Download or read book The Costs of the Soviet Empire written by Charles Wolf and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study develops and applies a comprehensive framework for estimating all of the economic costs incurred by the Soviet Union in acquiring, maintaining, and expanding its empire. The bulk of the study is devoted to estimating the total and component costs of the Soviet empire (CSE) for the period from 1971 through 1980. The principal components include implicit trade subsidies; export credits; military aid deliveries; economic aid deliveries; incremental costs of Soviet military operations in Afghanistan; and costs of Soviet covert and related activities that can be reasonably imputed to the empire, rather than to maintenance of the Soviet system at home. These costs are expressed in current and constant dollars and rubles, and scaled in relation to Soviet GNP and military spending. After considering total costs and their changes over the 1970s, the cost of each component is examined separately. Finally, the question of whether CSE will be higher or lower in the 1980s than in the 1970s is considered, as well as several policy issues relating to the burden imposed by CSE on the Soviet economy, the relative size of comparable U.S. costs, and the desirability and feasibility of U.S. policies for raising CSE.
Download or read book The Costs of the Soviet Empire written by and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study develops and applies a comprehensive framework for estimating all of the economic costs incurred by the Soviet Union in acquiring, maintaining, and expanding its empire. We define the 'empire' to include the geographically contiguous countries of Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, and the parts of the empire that lie 'abroad'. The included countries cover a wide range of types and degrees of Soviet influence and control-a characteristic that is not unique to the current Soviet empire. We define the costs of empire to include costs incurred by the Soviet Union to maintain or increase control in countries under Soviet domination, to acquire influence in countries that are candidates for future Soviet control, and to thwart or subvert countries opposed to it. Previous studies of the costs of the Soviet empire have been concerned with selected parts of the total costs, for example, emphasizing costs associated with particular countries or groups of countries such as those in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), or with such specific cost categories as Soviet economic and military aid. Our study draws on this prior work, combining and supplementing it in various ways. Substantial gaps and inadequacies remain in the available data. One of our aims is to highlight the most important gaps and thereby provide a basis for further data collection and analysis.
Download or read book The Selling of the Soviet Empire written by Alfred Kokh and published by SP Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before has there been an attempt to transform a massive state-owned economy into a dynamic free market system. The story of the conversion of the dinosaur Marxist Soviet state into the free-wheeling capitalist society of today's Russian Federation is one of the most compelling dramas in history. This tale includes violence, corruption, and a web of political conspiracy. It is a true-life economic-political thriller. Who are the new Russian financial magnates who are grabbing former state property? What were the terms for disposing of the state's immense wealth to private investors? What was the role of American financiers? These questions, and more, are answered here. In addition to what he saw with his own eyes (in the crucial period between 1992 and 1997), Kokh also paints vivid pictures of the influential decision-makers that he worked closely with, including Anatoly Chubais, the little known Kremlin kingpin who ran Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign and served as both Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. Kokh uses his expert knowledge of the Russian government to bring readers into the momentous meetings that changed the world, including his cogent analysis of events occurring in Russia at the present time.
Download or read book The Costs and Benefits of the Soviet Empire 1981 1983 written by Charles Wolf (Jr) and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report extends, through 1983, estimates of the economic costs of the Soviet empire that were published in a previous Rand study (R-3073/1-NA) covering the period 1971 to 1980. Its objectives are (1) to determine the extent to which the Soviet Union allocates resources for its broad international security interests; (2) to evaluate the burden that the empire imposes on the Soviet economy, and how this burden has changed in recent years; (3) to identify gaps in the estimates as a guide to needed improvements in future data collection; (4) to evaluate the political, military, and other benefits that the Soviet leadership attributes to the empire; and (5) to consider the extent to which economic stringencies within the Soviet Union, as well as other possible explanations, account for the marked changes that occurred in empire costs between 1981 and 1983. The study finds that Soviet empire costs declined appreciably during the early 1980s, but remained substantial in both absolute and relative terms. (Author).
Download or read book The Costs and Benefits of the Soviet Empire 1981 1983 written by Charles Wolf and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report extends, through 1983, estimates of the economic costs of the Soviet empire that were published in a previous RAND study (R-3073/1-NA) covering the period 1971 to 1980. Its objectives are (1) to determine the extent to which the Soviet Union allocates resources for its broad international security interests; (2) to evaluate the burden that the empire imposes on the Soviet economy, and how this burden has changed in recent years; (3) to identify gaps in the estimates as a guide to needed improvements in future data collection; (4) to evaluate the political, military, and other benefits that the Soviet leadership attributes to the empire; and (5) to consider the extent to which economic stringencies within the Soviet Union, as well as other possible explanations, account for the marked changes that occurred in empire costs between 1981 and 1983. The study finds that Soviet empire costs declined appreciably during the early 1980s, but remained substantial in both absolute and relative terms.
Download or read book The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire written by Fred Coleman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1996 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Coleman, A Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, has spent over thirty years gathering observations and experiences to produce this in-depth, up-close, definitive examination of the fall of the Soviet Union and the people and events that contributed essentially to its demise. From the Kremlin Palace coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, to the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin's troubled presidency through 1995, Coleman was the man on the scene for virtually every defining event of Russian history in the postwar era.
Download or read book The Last Empire written by Serhii Plokhy and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal) On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades -- with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. Bush, in fact, was firmly committed to supporting Gorbachev as he attempted to hold together the USSR in the face of growing independence movements in its republics. Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months, providing invaluable insight into the origins of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the outset of the most dangerous crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Choice Outstanding Academic Title BBC History Magazine Best History Book of the Year
Download or read book Energy and the Costs of Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe written by Robert James Zafft and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Down with Big Brother written by Michael Dobbs and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this volume was present during the final decade of the Soviet empire, first for Reuters, then for the "Washington Post". While Dobbs watched, playwrights and elctricians were transformed into presidents, while Communist Party leaders became jailbirds or newly-minted tycoons. He identifies the seeds of destruction, and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular, was the unwitting inspiration for the upheaval of the empire, while he thought he could save the Communist Party by reforming it.;Dobbs' conclusion is that though Big Brother may be dead, his dark legacy is still alive in the turbulence in Russia, Romania, Bosnia and other countries that once made up the most brutal empire of the 20th century.
Download or read book Lenin s Tomb written by David Remnick and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
Download or read book The Soviet Empire written by Soviet Union. Sʺezd Narodnykh Deputatov and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1989 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Future Directions for Analysis of the Soviet Economy written by Charles Wolf (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book After the Soviet Empire written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The break-up of the Soviet Union is a key event of the twentieth century. The 39th IIS congress in Yerevan 2009 focused on causes and consequences of this event and on shifts in the world order that followed in its wake. This volume is an effort to chart these developments in empirical and conceptual terms. It has a focus on the lands of the former Soviet Union but also explores pathways and contexts in the Second World at large. The Soviet Union was a full scale experiment in creating an alternative modernity. The implosion of this union gave rise to new states in search of national identity. At a time when some observers heralded the end of history, there was a rediscovery of historical legacies and a search for new paths of development across the former Second World. In some parts of this world long-repressed legacies were rediscovered. They were sometimes, as in the case of countries in East Central Europe, built around memories of parliamentary democracy and its replacement by authoritarian rule during the interwar period. Some legacies referred to efforts at establishing statehood in the wake of the First World War, others to national upheavals in the nineteenth century and earlier. In Central Asia and many parts of the Caucasus the cultural heritage of Islam in its different varieties gave rise to new markers of identity but also to violent contestations. In South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have embarked upon distinctly different, but invariably contingent, paths of development. Analogously core components of the old union have gone through tumultuous, but until the last year and a half largely bloodless, transformations. The crystallization of divergent paths of development in the two largest republics of that union, i.e. Russia and Ukraine, has ushered in divergent national imaginations but also in series of bloody confrontations.
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 The Soviet Union written by Tania Raffass and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet Union is often characterised as nominally a federation, but really an empire, liable to break up when individual federal units, which were allegedly really subordinate colonial units, sought independence. This book questions this interpretation, revisiting the theory of federation, and discussing actual examples of federations such as the United States, arguing that many federal unions, including the United States, are really centralised polities. It also discusses the nature of empires, nations and how they relate to nation states and empires, and the right of secession, highlighting the importance of the fact that this was written in to the Soviet constitution. It examines the attitude of successive Soviet leaders towards nationalities, and the changing attitudes of nationalists towards the Soviet Union. Overall, it demonstrates that the Soviet attitude to nationalities and federal units was complicated, wrestling, in a similar way to many other states, with difficult questions of how ethno-cultural justice can best be delivered in a political unit which is bigger than the national state.
Download or read book Collapse of an Empire written by Yegor Gaidar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My goal is to show the reader that the Soviet political and economic system was unstable by its very nature. It was just a question of when and how it would collapse...." —From the Introduction to Collapse of an Empire The Soviet Union was an empire in many senses of the word—a vast mix of far-flung regions and accidental citizens by way of conquest or annexation. Typical of such empires, it was built on shaky foundations. That instability made its demise inevitable, asserts Yegor Gaidar, former prime minister of Russia and architect of the "shock therapy" economic reforms of the 1990s. Yet a growing desire to return to the glory days of empire is pushing today's Russia backward into many of the same traps that made the Soviet Union untenable. In this important new book, Gaidar clearly illustrates why Russian nostalgia for empire is dangerous and ill-fated: "Dreams of returning to another era are illusory. Attempts to do so will lead to defeat." Gaidar uses world history, the Soviet experience, and economic analysis to demonstrate why swimming against this tide of history would be a huge mistake. The USSR sowed the seeds of its own economic destruction, and Gaidar worries that Russia is repeating some of those mistakes. Once again, for example, the nation is putting too many eggs into one basket, leaving the nation vulnerable to fluctuations in the energy market. The Soviets had used revenues from energy sales to prop up struggling sectors such as agriculture, which was so thoroughly ravaged by hyperindustrialization that the Soviet Union became a net importer of food. When oil prices dropped in the 1980s, that revenue stream diminished, and dependent sectors suffered heavily. Although strategies requiring austerity or sacrifice can be politically difficult, Russia needs to prepare for such downturns and restrain spending during prosperous times. Collapse of an Empire shows why it is imperative to fix the roof before it starts to rain, and why so
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.
