The Soviet Achievement


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Stalin And Medicine: Untold Stories


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'Rapoport has written a remarkable family memoir about growing up in the loftiest of Soviet Kremlin medical circles, where her father (Yakov Rapoport) was a distinguished pathologist, a man of scientific brilliance, technical expertise, great humor, and even greater courage during the rule of Joseph Stalin, around whom many suffered violent and mysterious deaths. The author's tone is lively, direct, humorous, and bluntly honest about her family and the rarified scientific and political circles in which they lived and worked. She reveals the heights of greatness that brilliant Jews could attain under the Soviet system, and also the discriminatory prejudice and harms, including threats and likelihood of arrest, torture, and death, that they experienced under Stalin and his successors … This marvelous book is an accessible work of important historical memory and warm scholarly and personal analysis. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.'CHOICEThis manuscript offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into some extraordinary moments of 20th century Russia. In a series of entrancing stories, the book demonstrates the disastrous consequences of a totalitarian regime's intervention in medicine and medical science. The narration is based on first-hand accounts the author gathered in conversations with her father, a world-renowned pathologist, and family friends, members of the Soviet intellectual elite.As one of the leading pathologists in the country, the author's father participated in many dramatic events that were hidden from the general public. The author describes Stalin's revenge on his doctors and the fabrication of the 'Doctors' Plot'; the thrilling story of the Moscow Brain Institute; the mysterious circumstances of the death of Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva; the outbreak of plague in the center of Moscow and the NKVD's approach to curbing an epidemic; the fraught drama associated with the death and autopsy of the 'father' of the H-bomb, Andrey Sakharov; and the world's first attempt at cancer biotherapy.In the Afterward entitled A Different Globe the author depicts the difficult and sometimes hilarious process of her family's adjustment to their new life in America.A number of TV programs, documentaries, and movies were shot in the author's Moscow apartment by Russian, European, and American media and movie companies.




Red Medicine


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Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia reviews the medical organization and administration in Soviet Russia. This book is organized into 24 chapters that particularly tackle the city of Moscow and Leningrad. It addresses the travels of the authors from Moscow to Georgia and the Crimea, providing an overview of the background of Russian life. Some of the topics covered in the book are the progress of Russia towards Communism; developments in the introduction of Communism; type of government of USSR; description of industrial conditions and health; features of agricultural conditions; state of religion, civil liberty, and law; and characteristics of home life, recreation, clubs, and education. Other chapters deal with the condition of women in Soviet Russia, state of marriage, and divorce. These topics are followed by discussions of the care of maternity, children and youths, as well as the treatment in residential and non-residential institutions. The final chapters describe the characteristics of medical practice and the general considerations on the medical care in large communities. The book can provide useful information to the historians, doctors, students, and researchers.




Cigarettes and Soviets


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Enriched by color reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packs, and anti-smoking propaganda, Cigarettes and Soviets provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit. Tricia Starks examines how the Soviets maintained the first mass smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting it. The book is at once a study of Soviet tobacco deeply enmeshed in its social, political, and cultural context and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic. Starks examines the Soviet antipathy to tobacco yet capitulation to market; the development of innovative cessation techniques and clinics and the late entry into global anti-tobacco work; the seeming lack of cultural stimuli alongside massive use; and the expansion of smoking without the conventional prompts of capitalist markets. She tells the story of Philip Morris's "Mission to Moscow" campaign for the Soviet market, the triumph of the quintessential capitalist product—the cigarette—in a communist system, and the successes and failures of the world's first national antismoking campaign. The interplay of male habits and health against largely female tobacco producers and medical professionals adds a gendered dimension. Smoking developed, continued, and grew in the Soviet Union without mass production, intensive advertising, seductive industrial design, or product ubiquity. The Soviets were early to condemn tobacco, and yet, by the end of the twentieth century Russians smoked more heavily than most most other nations in the world. Cigarettes and Soviets challenges interpretations of how tobacco use rose in the past and what leads to mass use today.




The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia


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The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.




Stalin and the Scientists


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“One of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century.” —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from the years leading up to the revolution through the death of the “Great Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Trofim Lysenko (who denied the existence of genes), and by relying on antiquated ideas of biology, he not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of brilliant scientists, he caused the death of millions through famine. But from atomic physics to management theory, and from radiation biology to neuroscience and psychology, these Soviet experts also made breakthroughs that forever changed agriculture, education, and medicine. A masterful book that deepens our understanding of Russian history, Stalin and the Scientists is a great achievement of research and storytelling, and a gripping look at what happens when science falls prey to politics. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2016 A New York Times Book Review “Paperback Row” selection “Ings’s research is impressive and his exposition of the science is lucid . . . Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today.” —The New York Times Book Review “A must read for understanding how the ideas of scientific knowledge and technology were distorted and subverted for decades across the Soviet Union.” —The Washington Post




The Social Crisis in the Russian Federation


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This book provides a detailed analysis of the social problems facing the Russian Federation, and develops proposals for continuing reform to improve the economic fundamentals, including the productivity, while at the same time ensuring that social and labour market policies become more effective.




Stalin and the Bomb


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The classic and “utterly engrossing” study of Stalin’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War by the renowned political scientist and historian (Foreign Affairs). For forty years the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Holloway pulled back the Iron Curtain with his “marvelous, groundbreaking study” Stalin and the Bomb (The New Yorker). How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? David Holloway answers these questions by tracing the dramatic story of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.




Stalin's Genocides


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The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.




Scientists, Engineers, and Track-Two Diplomacy


Book Description

This report is intended to provide a brief historical perspective of the evolution of the interacademy program during the past half-century, recognizing that many legacies of the Soviet era continue to influence government approaches in Moscow and Washington and to shape the attitudes of researchers toward bilateral cooperation in both countries (of special interest is the changing character of the program during the age of perestroika (restructuring) in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union); to describe in some detail the significant interacademy activities from late 1991, when the Soviet Union fragmented, to mid-2003; and to set forth lessons learned about the benefits and limitations of interacademy cooperation and to highlight approaches that have been successful in overcoming difficulties of implementation.