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Inside The Soviet Alternate Universe
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Book Synopsis Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe by : Dick Combs
Download or read book Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe written by Dick Combs and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reappraises the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union based on the author's 35-year career as a specialist in Soviet and post-Soviet affairs. Explores the psychological universe of Soviet rulers to clarify the nature of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Selling Peace written by Jeffrey Manber and published by Apogee Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time the inside story of Russia's marketing of their space program to the West is chronicled by one who was there. The colourful tales are told, warts and all. How the door to Russia's long hidden space pro-gram was opened during the era of Soviet perestroika, the political struggle on the signing of the first contract between the Russians and NASA, the push to change space station Freedom into a co-operative venture, the willingness of the Russians to use free markets against the wishes of NASA and how the Russian space station Mir became a commercial platform, are all told in a relaxed and engaging style by the author, who is the only American ever to work within the Russian space program. The book chronicles the author's 14 year journey to use Russian assets to strengthen the American space program. Included is the behind-the-scenes of signing Dennis Tito, working with entertainment icons like James Cameron and Mark Burnett and the electrifying ride that was MirCorp. The book discusses the boycott organised by NASA to prevent MirCorp's success and the drama behind the world's only commercial manned expedition that sent two men to the Mirspace station for over two months, with no government funding. It is a tale of strong characters. Readers are given a front-row seat on the decade-long clash between the Russian chief Yuri Semenov and NASA's Dan Goldin, a paradoxical battle that saw the Russians embracing American open markets and NASA clinging to the Cold War model for space exploration.
Book Synopsis The Invention of Russia by : Arkady Ostrovsky
Download or read book The Invention of Russia written by Arkady Ostrovsky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE WINNER OF THE CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD FINALIST FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR “Fast-paced and excellently written…much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable.” —New York Times “Filled with sparkling prose and deep analysis.” –The Wall Street Journal The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution. A highly regarded Moscow correspondent for the Economist, Arkady Ostrovsky comes to this story both as a participant and a foreign correspondent. His knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and astonishing longevity, his use of hybrid warfare and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country than its politicians. Putin pioneered a new form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and aggressively nationalistic - that has now been embraced by Donald Trump.
Book Synopsis Soviet Space Dogs by : Olesya Turkina
Download or read book Soviet Space Dogs written by Olesya Turkina and published by Fuel Pub. This book was released on 2014 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the true stories of Laika, Belka, Strelka, and the other space dogs who were sent on experimental space flight explorations by the Soviet Union between 1951 and 1956.
Book Synopsis For the Soul of Mankind by : Melvyn P. Leffler
Download or read book For the Soul of Mankind written by Melvyn P. Leffler and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 1029 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Red Inferno: 1945 by : Robert Conroy
Download or read book Red Inferno: 1945 written by Robert Conroy and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1945, the Allies are charging toward Berlin from the west, the Russians from the east. For Hitler, the situation is hopeless. But at this turning point in history, another war is about to explode. To win World War II, the Allies dealt with the devil. Joseph Stalin helped FDR, Churchill, and Truman crush Hitler. But what if “Uncle Joe” had given in to his desire to possess Germany and all of Europe? In this stunning novel, Robert Conroy picks up the history of the war just as American troops cross the Elbe into Germany. Then Stalin slams them with the brute force of his enormous Soviet army. From American soldiers and German civilians trapped in the ruins of Potsdam to U.S. military men fighting behind enemy lines, from a scholarly Russia expert who becomes a secret player in a new war to Stalin’s cult of killers in Moscow, this saga captures the human face of international conflict. With the Soviets vastly outnumbering the Americans—but undercut by chronic fuel shortages and mistrust—Eisenhower employs a brilliant strategy of retreat to buy critical time for air superiority. Soon, Truman makes a series of controversial decisions, enlisting German help and planning to devastate the massive Red Army by using America’s ultimate and most secret weapon.
Book Synopsis Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia by : Liubov Denisova
Download or read book Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia written by Liubov Denisova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length history of Russian peasant women in the 20th century in English. Filling a significant gap in the literature on rural studies and gender studies of the twentieth century Russia, it is the first to take the story into the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive overview of regulations concerning rural women: their employment patterns; marriages, divorces and family life; issues with health and raising children. Rural lives in the Soviet Union were often dramatically different from the common narrative of the Soviet history, and even during the Khrushchev "Thaw" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rural women were excluded from its reforms and liberating policies. The author, Luibov Denisova - a leading expert in the field of rural gender history in Russia - includes material from previously unavailable or unpublished collections and archives; interviews; sociological research and oral traditions. Overall, the book is a history of all rural women, from ordinary farm girls to agrarian professionals to prostitutes and paints a unique picture of rural women’s life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
Book Synopsis How Not to Network a Nation by : Benjamin Peters
Download or read book How Not to Network a Nation written by Benjamin Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.
Book Synopsis From Washington to Moscow by : Louis Sell
Download or read book From Washington to Moscow written by Louis Sell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks accords in 1972 it was generally seen as the point at which the USSR achieved parity with the United States. Less than twenty years later the Soviet Union had collapsed, confounding experts who never expected it to happen during their lifetimes. In From Washington to Moscow veteran US Foreign Service officer Louis Sell traces the history of US–Soviet relations between 1972 and 1991 and explains why the Cold War came to an abrupt end. Drawing heavily on archival sources and memoirs—many in Russian—as well as his own experiences, Sell vividly describes events from the perspectives of American and Soviet participants. He attributes the USSR's fall not to one specific cause but to a combination of the Soviet system's inherent weaknesses, mistakes by Mikhail Gorbachev, and challenges by Ronald Reagan and other US leaders. He shows how the USSR's rapid and humiliating collapse and the inability of the West and Russia to find a way to cooperate respectfully and collegially helped set the foundation for Vladimir Putin’s rise.
Book Synopsis A World of Difference by : Harry Turtledove
Download or read book A World of Difference written by Harry Turtledove and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Viking lander on the planet Minerva was destroyed, sending back one last photo of a strange alien being, scientists on Earth were flabbergasted. And so a joint investigation was launched by the United States and the Soviet Union, the first long-distance manned space mission, and a symbol of the new peace between the two great rivals. Humankind's first close encounter with extraterrestrials would be history in the making, and the two teams were schooled in diplomacy as well as in science. But nothing prepared them for alien war—especially when the Americans and the Soviets found themselves on opposite sides. . . . Praise for A World of Difference “A master storyteller.”—Houston Chronicle “[Harry] Turtledove has proved he can divert his readers to astonishing places. he's developed a cult following over the years. . . . I know I'd follow his imagination almost anywhere.”—San Jose Mercury News “Turtledove never tires of exploring the paths not taken, bringing to his storytelling a prodigious knowledge of his subject and a profound understanding of human sensibilities and motivations.”—Library Journal
Book Synopsis Capital Loss, Corruption, and the Role of Western Financial Institutions by : United States. Congress. House. Committee on Financial Services
Download or read book Capital Loss, Corruption, and the Role of Western Financial Institutions written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Financial Services and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis What Good Is Grand Strategy? by : Hal Brands
Download or read book What Good Is Grand Strategy? written by Hal Brands and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grand strategy is one of the most widely used and abused concepts in the foreign policy lexicon. In this important book, Hal Brands explains why grand strategy is a concept that is so alluring—and so elusive—to those who make American statecraft. He explores what grand strategy is, why it is so essential, and why it is so hard to get right amid the turbulence of global affairs and the chaos of domestic politics. At a time when "grand strategy" is very much in vogue, Brands critically appraises just how feasible that endeavor really is. Brands takes a historical approach to this subject, examining how four presidential administrations, from that of Harry S. Truman to that of George W. Bush, sought to "do" grand strategy at key inflection points in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy. As examples ranging from the early Cold War to the Reagan years to the War on Terror demonstrate, grand strategy can be an immensely rewarding undertaking—but also one that is full of potential pitfalls on the long road between conception and implementation. Brands concludes by offering valuable suggestions for how American leaders might approach the challenges of grand strategy in the years to come.
Book Synopsis When the Future Came: The Collapse of the USSR and the Emergence of National Memory in Post-Soviet History Textbooks by : Li Kurbatov, Sergiy Bennich-Björkman
Download or read book When the Future Came: The Collapse of the USSR and the Emergence of National Memory in Post-Soviet History Textbooks written by Li Kurbatov, Sergiy Bennich-Björkman and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2019-11-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This captivating volume brings together case studies drawn from four post-Soviet states—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. The collected papers illustrate how the events that started in 1985 and brought down the USSR six years later led to the rise of fifteen successor states, with their own historicized collective memories. The volume’s analyses juxtapose history textbooks for secondary schools and universities, and how they aim to create understandings as well as identities that are politically usable, within their different contexts. From this emerges a picture of multiple perestroika(s) and diverging development paths. Only in Ukraine—a country that recently experienced two popular uprisings, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity—the people themselves are ascribed agency and the power to change their country. In the other three states, elites are, instead, presented as prime movers of society, as is historical determinism. The volume’s contributors are Diana Bencheci, Andrei Dudchik, Liliya Erushkina, Marharyta Fabrykant, Alexandr Gorylev, Andrey Kashin, Alla Marchenko, Valerii Mosneagu, Alexey Rusakov, Natalia Tregubova, and Yuliya Yurchuk.
Book Synopsis When Angels Wept by : Eric G. Swedin
Download or read book When Angels Wept written by Eric G. Swedin and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, CIA-trained and -organized Cuban exiles aiming to overthrow Fidel Castro were soundly defeated. Most were taken prisoner by Cuban armed forces. Fearing another U.S. invasion of its new ally, the Soviet Union sneaked into Cuba strategic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads and Soviet troops armed with tactical nuclear weapons. However, a U-2 spy plane flight would soon find the Soviet missile sites, thus sparking the famous missile crisis. For thirteen terrifying days, the world watched nervously as the two superpowers moved toward escalation, holding the world's fate in their hands. Finally, Nikita Khrushchev blinked. He agreed to withdraw the weapons from Cuba in return for John F. Kennedy's pledge not to invade the island. But what if it had not turned out this way? What if the U-2 flight had been delayed? If the confrontation had set off a nuclear war, what would have happened to the United States and Soviet Union in 1962? What kind of account would a historian have written in a world scarred by nuclear war? Eric G. Swedin draws on research made available after the Soviet Union's collapse to examine what could have happened. Top U.S. military officers all urged stronger action against Cuba than the naval blockade, including a bombing campaign and even a full-scale invasion. Unknown to the Americans, meanwhile, the Soviet Union had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba and were prepared to use them. The 1962 crisis had many possible outcomes. Positing an alternate history helps us better appreciate the dangers of that tense time. Such counterfactual speculation shows what the Cuban missile crisis could have wrought and how it was truly one of the most important moments of the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis Russia in the Twentieth Century by : David R. Marples
Download or read book Russia in the Twentieth Century written by David R. Marples and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Russia, as the natural successor to the Soviet Union, is of crucial importance to understanding why communism ultimately lost out to Western democracy and the free market system. David Marples presents a balanced overview of 20th century Russian history and shows that although contemporary Russia has retained many of the practices and memories of the Soviet period, it is not about to revert back to the Soviet example.
Download or read book The Imperial Wife written by Irina Reyn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Imperial Wife is a smart, engaging novel that parallels two fascinating worlds and two singular women. Irina Reyn writes beautifully of immigrants, art and the vagaries of love". --Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins Two women's lives collide when a priceless Russian artifact comes to light. Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying to entice Russia's wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden and unexplained departure of her husband. As questions arise over the provenance of the Order and auction fever kicks in, Reyn takes us into the world of Catherine the Great, the infamous 18th-century empress who may have owned the priceless artifact, and who it turns out faced many of the same issues Tanya wrestles with in her own life. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past. Can a contemporary marriage withstand an “Imperial Wife”?
Book Synopsis History+ for Edexcel A Level: Communist states in the twentieth century by : Robin Bunce
Download or read book History+ for Edexcel A Level: Communist states in the twentieth century written by Robin Bunce and published by Hodder Education. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Endorsed for Edexcel Enable your students to develop high-level skills in their Edexcel A level History breadth and depth studies through expert narrative and extended reading, including bespoke essays from leading academics - Build a strong understanding of the period studied with authoritative, well-researched content written in an accessible and engaging style - Ensure continual improvement in students' essay writing, interpretation and source analysis skills, using practice questions and trusted guidance on successfully answering exam-style questions - Encourage students to undertake rolling revision and self-assessment by referring to end-of-chapter summaries and diagrams across the years - Help students monitor their progress and consolidate their knowledge through note-making activities and peer-support tasks - Provide students with the opportunity to analyse and evaluate works of real history, with specially commissioned historians' essays and extracts from academic works on the historical interpretations
