Purity And Compromise In The Soviet Party State

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Purity and Compromise in the Soviet Party-State

Author : Daniel Stotland
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2017-11-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498540636

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Purity and Compromise in the Soviet Party-State by Daniel Stotland Pdf

This work offers new ways of conceptualizing the decision-making paradigm of the Soviet party-state that was defined by the persistent shortage of qualified manpower that afflicted the Russian elite. The traditional Russian problems of under administration, combined with the unique features of the Soviet political system, resulted in a dichotomy between practical and ideological demands. The WWII era, examined in this book, provides a microcosm of pressures facing the Kremlin and illustrates the cyclical nature of policy formation forced on it by the paradoxes of the system. As the party’s responsibilities expanded into specialized economic and military areas, political experts increasingly depended on the specialized professionals. These trends grew increased drastically during the war. An unexpected consequence of the party’s expansion into economic or military professions was the discovery that cooptation worked both ways and many party members become managers rather than ideological overseers. Throughout the existential crisis of the system—the war and its aftermath—the party would find itself in a fundamental conflict over its identity, challenged over its role both vis-a-vis the state and its own priorities. After an abortive attempt to reverse the wartime trends, a new paradigm was articulated by the party during the last five years of Stalin's reign. This resulted in the emergence of a new elite consensus which envisioned the party as integral and invasive economic actor. This shift in the party’s identity was the price of maintaining centralized political power and came at the expense of the focus on ideological purity. In the long term, however, the diminished role of ideology robbed the party of its core value system and steadily eroded its legitimizing and self-energizing power. Over time, the new consensus would undermine the very foundations of the party-state construct. Yet if the USSR was to survive as a modern, industrialized state, the accommodation with the technocrats was necessary. The contradiction between ideological and pragmatic aims was inherent to the system, and demanded an eventual choice between the long-term health of the state and that of the party.

Purity and Compromise in the Soviet Party-state

Author : Daniel Stotland
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : History
ISBN : 1498540627

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Purity and Compromise in the Soviet Party-state by Daniel Stotland Pdf

This study examines the decision-making paradigm of the Soviet party-state during the Second World War and its aftermath. It analyzes the conflict among the political elite between practical and ideological demands and the emergence of a consensus in the immediate postwar period.

Kazakhstan in World War II

Author : Roberto J. Carmack
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780700628254

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Kazakhstan in World War II by Roberto J. Carmack Pdf

In July 1941, the Soviet Union was in mortal danger. Imperiled by the Nazi invasion and facing catastrophic losses, Stalin called on the Soviet people to “subordinate everything to the needs of the front.” Kazakhstan answered that call. Stalin had long sought to restructure Kazakh life to modernize the local population—but total mobilization during the war required new tactics and produced unique results. Kazakhstan in World War II analyzes these processes and their impact on the Kazakhs and the Soviet Union as a whole. The first English-language study of a non-Russian Soviet republic during World War II, the book explores how the war altered official policies toward the region’s ethnic groups—and accelerated Central Asia’s integration into Soviet institutions. World War II is widely recognized as a watershed for Russia and the Soviet Union—not only did the conflict legitimize prewar institutions and ideologies, it also provided a medium for integrating some groups and excluding others. Kazakhstan in World War II explains how these processes played out in the ethnically diverse and socially “backward” Kazakh republic. Roberto J. Carmack marshals a wealth of archival materials, official media sources, and personal memoirs to produce an in-depth examination of wartime ethnic policies in the Red Army, Soviet propaganda for non-Russian groups, economic strategies in the Central Asian periphery, and administrative practices toward deported groups. Bringing Kazakhstan’s previously neglected role in World War II to the fore, Carmack’s work fills an important gap in the region’s history and sheds new light on our understanding of Soviet identities.

Building Socialism

Author : Yiannis Kokosalakis
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2023-02-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781009218894

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Building Socialism by Yiannis Kokosalakis Pdf

By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Building Socialism presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists made up of ordinary people. While far removed from the levers of power, they were nevertheless charged with promoting the Party's programme of revolutionary social transformation in their workplaces, neighbourhoods, and households. Their regular meetings, conferences and campaigns have generated a voluminous source base. This rich material provides a unique view of the practical manifestation of the Party's revolutionary mission and forms the basis of this insightful new narrative of how the Soviet republic functioned in the period from the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 to its invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941.

Party Leadership under Stalin and Khrushchev

Author : Jonathan Harris
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2018-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498528399

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Party Leadership under Stalin and Khrushchev by Jonathan Harris Pdf

This study examines the concept of “party leadership” as used by officials in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It argues that the term was employed to both disguise and signal officials’ efforts to lead the party and analyzes how it affected ideological education and the administration of the Soviet economy.

The Cold War [5 volumes]

Author : Spencer C. Tucker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 4179 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9798216062493

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The Cold War [5 volumes] by Spencer C. Tucker Pdf

This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.

Ben Ali's Tunisia

Author : Anne Wolf
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2023-02-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780192868503

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Ben Ali's Tunisia by Anne Wolf Pdf

Based on a wealth of new primary data, this book offers the first account of the internal regime factors that ultimately caused the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's long dictatorship in Tunisia during the Arab Uprisings. Anne Wolf's account challenges studies that focus on the role of mass mobilization alone, and demonstrates that in the last decade of Ben Ali's presidency, dissent within his ruling party - the Constitutional Democratic Rally - mounted to such an extent that followers began challenging their own powerbroker. The culmination of this was a secret coup d'état staged by regime figures against Ben Ali in January 2011, an event that has not previously been uncovered. Wolf proposes a new theory of power and contention within ruling parties in authoritarian regimes to explain how dictators seek to fortify their rule and foster party-political stability, but also when, why, and how they succumb to internal contention and with what effect.

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe

Author : Grace Davie,Lucian Leuștean
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 871 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198834267

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The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe by Grace Davie,Lucian Leuștean Pdf

This authoritative collection offers a detailed overview of religious ideas, structures, and institutions in the making of Europe. Written by leading scholars in the field, it demonstrates the enduring presence of lived and institutionalised religion in the social networks of identity, policy, and power over two millennia of European history.

The Secret History of Soviet Russia's Police State

Author : Martyn Whittock
Publisher : Robinson
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-07-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781472142399

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The Secret History of Soviet Russia's Police State by Martyn Whittock Pdf

'[R]eadable and thoughtful . . . does an excellent job of exploring how the murderous political police in all its incarnations defined the Soviet Union, and left a poisonous legacy still with us today' Professor Mark Galeotti, author of The Vory and A Short History of Russia Repression, control, manipulation and elimination of enemies assisted in the establishment of the Soviet state, and helped maintain it in power, but could not, in the end, prevent its collapse. Citizens of the West have, for the most part, been told a very simplified story of the repressive 'totalitarian' state that was the USSR. In fact, it was sustained by more than just policing and force. No amount of revisionist history can erase the reality of millions controlled, imprisoned and killed, but there was much more to the USSR's one-party state than this. Whittock tells a more complex story of the combination of cruelty, co-operation and compromise required to build and run a one-party state. Much of this is the story of the role played by the secret police in creating and sustaining such a form of government, but it is much more than simply a 'history of the secret police'. This is because the 'police state' which emerged (in which dissent, both real and imaginary, was undoubtedly policed, threatened and ruthlessly eliminated) was more than just the product of the arrests, interrogations, executions and imprisonments carried out by the secret police. The USSR was also made possible by a battle for hearts and minds which led millions of people to feel that they really had benefited from the system and had a stake in the new society.

Soldiers on the Cultural Front

Author : Tatiana Gabroussenko
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2010-07-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824860783

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Soldiers on the Cultural Front by Tatiana Gabroussenko Pdf

An understanding of contemporary North Korea’s literature is virtually impossible without an investigation of its formative period, 1945–1960, which saw a gradual transformation from the initial "Soviet era" to a Korean version of "national Stalinism." This turbulent epoch established a long-lasting framework for North Korean literature and set up an elaborate system of political control over literary matters, as well as over the people who served in this field. In 1946 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leader Kim Il Sung described the country’s writers as "soldiers on the cultural front," thus clearly defining what the nascent Communist regime expected from its intellectuals. As a result, many literary nonentities were rewarded with fame and success (often only to be relegated once again to obscurity within a few years) while many outstanding luminaries of the past were erased from the pages of official publications or even lost their lives. The Soviet cultural impact brought new tropes, artistic images, and rhetoric, which were quickly absorbed into the North Korean discourse. However, the cultural politics of the DPRK and the USSR revealed profound and irreconcilable disparities that were rooted in the different political conditions and traditions of each country. Soldiers on the Cultural Front presents the first consistent research on the early history of North Korea’s literature and literary policy in Western scholarship. It traces the introduction and development of Soviet-organized conventions in North Korean literary propaganda and investigates why the "romance with Moscow" was destined to be short lived. It reconstructs the biographies and worldviews of major personalities who shaped North Korean literature and teases these historical figures out of popular scholarly myth and misconception. The book also investigates the specific forms of control over intellectuals and literary matters in North Korea. Considering the unique phenomenon of North Korean literary critique, the author analyzes the political campaigns and purges of 1947–1960 and investigates the role of North Korean critics as "political executioners" in these events. She draws on an impressive variety and number of sources—ranging from interviews with Korean and Soviet participants, public and family archives, and memoirs to original literary and critical texts—to present a balanced and eye-opening work that will benefit those interested in not only understanding North Korean literature and society, but also rethinking forms of socialist modernity elsewhere in the world.

Against Purity

Author : Alexis Shotwell
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2016-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781452953045

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Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell Pdf

The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, hope found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.

Contemporary Russian Politics

Author : Neil Robinson
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-04-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781509525188

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Contemporary Russian Politics by Neil Robinson Pdf

Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a fourth presidential term in 2018 has seen Russian democracy weaken further and Russia’s relations with the West deteriorate seriously. Yet, within Russia, Putin’s position remains unchallenged and his foreign policy battles have received widespread public support. But is Putin as safe as his approval ratings lead us to believe? And how secure is the regime that he heads? In this new book, Neil Robinson places contemporary Russian politics in historical perspective to argue that Putin’s regime has not overcome the problems that underpinned the momentous changes in twentieth-century Russian history when the country veered from tsarism to Soviet rule to post-communist chaos. The first part of the book, outlining why crises have been perennial problems for Russia, is followed by an exploration of contemporary Russian political institutions and policy to show how Putin has stabilised Russian politics. But, while Putin’s achievements as a politician have been considerable in strengthening his personal position, they have not dealt successfully with the enduring problem of the Russian state’s functionality. Like other Russian rulers, Putin has been much better at establishing a political system that supports his rule than he has at building up a state that can deliver material wealth and protection to the Russian people. As a result, Robinson argues, Russia has been and remains vulnerable to political crisis and regime change.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

Author : Victoria Smolkin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2019-10-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691197234

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A Sacred Space Is Never Empty by Victoria Smolkin Pdf

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe

Author : Frankowski
Publisher : Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2023-10-20
Category : Law
ISBN : 9789004640221

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Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe by Frankowski Pdf

This book represents an effort to assess the unprecedented political, economic, and social reforms that have swept through Central and Eastern Europe in the five years since the collapse of Communism. The dismantling of the Warsaw Pact, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Communist Party apparatus, and the various manifestations of the `nomenklatura' political control system have meant different things in different countries, but throughout the region we have witnessed a struggle to replace an authoritarian, one-party political system and a command economy with something resembling Western-style constitutional democracy and market economics. Accompanying this struggle have been attempts to transform the legal structure of these countries. It is no exaggeration to claim that lawyers, and particularly legal scholars, have played a central role in the struggle for reform in post-communist Europe. As conceived by its principal organizer and editor (Stanislaw Frankowski), this study gives these scholars an opportunity to express their perceptions of the success achieved to date and the work still remaining. A secondary goal is to expose a Western audience to the views and insights of legal scholars who have worked within the Central and Eastern European traditions. The four parts of this book reflect the principal areas in which legal reform seemed essential. First comes the reconstitutionalization of the societies in question, which means above all else the elimination of single-party politics and the notion of unity of powers. Then comes the creation of the legal institutions that would make possible a civil society under law. Then the institutions that moderate and control the uses of state power to discipline and punish persons that have transgressed the society's norms. Finally there is the question of how law reform had dealt with industrial democracy and the anticipated transformation of the workplace.

The Cold War [2 volumes] [2 volumes]

Author : Priscilla Roberts
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 992 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018-12-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781440852121

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The Cold War [2 volumes] [2 volumes] by Priscilla Roberts Pdf

This detailed two-volume set tells the story of the Cold War, the dominant international event of the second half of the 20th century, through a diverse selection of primary source documents. One of the most extensive to date, this set of primary source documents studies the Cold War comprehensively from its beginning, with the emergence of the world's first communist government in Russia in late 1917, to its end, in 1991. All of the key events, including the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the nuclear arms race, are discussed in detail. The primary sources provide insight into the thinking of all participants, drawing on Western, Soviet, Asian, and Latin American perspectives. In The Cold War: Interpreting Conflict through Primary Documents primary documents are organized chronologically, allowing readers to appreciate the ramifications of the Cold War within a clear time frame. Extensive interpretive commentary provides in-depth background and context for each document. This work is an indispensable reference for all readers seeking to become deeply knowledgeable about the Cold War.