From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov.
In the early 1960s, at the Dartmouth Conference, U.S. and Russian diplomats came together to engage in conversations concerning the connections between the two nations. These conversations have continued and have involved Russian and American citizens in open discussions of what they believe are the most important aspects of their political, economic, and social relationships. Research has been conducted examining the results of these public forums, and those results are presented in this edited volume. The perspectives of both citizens and diplomats described in this book offer valuable insights to those in academia, business, and others interested in better understanding the unique aspects of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia.
This profoundly erotic, profoundly compelling (The Los Angeles Times) account of an American students adventures in Russia is a classic revelation of her eternal qualities. The unforgettable cast of characters is led by his beautiful, capricious girlfriend and a supreme hedonist who has been called The Russian Falstaff. Submerged in the supposedly puritan countrys private devotion to food, drink, sex, and despair, the narrator, a London reviewer found, seems to catch the soul of the Soviet citizen. Feifer is possibly unique, a second London critic delighted, for having written a book with several layers of brilliance.
This timely work shows how and why the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union was caused in large part by nationalism. Unified in their hostility to the Kremlin's authority, the fifteen constituent Union Republics, including the Russian Republic, declared their sovereignty and began to build state institutions of their own. The book has a dual purpose. The first is to explore the formation of nations within the Soviet Union, the policies of the Soviet Union toward non-Russian peoples, and the ultimate contradictions between those policies and the development of nations. The second, more general, purpose is to show how nations have grown in the twentieth century. The principle of nationality that buried the Soviet Union and destroyed its empire in Eastern Europe continues to shape and reshape the configuration of states and political movements among the new independent countries of the vast East European-Eurasian region.
Eds. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites
Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s, although a relatively free and open potential alternative to Soviet communism, was also a time of extreme tension, as Russian society and culture were rocked by the forces of resistance and change. These essays examine the social and cultural dimensions of NEP in urban and rural Russia in the years before Stalin and rapid industrialization.
In three newly democratic countries in Eastern Europe (East Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland), communism's former victims and jailers are struggling to make sense of their history - and sometimes rewrite it. In this groundbreaking, stylishly reported book, a journalist travels across the battlefields of memory and asks: Who is guilty? How shall they be punished? And who is qualified to judge them in states where almost every citizen was an accomplice? Seeking the hard answers to these questions, Tina Rosenberg tells of conscience and complicity, courage and optimism. Winner of the National Book Award for Non-fiction.
Despite widespread criticism of multinational companies, they have made an unparalleled contribution to the development of Eastern Europe over the last two decades. They have brought opportunities to the young, improved working conditions, saved communities from destitution, rehabilitated corrupt banking systems and laid a modern telecommunications network. Their exports have driven economic growth; their presence has boosted civil society. The impact has not always been positive, but their power and dynamism, if effectively harnessed, can help defeat poverty elsewhere too.
The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I.
Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the peoples of Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) have been exposed to new, Western influences that stress individualism at the expense Central Asian traditions of family and communalism. Young men in particular are exposed to new ideas and lifestyles as they travel in large numbers outside their native republics for the first time, even as contemporary Islam exerts itself as a potent force for cultural conservatism, especially for women. As a result, young Central Asians today confront a complex mixture of the old and the new that strains personal relations, especially within the family, between generations, and between spouses.Relying on the author's extensive fieldwork, Muslim Youth devotes separate chapters to family life, education, dating, and marriage and the family in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. Throughout the book, emblematic life stories vividly portray the hopes and concerns of Tajiks, teasing out the complexity of modernity versus tradition and individualism versus collectivism.
Argumenty I Fakty is the Soviet Union's largest paper, with a circulation of some 34 million. An independent publication, it receives up to 7000 letters a day, of which this volume is a small selection, a window on glasnost -era Soviet thinking at the street level. There are repeated complaints about shortages of goods, preferential treatment given party officials, bureaucratic insensitivity and incompetence. No single point of view is privileged, and the letters run the gamut from hardline Stalinists (a small minority) to near-monarchists (an even smaller minority). What nearly all of them have in common is dissatisfaction with the Soviet system. The book is an eruption of decades of pent-up anger, finally unleashed by the loosening of censorship. There are lighter moments, such as the writer who suggests selling the Politburo to the U.S. so that America can foist these boobs pk off on the Japanese. However, the only relief from the numbing sameness of the rest of this book comes in the chapter on health and environmental issues, where the agony of human suffering breaks through the griping tone. McKay is a British journalist.
