[PDF] Moscow Prime Time eBook

Author : Kristin Roth-Ey
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 16,13 MB
Release : 2011-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1501771434

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When Nikita Khrushchev visited Hollywood in 1959 only to be scandalized by a group of scantily clad actresses, his message was blunt: Soviet culture would soon consign the mass culture of the West, epitomized by Hollywood, to the "dustbin of history." In Moscow Prime Time, a portrait of the Soviet broadcasting and film industries and of everyday Soviet consumers from the end of World War II through the 1970s, Kristin Roth-Ey shows us how and why Khrushchev’s ambitious vision ultimately failed to materialize. The USSR surged full force into the modern media age after World War II, building cultural infrastructures—and audiences—that were among the world’s largest. Soviet people were enthusiastic radio listeners, TV watchers, and moviegoers, and the great bulk of what they were consuming was not the dissident culture that made headlines in the West, but orthodox, made-in-the-USSR content. This, then, was Soviet culture’s real prime time and a major achievement for a regime that had long touted easy, everyday access to a socialist cultural experience as a birthright. Yet Soviet success also brought complex and unintended consequences. Emphasizing such factors as the rise of the single-family household and of a more sophisticated consumer culture, the long reach and seductive influence of foreign media, and the workings of professional pride and raw ambition in the media industries, Roth-Ey shows a Soviet media empire transformed from within in the postwar era. The result, she finds, was something dynamic and volatile: a new Soviet culture, with its center of gravity shifted from the lecture hall to the living room, and a new brand of cultural experience, at once personal, immediate, and eclectic—a new Soviet culture increasingly similar, in fact, to that of its self-defined enemy, the mass culture of the West. By the 1970s, the Soviet media empire, stretching far beyond its founders’ wildest dreams, was busily undermining the very promise of a unique Soviet culture—and visibly losing the cultural cold war. Moscow Prime Time is the first book to untangle the paradoxes of Soviet success and failure in the postwar media age.

Author : David Wingrove
Publisher : Random House
Page : 498 pages
File Size : 36,18 MB
Release : 2014-04-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1448177561

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There is only the war. Otto Behr is a German agent, fighting his Russian counterparts across three millennia, manipulating history for moments in time that can change everything. Only the remnants of two great nations stand and for Otto, the war is life itself, the last hope for his people. But in a world where realities shift and memory is never constant, nothing is certain, least of all the chance of a future with his Russian love...

Author : Venedikt Erofeev
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 49,32 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780810112001

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In this classic of Russian humor and social commentary, a fired cable fitter goes on a binge and hopes a train to Petushki (where his "most beloved of trollops" awaits). On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.

Author : Katerina Clark
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 12,56 MB
Release : 2011-11-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0674062892

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In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

Author : Antonio J. Mendez
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 45,50 MB
Release : 2019-05-21
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1541762177

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From the spymaster and inspiration for the movie Argo, discover the "real-life spy thriller" of the brilliant but under-supported CIA operatives who developed breakthrough spy tactics that helped turn the tide of the Cold War (Malcolm Nance). Antonio Mendez and his future wife Jonna were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, and tapped their phones. Intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor. As experts in disguise, Antonio and Jonna were instrumental in developing a series of tactics -- Hollywood-inspired identity swaps, ingenious evasion techniques, and an armory of James Bond-style gadgets -- that allowed CIA officers to outmaneuver the KGB. As Russia again rises in opposition to America, this remarkable story is a tribute to those who risked everything for their country, and to the ingenuity that allowed them to succeed.

Author : Eric Haseltine
Publisher : Thomas Dunne Books
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 29,43 MB
Release : 2019-04-30
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1250301157

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The thrilling, true story of the race to find a leak in the United States Embassy in Moscow—before more American assets are rounded up and killed. Foreword by Gen. Michael V. Hayden (Retd.), Former Director of NSA & CIA In the late 1970s, the National Security Agency still did not officially exist—those in the know referred to it dryly as the No Such Agency. So why, when NSA engineer Charles Gandy filed for a visa to visit Moscow, did the Russian Foreign Ministry assert with confidence that he was a spy? Outsmarting honey traps and encroaching deep enough into enemy territory to perform complicated technical investigations, Gandy accomplished his mission in Russia, but discovered more than State and CIA wanted him to know. Eric Haseltine's The Spy in Moscow Station tells of a time when—much like today—Russian spycraft had proven itself far beyond the best technology the U.S. had to offer. The perils of American arrogance mixed with bureaucratic infighting left the country unspeakably vulnerable to ultra-sophisticated Russian electronic surveillance and espionage. This is the true story of unorthodox, underdog intelligence officers who fought an uphill battle against their own government to prove that the KGB had pulled off the most devastating penetration of U.S. national security in history. If you think "The Americans" isn't riveting enough, you'll love this toe-curling nonfiction thriller.

Author : Andrey Platonov
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 33,33 MB
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1590175859

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An NYRB Classics Original Moscow Chestnova is a bold and glamorous girl, a beautiful parachutist who grew up with the Revolution. As an orphan, she knew tough times—but things are changing now. Comrade Stalin has proclaimed that “Life has become better! Life has become merrier!” and Moscow herself is poised to join the Soviet elite. But her ambitions are thwarted when a freak accident propels her flaming from the sky. A new, stranger life begins. Moscow drifts from man to man, through dance halls, all-night diners, and laboratories in which the secret of immortality is actively being investigated, exploring the endless avenues and vacant spaces of the great city whose name she bears, looking for happiness, somewhere, still. Unpublishable during Platonov’s lifetime, Happy Moscow first appeared in Russian only in 1991. This new edition contains not only a revised translation of Happy Moscow but several related works: a screenplay, a prescient essay about ecological catastrophe, and two short stories in which same characters reappear and the reader sees the mind of an extraordinary writer at work.

Author : Amor Towles
Publisher : Random House
Page : 547 pages
File Size : 17,12 MB
Release : 2017-01-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1448135508

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The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers Soon to be a Showtime/Paramount+ series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov From the number one New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel 'A wonderful book' - Tana French 'This novel is astonishing, uplifting and wise. Don't miss it' - Chris Cleave 'No historical novel this year was more witty, insightful or original' - Sunday Times, Books of the Year '[A] supremely uplifting novel ... It's elegant, witty and delightful - much like the Count himself.' - Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year 'Charming ... shows that not all books about Russian aristocrats have to be full of doom and nihilism' - The Times, Books of the Year On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval. Can a life without luxury be the richest of all? A BOOK OF THE DECADE, 2010-2020 (INDEPENDENT) THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A MAIL ON SUNDAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017 ONE OF BILL GATES'S SUMMER READS OF 2019 NOMINATED FOR THE 2018 INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS WEEK AWARD