The Development of Capitalism in Russia


Book Description

CONTENTS The Development of Capitalism in Russia The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists The Differentiation of the Peasantry The Landowners' Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy The Growth of Commercial Agriculture The First Stages of Capitalism in Industry Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry The Development of Large-Scale Machine Industry The Formation of the Home Market




Soviet Baby Boomers


Book Description

Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. Illuminating a critical generation of people who had remained largely faceless up until now, the book reveals what it meant to "live Soviet" during the twilight of the Soviet empire.




Born to Kill in the Ussr - True Stories of Soviet Serial Killers


Book Description

An ex-actor poses as a gas company worker to enter homes without suspicion. When the doors are closed, he strikes with a camping ax. A love-scorned man hunts and eats women when a "magical force" tells him that drinking blood from a body cleanses the soul. Fifty-two people lie gunned down by the Ukrainian Terminator in a horrific six-month tour de force that wipes out entire families. The largest park in Moscow witnesses over sixty people slaughtered in a twisted game of chess. Born to Kill in the USSR is an unflinching portrait of the serial killers through the Soviet and Post-Soviet era. Forty-six men and women's unconscionable devolutions are documented against the political complexities and social reality of the largest country in the world.







Russia's Sputnik Generation


Book Description

Russia's Sputnik Generation presents the life stories of eight 1967 graduates of School No. 42 in the Russian city of Saratov. Born in 1949/50, these four men and four women belong to the first generation conceived during the Soviet Union's return to ""normality"" following World War II. Well educated, articulate, and loosely networked even today, they were first-graders the year the USSR launched Sputnik, and grew up in a country that increasingly distanced itself from the excesses of Stalinism. Reaching middle age during the Gorbachev Revolution, they negotiated the transition to a Russian-style market economy and remain active, productive members of society in Russia and the diaspora. In candid interviews with Donald J. Raleigh, these Soviet ""baby boomers"" talk about the historical times in which they grew up, but also about their everyday experiences -- their family backgrounds; childhood pastimes; favorite books, movies, and music; and influential people in their lives. These personal testimonies shed valuable light on Soviet childhood and adolescence, on the reasons and course of perestroika, and on the wrenching transition that has taken place since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.




Born to be Criminal


Book Description

This collection of essays explores the continuities and disruptions in the perceptions of criminality, its causes and ways of fighting it in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It focuses on both the discourse on criminality and thus the conceptualisation of criminality in various disciplines (criminology, psychiatry, and literature), and penal practice, that is, different aspects of criminal law and anti-crime policy. Thus, the volume is markedly interdisciplinary, with authors representing a variety of approaches in history and literary studies, from social history to discourse analysis, from the history of sciences to text analysis.




Unnatural Deaths in the USSR, 1928-1954


Book Description

This astonishing and sobering account of government- and war-induced civilian deaths in the Soviet Union calculates that Soviet loss of life between 1928 and 1954 was far higher than Western ex­perts have ever believed. Applying mathematical techniques to Soviet demographic statistics, Dyadkin shows that Stalinist repres­sion and World War II must have taken the lives of between 43 and 52 million Soviet citizens. In the first period, 1929-36, one of collectivization, Stalin control­led and eliminated classes; during the Great Purge of 1937-38, mil­lions of Communist party members and bureaucrats were executed, and then the purge extended into the Red Army. Dyadkin shows that World War II took close to 30 million lives and that during 1950-53 another 450,000 died in prison camps.




The Forsaken


Book Description

Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal. In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice.




Arrested Development


Book Description

Arrested Development examines the USSR's involvement in West Africa during the 1950s and 1960s as aid donor, trade partner, and political inspiration for the first post-independence governments in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. Buoyed by solid economic performance in the 1950s, the USSR opened itself up to the world and launched a series of programs aimed at supporting the search for economic development in newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. These countries, emerging from decades of colonial domination, looked at the USSR as an example to strengthen political and economic independence. Based on extensive research in Russian and West African archives, Alessandro Iandolo explores the ideas that guided Soviet engagement in West Africa, investigates the projects that the USSR sponsored "on the ground," and analyzes their implementation and legacy. The Soviet specialists who worked in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali collaborated with West African colleagues in drawing ambitious development plans, supervised the construction of new transport infrastructure, organized collective farms and fishing cooperatives, conducted geological surveys and mineral prospecting, set up banking systems, managed international trade, and staffed repairs workshops and ministerial bureaucracies alike. The exchanges and clashes born out of the encounter between Soviet and West African ideas, ambitions, and hopes about development reveal the USSR as a central actor in the history of economic development in the twentieth century.




The Soviet Mind


Book Description

Isaiah Berlins response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Never before collected, Berlins writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalins manipulative artificial dialectic; portraits of Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more.