more complex than it appeared to most observers in the East and the West alike.
Download or read book A Failed Empire written by Vladislav M. Zubok and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this widely praised book, Vladislav Zubok argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok offers the first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side. A Failed Empire provides a history quite different from those written by the Western victors. In a new preface for this edition, the author adds to our understanding of today's events in Russia, including who the new players are and how their policies will affect the state of the world in the twenty-first century.
