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Stalinism For All Seasons
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Book Synopsis Stalinism for All Seasons by : Vladimir Tismaneanu
Download or read book Stalinism for All Seasons written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-10-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) traces its origins as a tiny, clandestine revolutionary organization in the 1920s, to its years in national power from 1944 to 1989, and to the post-1989 metamorphoses.
Book Synopsis Stalinism for All Seasons by : Vladimir Tismaneanu
Download or read book Stalinism for All Seasons written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Devil in History by : Vladimir Tismaneanu
Download or read book The Devil in History written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
Book Synopsis Romania Since 1989 by : Henry F. Carey
Download or read book Romania Since 1989 written by Henry F. Carey and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive study of Romanian politics ever published abroad, this volume represents an effort to collect and analyze data on the complex problems of Romania's journey from sultanistic national communism to a yet-unreached democratic government.
Book Synopsis The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 by : Peter Siani-Davies
Download or read book The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 written by Peter Siani-Davies and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was the most spectacularly violent and remains today the most controversial of all the East European upheavals of that year. Despite (or perhaps because of) the media attention the revolution received, it remains shrouded in mystery. How did the seemingly impregnable Ceausescu regime come to be toppled so swiftly and how did Ion Iliescu and the National Salvation Front come to power? Was it by coup d'état? Who were the mysterious "terrorists" who wreaked such havoc on the streets of Bucharest and the other major cities of Romania? Were they members of the notorious securitate? What was the role of the Soviet Union?Blending narrative with analysis, Peter Siani-Davies seeks to answer these and other questions while placing the events and their immediate aftermath within a wider context. Based on fieldwork conducted in Romania and drawing heavily on Romanian sources, including television and radio transcripts, official documents, newspaper reports, and interviews, this book is the most thorough study of the Romanian Revolution that has appeared in English or any other major European language.Recognizing that a definitive history of these events may be impossible, Siani-Davies focuses on the ways in which participants interpreted the events according to particular scripts and myths of revolution rooted in the Romanian historical experience. In the process the author sheds light on the ways in which history and the conflicting retellings of the 1989 events are put to political use in the transitional societies of Eastern Europe.
Book Synopsis Romania Under Communist Rule by : Dennis Deletant
Download or read book Romania Under Communist Rule written by Dennis Deletant and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first synthesis of the history of communism in Romania, from the founding of the Romanian Communist Party in 1921 to the revolution that led to the downfall of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu in December 1989. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the development of communism in Romania and the impact of four decades of communist rule on Romanian society. Romania Under Communist Rule is divided into three parts. The first presents the period of Soviet domination and the consolidation of the Communist regime in Romania during the period from 1947 to 1955. The second discusses the Romanian Communist Party's efforts at autonomy in the period from 1956 to 1969, including the withdrawal of Soviet troops form Romania in 1958, and the coming to power of Nicolae Ceaucescu after the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965. The third and final section of the book analyzes the neo-Stalinist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaucescu, culminating in the overthrow of the communist regime in Romania as a result of the December 1989 revolution. The author, Dennis Deletant, is a leading specialist on Romanian history and culture. Professor of Romanian studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London, he is recognized as the leading authority on Romanian history in Great Britain.
Book Synopsis In Search of Lost Meaning by : Adam Michnik
Download or read book In Search of Lost Meaning written by Adam Michnik and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-05-23 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection of essays, Adam Michnik—one of Europe’s leading dissidents—traces the post-cold-war transformation of Eastern Europe. He writes again in opposition, this time to post-communist elites and European Union bureaucrats. Composed of history, memoir, and political critique, In Search of Lost Meaning shines a spotlight on the changes in Poland and the Eastern Bloc in the post-1989 years. Michnik asks what mistakes were made and what we can learn from climactic events in Poland’s past, in its literature, and the histories of Central and Eastern Europe. He calls attention to pivotal moments in which central figures like Lech Walesa and political movements like Solidarity came into being, how these movements attempted to uproot the past, and how subsequent events have ultimately challenged Poland’s enduring ethical legacy of morality and liberalism. Reflecting on the most recent efforts to grapple with Poland’s Jewish history and residual guilt, this profoundly important book throws light not only on recent events, but also on the thinking of one of their most important protagonists.
Book Synopsis My Papa Murdered Mikhoels by : Vladimir Gusarov
Download or read book My Papa Murdered Mikhoels written by Vladimir Gusarov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author’s father, when he was a senior Communist Party member in Belorussia, could have been implicated in the assassination of Mikhoels, the popular director of the State Jewish Theatre in the Soviet Union. This was carried out on the orders of Stalin in 1948 when Vladimir was twenty three years old. His own life is headed towards the theatre rather than politics—and subsequently, ‘shaming his father’s grey hairs,’ into the Moscow dissident movement. Early years are sheltered and privileged, but a psychotic outburst in a restaurant against the tyranny of Stalinism results in him being incarcerated in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, where he comes across an aristocratic English spy. Gusarov himself has a keen interest in the West and expresses particular admiration for the British Labour Party as well as the Queen. Further deviations, run-ins with the KGB and Soviet psychiatry pattern a failing stage career. But he does at one point find himself the uneasy star of a film about Soviet railways ordered by Kaganovich. During all this time father, for his own sake as much as that of his son, saves Vladimir from being sent to a labour camp. Perhaps that is what allows him to write with such cynical humour about his slow descent into chaos and oblivion. His accounts of a multitude of encounters with people from all walks of Russian life (including colourful episodes with Voroshilov and Solzhenitsyn—as well as his marriages and wayward sexual adventures) are enormously enriched by the actor’s power of speech recall.
Book Synopsis The Shaping of Popular Consent by : Alexander McGregor (Ph. D.)
Download or read book The Shaping of Popular Consent written by Alexander McGregor (Ph. D.) and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book questions the view of the current orthodoxy which argues that the Soviet Union and the United States were binary opposites in the 1930s. The Shaping of Popular Consent presents a comparative analysis of one specific facet of the USSR and the US, namely the manner in which their ruling elites sought to win popular consent. A key dimension in the analysis of any political order, this issue recommends itself precisely because the assumption that, in this the two were quite dissimilar, is the virtual point of departure for the current thinking. To sharpen the focus of the comparison, the book concentrates on the role of the visual arts and the manner and extent to which those in power employed them to attempt to win popular consent. Therefore, this book poses two questions. Firstly, to what extent did the ruling elites in both the USSR and the US believe they needed the people's faith/trust in the system? Secondly, different as the two societies were, to what extent might they have employed similar use of visual cultural media in their attempts to win "hearts and minds"? The study explores the interwar years, specifically 1929-1941. This was an era of great upheaval in both the USSR and the US and marks the beginning of the age of mass communication. The book examines if, how, and to what extent Soviet and American cultural producers, during the years 1929-1941, employed the visual arts, cinema in particular but also painting, the plastic arts, theatre and architecture, to promote, essentially, the establishments' rights and wrongs, heroes and villains. It does so exploring both the domestic and the international scene. It illustrates that, despite giant differences between the two countries, in the way the two establishments sought to win popular consent the binary view is simply inaccurate. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the need for a plethora of wide-ranging comparative studies of the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, through recognizing the importance of comparing and contrasting the USSR and the US, and by attempting to do just that, we might learn to better understand how, in what ways and for what purposes these two countries, so central to our understanding of the modern world, were organized. Thus, this work is genuinely comparative, inter-disciplinary and cultural. Indeed, the study is part of a vanguard movement. It is of significant value to scholars of both the USSR, Stalinism and Soviet art and the US, the New Deal and Hollywood. Finally, building on work by Noam Chomsky, Anotonio Gramsci and others such as Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities, the book will be of tremendous interests to many (both students and interested parties alike) who have an interest in how identities are constructed, how propaganda is manufactured and just how the (ostensibly) divergent philosophies of modern governments are represented in popular culture.
Book Synopsis Velvet Totalitarianism by : Claudia Moscovici
Download or read book Velvet Totalitarianism written by Claudia Moscovici and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2009-07-29 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces students and the general public to the post-Stalinist phase of totalitarianism, focusing on Romania under the Ceausescu dictatorship, through the dual optic of scholarship and fiction, in a story about a family surviving difficult times under a totalitarian regime due to the strength of their love.
Download or read book The Taste of Ashes written by Marci Shore and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inventive, wholly original look at the complex psyche of Eastern Europe in the wake of the revolutions of 1989 and the opening of the communist archives. In the tradition of Timothy Garton Ash’s The File, Yale historian and prize-winning author Marci Shore draws upon intimate understanding to illuminate the afterlife of totalitarianism. The Taste of Ashes spans from Berlin to Moscow, moving from Vienna in Europe’s west through Prague, Bratislava, Warsaw and Bucharest to Vilnius and Kiev in the post-communist east. The result is a shimmering literary examination of the ghost of communism – no longer Marx’s “specter to come” but a haunting presence of the past. Marci Shore builds her history around people she came to know over the course of the two decades since communism came to an end in Eastern Europe: her colleagues and friends, once-communists and once-dissidents, the accusers and the accused, the interrogators and the interrogated, Zionists, Bundists, Stalinists and their children and grandchildren. For them, the post-communist moment has not closed but rather has summoned up the past: revolution in 1968, Stalinism, the Second World War, the Holocaust. The end of communism had a dark side. As Shore pulls the reader into her journey of discovery, reading the archival records of people who are themselves confronting the traumas of former lives, she reveals the intertwining of the personal and the political, of love and cruelty, of intimacy and betrayal. The result is a lyrical, touching, and sometimes heartbreaking, portrayal of how history moves and what history means.
Book Synopsis The Posthuman Dada Guide by : Andrei Codrescu
Download or read book The Posthuman Dada Guide written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."—The Posthuman Dada Guide The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world—all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse—a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution—lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada—and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources.
Book Synopsis The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov by : Peter Pringle
Download or read book The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov written by Peter Pringle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today. But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag. Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.
Book Synopsis Stalin's Curse by : Robert Gellately
Download or read book Stalin's Curse written by Robert Gellately and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.
Download or read book Alfred Kazin written by Richard M. Cook and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1915 to barely literate Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Alfred Kazin rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and one of Americas last great men of letters. Biographer Ri
Book Synopsis DARKNESS AT NOON by : ARTHUR KOESTELERS
Download or read book DARKNESS AT NOON written by ARTHUR KOESTELERS and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Fashion Meets Socialism by : Jukka Gronow
Download or read book Fashion Meets Socialism written by Jukka Gronow and published by Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. This book was released on 2015-08-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press.
