The Bloc That Failed

Author : Charles Gati
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Failed Illusions written by Charles Gati and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting new look at a key event of the Cold War, Failed Illusions fundamentally modifies our picture of what happened during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Now, fifty years later, Charles Gati challenges the simplicity of this David and Goliath story in his new history of the revolt.

Author : Charles Gati
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Bloc That Failed written by Charles Gati and published by . This book was released on 1990-05-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... lucid and stimulating... " --The New York Times Book Review "Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the new Eastern Europe and the collapse of Soviet control over it--informative and incisive." --Zbigniew Brzezinski "Gati's book... is the most current and best-informed study of this rapidly changing world.... Professor Gati is uniquely qualified to understand and give perspective to the impact of perestroika and Soviet 'new thinking' on the events in Eastern Europe." --William H. Luers, Former U. S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia "... a superb synthesis of the postwar evolution of Soviet-East European relations and the first up-to-date analysis of the revolutionary events in that part of the world in 1989." --Michael Mandelbaum, Council on Foreign Relations "An up-to-date and lucid overview of the troubled course of Soviet-East European relations at time of momentous change in the Soviet bloc." --Sarah M. Terry "... excellent analysis and synthesis... " --Foreign Affairs "this book is written in a lively style and is a good scholarly synthesis of the post-Second World War evolution of Soviet-East European relations ending in the revolutionary events of 1989." --Canadian Journal of Political Science "... a lively and perceptive account... " --Military Review "Clearly and simply written, this book is particularly useful as a compact introduction to the prehistory and transformation of East European politics." --Choice "It is well organized, readable, and sensitive to complexity; find the time to read it." --History

Author : Linda J. Cook
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674828001
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed written by Linda J. Cook and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract. Linda Cook pursues the idea from Brezhnev's day to our own, and considers the constraining effect it may have had on Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet economy.

Author : Stéphane Courtois
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674076082
Total Pages : 920 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Black Book of Communism written by Stéphane Courtois and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

Author : Vladislav M. Zubok
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807899054
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Failed Empire written by Vladislav M. Zubok and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this widely praised book, Vladislav Zubok argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok offers the first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side. A Failed Empire provides a history quite different from those written by the Western victors. In a new preface for this edition, the author adds to our understanding of today's events in Russia, including who the new players are and how their policies will affect the state of the world in the twenty-first century.

Author : Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801463211
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Socialist Car written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. In The Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.

Author : Austin Jersild
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469611600
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Sino-Soviet Alliance written by Austin Jersild and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950 the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance to foster cultural and technological cooperation between the Soviet bloc and the PRC. While this treaty was intended as a break with the colonial past, Austin Jersild argues that the alliance ultimately failed because the enduring problem of Russian imperialism led to Chinese frustration with the Soviets. Jersild zeros in on the ground-level experiences of the socialist bloc advisers in China, who were involved in everything from the development of university curricula, the exploration for oil, and railway construction to piano lessons. Their goal was to reproduce a Chinese administrative elite in their own image that could serve as a valuable ally in the Soviet bloc's struggle against the United States. Interestingly, the USSR's allies in Central Europe were as frustrated by the "great power chauvinism" of the Soviet Union as was China. By exposing this aspect of the story, Jersild shows how the alliance, and finally the split, had a true international dimension.

Author : Michel Christian
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110532409
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Planning in Cold War Europe written by Michel Christian and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis. During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes. First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries. The volume thus contributes to two fields undergoing a process of profound reassessment: the history of modernisation and of the Cold War.

Author : Rachel Applebaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501735586
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Empire of Friends written by Rachel Applebaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.

Author : Leslie Holmes
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199551545
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Communism: A Very Short Introduction written by Leslie Holmes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of communism was one of the most defining moments of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction examines the history behind the political, economic, and social structures of communism as an ideology.