[PDF] Soviet Born eBook

Author : Moshe Lewin
Publisher :
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 23,74 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Agriculture and state
ISBN :

GET BOOK

In this Now-Classic Book, The Making of the Soviet System, Moshe Lewin traces the transformation of Russian society and the Russian political system in the period between the two world wars, a transformation that was to lead to Stalinism in the 1930s. Lewin focuses on the changes stemming from war, revolution, civil war, and industrialization, and he discusses such topics as rural society and religion in the twentieth century; the background of Soviet collectivization; Soviet prewar policies of agricultural procurement; the kolkhoz and the muzhik; Leninism and Bolshevism; industrial relations during the five-year plans of 1928-1941; and the social background of Stalinism. Through this comprehensive approach to understanding the origins and problems of Stalinism, Lewin makes a significant contribution to the study of Russia's social history before the revolution as well as in the Soviet period.

Author : Benjamin Peters
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 49,59 MB
Release : 2016-03-25
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0262034182

GET BOOK

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.

Author : Donald J. Raleigh
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 18,30 MB
Release : 2013-09-19
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0199311234

GET BOOK

Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation.

Author : Masha Gessen
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 530 pages
File Size : 23,40 MB
Release : 2017-10-03
Category : History
ISBN : 159463453X

GET BOOK

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Author : Lina Zilionyte
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 643 pages
File Size : 38,43 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Liberty
ISBN : 1434311058

GET BOOK

Born for Freedom is a story written from the viewpoint of Lucy, a six-year-old girl, who was born in Lithuania under the Soviet occupation. Through the heroine's eyes the reader comes to know her native village and what social-political changes took place in the country in the 1960's, the time when the terror-stricken nation tried to reconcile with its recent postwar past. Lucy faces the first challenges of her childhood when she begins to attend elementary and high school. She is torn between the ideologically saturated school and home where old values and traditions prevail. She learns to cover up her true belief and masters to perfection to live with a double face, the feature she carries over into adult life. Thirst for knowledge and strong will takes her to Vilnius where she studies foreign languages at the university. She remains unshakable to the core regarding her personal convictions and refuses to join the Communist Party. Brought up in the national spirit, she knows what it means to be deprived of freedom as a nation and as a Lithuanian. With her unbending spirit, she is about to climb to the heights of her career as a translator when inevitable happens. During the interview with the chief of the KGB, Lucy has to make a choice: either she becomes a Party member and joins the ranks of the Soviet spies abroad or she quits her favorite job. She chooses the latter. The refrain to be free because I was born to be free is not only the main theme of the novel but also Lucy's driving force through her life. Her dream to become free comes finally true when she arrives in Chicago. However, her new country and the unknown future take her into another whirlpool of adventures.

Author : Daniel Bertaux
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 30,21 MB
Release : 2004-08-02
Category : History
ISBN : 1134391471

GET BOOK

For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s resulted in a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and western researchers. This book is a fascinating collection of life stories and family history interview material collected by the editors and two Russian groups of interviewers.

Author : Stephen F. Cohen
Publisher : New York : Oxford University Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 45,15 MB
Release : 1986
Category : History
ISBN : 0195040163

GET BOOK

Written in 1985, this book cuts through the Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and later political realities. The author probes Soviet history, society, and politics to explain how the U.S.S.R. remained stable from revolution through the mid-1980s.

Author : Daniel Bertaux
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 26,89 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 1412804876

GET BOOK

For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the Soviet System analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies. Daniel Bertaux is directeur de recherches at the Centre d'Etudes des Mouvements Sociaux, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Paul Thompson is research professor in sociology at the University of Essex and fellow at the Institute of Community Studies in London. Anna Rotkirch is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Helsinki.

Author : Evan Mawdsley
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 42,47 MB
Release : 2000-03-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0191522856

GET BOOK

Although the product of a self-proclaimed proletarian revolution, Soviet Russia was always dominated by an elite. Basing itself upon nearly two thousand people who served on the Communist Party's Central Committee from 1917 to 1991, this is the first book to study the elite that ruled the world's largest country throughout the entire period of Soviet rule. It is also the first to make full use of the rich sources available since the collapse of Communism. The authors profile the elite as a whole and looks more closely at fifteen individual members, identifying four elite generations. The book examines the evolving connection between Central Committee membership and administrative functions; the changing power and privileges of the elite and its relationship with the population; the Communist party and the top leaders; and the surprising extent to which the elite managed to maintain its position into the early years of post-communist Russia.