The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev

Author : William J. Tompson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317881729
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Soviet Union under Brezhnev written by William J. Tompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev provides an accessible post-Soviet perspective on the history of the USSR from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1980’s. It challenges both the ‘evil empire’ image of the USSR that was widespread in the early 1980’s and the ‘stagnation’ label attached to the period by Soviet reformers under Gorbachev. The book makes use of a range of memoirs, interviews, archival documents and other sources not available before 1990 to place Brezhnev and his epoch in a broader historical context. The author: examines high politics, foreign policy and policy making explores broader social, cultural and demographic trends presents a picture of Soviet society in the crucial decades prior to the upheavals and crises of the late 1980’s While stopping well short of a full-scale rehabilitation of Brezhnev, Tompson rejects the prevailing image of the Soviet leader as a colourless non-entity, drawing attention to Brezhnev’s real political skills, as well as his faults, and to the systemic roots of many of the problems he faced.

Author : Thomas Crump
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134669151
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brezhnev and the Decline of the Soviet Union written by Thomas Crump and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1964-1982, a longer period than any other Soviet leader apart from Stalin. During Brezhnev’s time Soviet power seemed at its height and increasing. Living standards were rising, the Soviet Union was a nuclear power and successful in its space missions, and the Soviet Union's influence reached into all part of the world. Yet, as this book, which provides a comprehensive overview and reassessment of Brezhnev’s life, early political career and career as leader, shows, the seeds of decline were sown in Brezhnev's time. There was a huge over-commitment of resources to the Soviet industrial-military complex and to massively expensive foreign policy overstretch. At the same time there was a failure to deliver on citizens' rising expectations, and an overconfident ignoring of dissidents and their demands. The book will be of great interest to Russian specialists, and also to scholars of international relations and world history.

Author : Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozlov
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 030016856X
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sedition written by Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozlov and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although dissident Soviet intellectuals in the post-Stalin era received wide international attention, ordinary people who opposed the regime rarely had their voices heard. This book is the first to tell the hidden story of popular discontent during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. It draws on an extraordinary collection of arrest and prosecution records from the 1960s and 1970s found in Soviet Procuracy archives.

Author : John W. Strong
Publisher : New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold Company
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev and Kosygin: the Transition Years written by John W. Strong and published by New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. This book was released on 1971 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of essays evolved from a series of lectures given at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, during 1968.

Author : Natalya Chernyshova
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135046263
Total Pages : 526 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era written by Natalya Chernyshova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state’s efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens’ relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project. The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet ‘mature socialism’ between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of ‘stagnation’, arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.

Author : Christopher J. Ward
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822971216
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brezhnev's Folly written by Christopher J. Ward and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heralded by Soviet propaganda as the "Path to the Future," the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) represented the hopes and dreams of Brezhnev and the Communist Party elite of the late Soviet era. Begun in 1974, and spanning approximately 2,000 miles after twenty-nine years of halting construction, the BAM project was intended to showcase the national unity, determination, skill, technology, and industrial might that Soviet socialism claimed to embody. More pragmatically, the Soviet leadership envisioned the BAM railway as a trade route to the Pacific, where markets for Soviet timber and petroleum would open up, and as an engine for the development of Siberia. Despite these aspirations and the massive commitment of economic resources on its behalf, BAM proved to be a boondoggle-a symbol of late communism's dysfunctionality-and a cruel joke to many ordinary Soviet citizens. In reality, BAM was woefully bereft of quality materials and construction, and victimized by poor planning and an inferior workforce. Today, the railway is fully complete, but remains a symbol of the profligate spending and inefficiency that characterized the Brezhnev years.In Brezhnev's Folly, Christopher J. Ward provides a groundbreaking social history of the BAM railway project. He examines the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of workers from the diverse republics of the USSR and other socialist countries, and his extensive archival research and interviews with numerous project workers provide an inside look at the daily life of the BAM workforce. We see firsthand the disorganization, empty promises, dire living and working conditions, environmental damage, and acts of crime, segregation, and discrimination that constituted daily life during the project's construction. Thus, perhaps, we also see the final irony of BAM: that the most lasting legacy of this misguided effort to build Soviet socialism is to shed historical light on the profound ills afflicting a society in terminal decline.

Author : E. Bacon
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230501087
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brezhnev Reconsidered written by E. Bacon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for almost two decades when it was at the height of its powers. This book is a long overdue reappraisal of Brezhnev the man and the system over which he ruled. By incorporating much of the new material available in Russian, it challenges the received wisdom about the Brezhnev years, and provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of one of the twentieth century's most neglected political leaders.

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

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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 : Mervyn Matthews
Publisher : Hoover Press
ISBN 13 : 9780817988333
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Patterns of Deprivation in the Soviet Union Under Brezhnev and Gorbachev written by Mervyn Matthews and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Dina Fainberg
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498529941
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era written by Dina Fainberg and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-04-27 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.