Author : Samantha Smith
Publisher : Little Brown
Page : 122 pages
File Size : 37,22 MB
Release : 1985-01-01
Category : Children's writings
ISBN : 9780316801751
A ten-year-old from Maine describes her trip to Russia at the invitation of Yuri Andropov after writing him a letter expressing her fears about a nuclear war.
Author : Alex La Guma
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 25,31 MB
Release : 2017-04-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1498536034
In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.
Author : Arkady Ostrovsky
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 19,63 MB
Release : 2016-06-07
Category : History
ISBN : 0399564187
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE WINNER OF THE CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD FINALIST FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR “Fast-paced and excellently written…much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable.” —New York Times “Filled with sparkling prose and deep analysis.” –The Wall Street Journal The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution. A highly regarded Moscow correspondent for the Economist, Arkady Ostrovsky comes to this story both as a participant and a foreign correspondent. His knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and astonishing longevity, his use of hybrid warfare and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country than its politicians. Putin pioneered a new form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and aggressively nationalistic - that has now been embraced by Donald Trump.
Author : Anne Galicich
Publisher :
Page : 80 pages
File Size : 29,2 MB
Release : 1987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
Describes Samantha Smith's historic trip to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, and her subsequent travels and speeches promoting peace and understanding among nations.
Author : Marat Akchurin
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 11,79 MB
Release : 2022-11-21
Category : Travel
ISBN : 166320912X
Red Odyssey is a travel book written by Marat Akchurin for those who have a passion for reading good adventure and historical fiction. Through a kaleidoscope of individual perspectives, the author explores and describes the collective historical experience of a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional nation living in a crumbling totalitarian state. Red Odyssey is not a political treatise, sociological analysis, or history book about Central Asia during the former Soviet Union. It is rather a tale of adventures of a time traveler trying to survive in a surrealistic society permeated with hypocrisy. The ruling regime is captive to its own lies. So it falsifies the past, it falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. Imperial propaganda transforms reality into fiction. The goal of Red Odyssey is to reverse the fabricated verisimilitude of their false utopia into the harsh truth of reality. Akchurin's keen, perceptive eye, his taste for adventure, and his intimate knowledge of this fractured superpower—its history, cultures, legends, folklores, politics, and ethnicities—leave no stone unturned in his relentless exploration of places long ignored and misunderstood by the West.
Author : Erika Fatland
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 473 pages
File Size : 20,75 MB
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1643133799
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world. Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In Sovietistan, she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships. In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate nuclear testing ground "Polygon" in Kazakhstan; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she travels incognito through Turkmenistan, as it is closed to journalists, and she meets German Mennonites that found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago. We learn how ancient customs clash with gas production and witness the underlying conflicts in new countries building their futures in nationalist colors. Once the frontier of the Soviet Union, life follows another pace of time. Amidst the treasures of Samarkand and the brutalist Soviet architecture, Sovietistan is a rare and unforgettable travelogue.
Author : Daniel Treisman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 546 pages
File Size : 40,45 MB
Release : 2012-01-10
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1416560726
Professor Daniel Treisman answers some of scholars' most pressing questions that haunt modern day Russia. Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate, and could its collapse have been avoided? Did Yeltsin destroy too much or too little of the Soviet political order? What explains Putin's unprecedented popularity with the Russian public? How did the "oligarchs" reshape the Russian economy? Treisman suggests that these questions can be answered by looking back through the dynamic political and social traditions of the region. Rigorous rather than rhetorical, this book uses historically documented evidence with modern day conditions to paint a complete picture of Russia today. In a time when global politics are more important than ever, it is critical for us to understand the inner workings.
Author : Timothy Snyder
Publisher : Crown
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 24,29 MB
Release : 2019-04-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0525574476
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America. “A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies. In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.
Author : Miroslav Krleža
Publisher :
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 15,67 MB
Release : 2021-03-02
Category : Soviet Union
ISBN : 9789533510293
When Miroslav Krleza traveled through Russia for six months between the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925, the celebrated Croatian writer was there to figure out what it all meant. The sprawling country was still coming to terms with the events of the 1917 revolution and reeling from Lenin's death in January 1924. During this period of profound political and social transition, Krleza opened his senses to train stations, cities, and villages and collected wildly different Russian perspectives on their collective moment in history. Krleza's impressionistic reportage of mass demonstrations and jubilant Orthodox Easter celebrations is informed by his preoccupation with the political, social, and psychological complexities of his environment. The result is a masterfully crafted modernist travelogue that resonates today as much as it did when first published in 1926.
Author : Robert Robinson
Publisher : Acropolis Books (NY)
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 21,52 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
"Robert Robinson (1907?-1994) was a Jamaican-born toolmaker who worked in the auto industry in the United States. At the age of 23, he was recruited to work in the Soviet Union, where he spent 44 years after the government refused to give him an exit visa for return. Starting with a one-year contract by Russians to work in the Soviet Union, he twice renewed his contract. He became trapped by the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II and the government's refusal to give him an exit visa. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering during the war. He finally left the Soviet Union in 1974 on an approved trip to Uganda, where he asked for and was given asylum. He married an African-American professor working there. He finally gained re-entry to the United States in 1976, and gained attention for his accounts of his 44 years in the Soviet Union."--Wikipedia.
