A Failed Empire

Author: Vladislav M. Zubok
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807899054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

Book Description
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.

The Last Empire

Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Book Description
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

Breach of Trust

Author: Andrew J. Bacevich
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805082964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war. As war has become normalized, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." Bacevich takes stock of a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory.

A Failed Vision of Empire

Author: Daniel J. Burge
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149623166X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Since the early twentieth century, historians have traditionally defined manifest destiny as the belief that the United States was destined to expand from coast to coast. This generation of historians has posed manifest destiny as a unifying ideology of the nineteenth century, one that was popular and pervasive and ultimately fulfilled in the late 1840s when the United States acquired the Pacific Coast. However, the story of manifest destiny was never quite that simple. In A Failed Vision of Empire Daniel J. Burge examines the belief in manifest destiny over the nineteenth century by analyzing contested moments in the continental expansion of the United States, arguing that the ideology was ultimately unsuccessful. By examining speeches, plays, letters, diaries, newspapers, and other sources, Burge reveals how Americans debated the wisdom of expansion, challenged expansionists, and disagreed over what the boundaries of the United States should look like. A Failed Vision of Empire is the first work to capture the messy, complicated, and yet far more compelling story of manifest destiny's failure, debunking in the process one of the most pervasive myths of modern American history.

For the Soul of Mankind

Author: Melvyn P. Leffler
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142996409X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1032

Book Description
To the amazement of the public, pundits, and even the policymakers themselves, the ideological and political conflict that had endangered the world for half a century came to an end in 1990. How did that happen? What caused the cold war in the first place, and why did it last as long as it did? The distinguished historian Melvyn P. Leffler homes in on four crucial episodes when American and Soviet leaders considered modulating, avoiding, or ending hostilities and asks why they failed: Stalin and Truman devising new policies after 1945; Malenkov and Eisenhower exploring the chance for peace after Stalin's death in 1953; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and LBJ trying to reduce tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and Brezhnev and Carter aiming to sustain détente after the Helsinki Conference of 1975. All these leaders glimpsed possibilities for peace, yet they allowed ideologies, political pressures, the expectations of allies and clients, the dynamics of the international system, and their own fearful memories to trap them in a cycle of hostility that seemed to have no end. For the Soul of Mankind illuminates how Reagan, Bush, and, above all, Gorbachev finally extricated themselves from the policies and mind-sets that had imprisoned their predecessors, and were able to reconfigure Soviet-American relations after decades of confrontation.

Empire

Author: D. C. B. Lieven
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300097269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Book Description
Focusing on the Tsarist and Soviet empires of Russia, Lieven reveals the nature and meaning of all empires throughout history. He examines factors that mold the shape of the empires, including geography and culture, and compares the Russian empires with other imperial states, from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States. Illustrations.

Mussolini Warlord

Author: H. James Burgwyn
Publisher: Enigma Books
ISBN: 1936274299
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
The first study of Benito Mussolini's failure as a war leader.

Failure of Empire

Author: Noel Lenski
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520283899
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
Failure of Empire is the first comprehensive biography of the Roman emperor Valens and his troubled reign (A.D. 364-78). Valens will always be remembered for his spectacular defeat and death at the hands of the Goths in the Battle of Adrianople. This singular misfortune won him a front-row seat among history's great losers. By the time he was killed, his empire had been coming unglued for several years: the Goths had overrun the Balkans; Persians, Isaurians, and Saracens were threatening the east; the economy was in disarray; and pagans and Christians alike had been exiled, tortured, and executed in his religious persecutions. Valens had not, however, entirely failed in his job as emperor. He was an admirable administrator, a committed defender of the frontiers, and a ruler who showed remarkable sympathy for the needs of his subjects. In lively style and rich detail, Lenski incorporates a broad range of new material, from archaeology to Gothic and Armenian sources, in a study that illuminates the social, cultural, religious, economic, administrative, and military complexities of Valens's realm. Failure of Empire offers a nuanced reconsideration of Valens the man and shows both how he applied his strengths to meet the expectations of his world and how he ultimately failed in his efforts to match limited capacities to limitless demands.

Down with Big Brother

Author: Michael Dobbs
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408851024
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Book Description
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.

Empire of Friends

Author: Rachel Applebaum
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.