Brezhnev's Folly

Author: Christopher J. Ward
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822971216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Heralded by Soviet propaganda as the "Path to the Future," the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) represented the hopes and dreams of Brezhnev and the Communist Party elite of the late Soviet era. Begun in 1974, and spanning approximately 2,000 miles after twenty-nine years of halting construction, the BAM project was intended to showcase the national unity, determination, skill, technology, and industrial might that Soviet socialism claimed to embody. More pragmatically, the Soviet leadership envisioned the BAM railway as a trade route to the Pacific, where markets for Soviet timber and petroleum would open up, and as an engine for the development of Siberia. Despite these aspirations and the massive commitment of economic resources on its behalf, BAM proved to be a boondoggle-a symbol of late communism's dysfunctionality-and a cruel joke to many ordinary Soviet citizens. In reality, BAM was woefully bereft of quality materials and construction, and victimized by poor planning and an inferior workforce. Today, the railway is fully complete, but remains a symbol of the profligate spending and inefficiency that characterized the Brezhnev years.In Brezhnev's Folly, Christopher J. Ward provides a groundbreaking social history of the BAM railway project. He examines the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of workers from the diverse republics of the USSR and other socialist countries, and his extensive archival research and interviews with numerous project workers provide an inside look at the daily life of the BAM workforce. We see firsthand the disorganization, empty promises, dire living and working conditions, environmental damage, and acts of crime, segregation, and discrimination that constituted daily life during the project's construction. Thus, perhaps, we also see the final irony of BAM: that the most lasting legacy of this misguided effort to build Soviet socialism is to shed historical light on the profound ills afflicting a society in terminal decline.

Brezhnev

Author: Susanne Schattenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755642104
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
"Schattenberg has done a service in rescuing the Brezhnev period from obscurity." The Morning Star "[Offers an] unparalleled examination of the Brezhnev papers." Literary Review Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for eighteen years, a term of leadership second only in length to that of Stalin. He presided over the Brezhnev Doctrine, which accelerated the Cold War, and led the Soviet Union through catastrophic foreign policy decisions such as the invasion of Afghanistan. To many in the West, he is responsible for the stagnation (and to some even collapse) of the Soviet Union. But much of this history has been based on the only two English-language biographies (both published before Brezhnev's death and without access to archival sources) and Brezhnev's own astonishingly untrue memoirs – written for propaganda purposes. Newly translated from German, Schattenberg's magisterial book systematically dismantles the stereotypical and one-dimensional view of Brezhnev as the stagnating Stalinist by drawing on a wealth of archival research and documents not previously studied in English. The Brezhnev that emerges is a complex one, from his early apolitical years, when he dreamed of becoming an actor, through his swift and surprising rise through the Party ranks. From his hitherto misunderstood role in Khrushchev's ousting and appointment as his successor, to his somewhat pro-Western foreign policy aims, deft consolidation and management of power, and ultimate descent into addiction and untimely death. For Schattenberg, this is the story of a flawed and ineffectual idealist - for the West, this biography makes a convincing case that Brezhnev should be reappraised as one of the most interesting and important political figures of the twentieth century.

Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era

Author: Dina Fainberg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498529941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.

The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War

Author: Artemy M. Kalinovsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134700725
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 613

Book Description
This new Handbook offers a wide-ranging overview of current scholarship on the Cold War, with essays from many leading scholars. The field of Cold War history has consistently been one of the most vibrant in the field of international studies. Recent scholarship has added to our understanding of familiar Cold War events, such as the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and superpower détente, and shed new light on the importance of ideology, race, modernization, and transnational movements. The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War draws on the wealth of new Cold War scholarship, bringing together essays on a diverse range of topics such as geopolitics, military power and technology and strategy. The chapters also address the importance of non-state actors, such as scientists, human rights activists and the Catholic Church, and examine the importance of development, foreign aid and overseas assistance. The volume is organised into nine parts: Part I: The Early Cold War Part II: Cracks in the Bloc Part III: Decolonization, Imperialism and its Consequences Part IV: The Cold War in the Third World Part V: The Era of Detente Part VI: Human Rights and Non-State Actors Part VII: Nuclear Weapons, Technology and Intelligence Part VIII: Psychological Warfare, Propaganda and Cold War Culture Part IX: The End of the Cold War This new Handbook will be of great interest to all students of Cold War history, international history, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

Into Russian Nature

Author: Alan D. Roe
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190914556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
National parks are perhaps the most recognized environmental protection institution in the world and have long attracted the interest of historians. This is the first academic work on Russian national parks. It spans from the years before the Great October Revolution to the present and examines movements to establish national parks from European Russia to Siberia and the Far East. It is a story of grandiose visions in which Russian environmentalists conceived of ways to alter the state's relationship to nature and of demoralizing disappointment when the lofty ambitions of different park visionaries fell far short of their hopes.

The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia

Author: Melissa Chakars
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633860148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.

Ice and Snow in the Cold War

Author: Julia Herzberg
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785339877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
The history of the Cold War has focused overwhelmingly on statecraft and military power, an approach that has naturally placed Moscow and Washington center stage. Meanwhile, regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery have received little attention. However, such environments were of no small importance during the Cold War: in addition to their symbolic significance, they also had direct implications for everything from military strategy to natural resource management. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of “East” and “West.”

Promoting Great Reads to Improve Teen Reading

Author: Lucy Schall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
Support current educational initiatives with a ready-to-use tool that will help you with selection, motivation, and skill building relative to titles published within the last five years. New demands by Common Core and other national and state standards mean teachers and librarians need support in pairing high-interest content with skill building that speaks to those standards. This hands-on, research-based resource will help. Covering 100 titles, it guides you to topics, themes, values, and activities that meet national and state standards. The book's organization—by genres, topics, and themes—will enable librarians to serve customers with specific requests and help teachers build thematic units. Focusing on recent young adult fiction and nonfiction (2010–2014), the guide offers a succinct plot summary, links to popular themes and genres, indication of reading levels, and an engaging booktalk for each title. It also includes guidelines for further promoting each book and extending knowledge through discussion. The author, a former middle and high school teacher, demonstrates how you can foster close reading through paraphrasing, comparison, and response and explains how to strengthen critical thinking among teens. Lists of related titles and notes on gender appeal can be used for readers' advisory.

Raised under Stalin

Author: Seth F. Bernstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
In Raised under Stalin, Seth Bernstein shows how Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities as members of the Young Communist League or Komsomol even as it surrounded them with violence, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war. Informed by declassified materials from post-Soviet archives, as well as films, memoirs, and diaries by and about youth, Raised under Stalin explains the divided status of youth for the Bolsheviks: they were the "new people" who would someday build communism, the potential soldiers who would defend the USSR, and the hooligans who might undermine it from within. Bernstein explains how, although Soviet revolutionary youth culture began as the preserve of proletarian activists, the Komsomol transformed under Stalin to become a mass organization of moral education; youth became the targets of state repression even as Stalin’s regime offered them the opportunity to participate in political culture. Raised under Stalin follows Stalinist youth into their ultimate test, World War II. Even as the war against Germany decimated the ranks of Young Communists, Bernstein finds evidence that it cemented Stalinist youth culture as a core part of socialism.

Soviet SCI_BERIA

Author: Ksenia Tatarchenko
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350165859
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
At first glance, the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, or Akademgorodok, appears as an outlier in academic excellence. This 'science city' is renowned for a preeminent university, dozens of research institutes, and a thriving technopark. At home, it is an emblem of Russian innovation; abroad, it is often portrayed as a potential threat, a breeding ground of cyber soldiers. Though Siberia has been the main source of post-1991 Russian carbon revenues, its soviet history and cold war legacy of internationalism demonstrates that territorial and scientific dimensions interlocked the moment the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was created in 1957. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Soviet SCI_BERIA focuses on how the post-Stalinist Siberia was redefined and represented through the ideal of rational development, the late socialist innovation practices, and the relationship between experts and the state. It offers a fresh insight into the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet Akademgorodok. In doing so, Tatarchenko not only fosters a conversation between history, area studies, and science studies but also sheds new light on Soviet modernity and the limits of its transformative projects.