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This book is a collective biography that will fascinate its subjects’ grandchildren, to whom the world it depicts will seem like a distant planet.
The book is an excruciating account of how victims (and potential victims) enlarged and sped the killing machine: workers denouncing workers, family members betraying family members, and lovers sacrificing lovers in vain attempts to save themselves, as Stalin and his lieutenants ordered each new wave of purges.
Compassionate yet critical, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the morass Soviet leaders got themselves and their army into when they invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
An entirely new take on the origins of World War I comes as a surprise. If war guilt is to be assigned, this book argues, it should go not only (or even primarily) to Germany -- the long-accepted culprit -- but also to Russia.
With a measured mastery, Trenin probes the many aspects of this dilemma, from Russia’s changing relations with its neighbors and the great powers to the effect of the country’s identity crisis on its economy, demographics, and culture.
One does not expect the CEO of a major oil company to write a detailed history of the industry going back to antiquity. But that is what Alekperov, the president of Lukoil, the second largest of Russia’s ten key oil companies, has done.
The Bosnian tragedy, like so many international conflicts, demonstrated the harm decision-makers can cause when they have no firsthand knowledge of conditions on the ground. Hunt spent much of her four years as U.S. President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Austria attempting to intercede in the conflict.
Platt treats the way Russian historians, writers, and artists since the early nineteenth century have tried to come to terms with the legacy of these overpowering figures -- sometimes merging Peter’s “greatness” and Ivan’s “terror” into a single, reinforcing unity and sometimes treating those qualities as polar opposites.
In special cases, one closes a book with the mind churning, stirred by the arguments within. In still rarer cases, one sets down the book and is moved by the spirit and character of its author. This is one such book.
After comparing the levels of income inequality among Russia’s regions, Remington concludes that the political dynamic in each is an important factor in determining economic disparities.
As Clark demonstrates in this masterful tour of trends in Soviet culture and their echoes in Europe, the modified version of universalism tolerated by Stalin placed the Soviet Union at its center, and at the Soviet Union’s center stood Moscow -- the site and symbol of centralized Soviet power.
The theme of writers and the regime is familiar in Russian history, but Volkov brings a fresh, voluptuous quality to it by featuring the personal entanglement of tsars -- from Peter the Great’s father, Alexis I, to Vladimir Lenin, the first of the Soviet “tsars” -- with certain authors, artists, and composers.
What gives perspective to the authors’ analysis is the long haul of history in which they situate it.
The Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 and the imbroglio that followed were seminal events in the Cold War’s last years. Kalinovsky goes over the whole story briefly and then, with a large cache of archival material, firsthand accounts, and interviews, takes the reader deep inside the Soviet decision-making process as first Mikhail Gorbachev’s aging predecessors and then Gorbachev and his circle struggled awkwardly to settle on an exit strategy that would not bring the roof down.
It is not structural socioeconomic conditions, as is often assumed, that fuel separatism, she finds, but the immediate fear of unemployment or lost opportunity, anxieties that nationalist leaders skillfully cast in a narrative favoring national independence.
Mark systematically explores the past as processed in the present in countries from the Baltics to Romania.
This is by far the most thorough and systematic study of Russia’s so-called power ministries, charged with administering the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force.
Of all the genres employed to explore the long night of Eastern European communism, fables have not, until now, been one of them.
On December 1, 1934, a disaffected, psychotic party worker stalked Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party, as he walked the hall to his third-floor office and shot him in the back of the head. From this act flowed an ever-widening cascade of murderous events.
Studying how Russia has changed the way it does its national economic accounting may sound dry, but it is far from so. On the contrary, given the impact that GDP statistics have on politics and policy choices -- sometimes including international politics -- how these are measured and reported has immense practical consequences.
Murphy's angels comprise all categories of Chechen women -- on whichever side of the violence.
Mitchell argues that in its democracy-promotion efforts, the United States should be more critical of its perceived democratic allies, less focused on single benchmarks such as elections, and more attuned to the many elements needed to create an engaged citizenry.
What the memoir teaches is how cogs in the gulag machine, even when troubled by the cruelty and injustice around them, accepted the rationalizations given by the state.
In the end, the authors argue, whether a well-endowed country has a government that pursues policies promoting fiscal integrity, long-term growth, and a more equitable distribution of economic benefits depends on who owns and manages the oil and gas.
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