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State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia

Author : Baasanjav Terbish

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 311 pages

File Size : 21,2 MB

Release : 2022-02-25

Category : History

ISBN : 1666905690

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Book Description

This book recounts the entangled stories of three distinctly Russian movements—state ideology, Russian cosmism, and Eurasianism—from their inception at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century until now. Despite harboring pseudoscientific and mystical ideas specific to Russia, all three movements were propagated by their followers as “universal sciences,” and all three vied for scientific supremacy and universal acceptance. Suppressed by the Bolsheviks and their state ideology as “unscientific” in the 1920s, Russian cosmism and Eurasianism led an esoteric underground existence during the Soviet period and re-emerged in the dying years of the Soviet Union, seeking not only to reclaim their “scientific” status but also to potentially fill the perplexing vacuum left by the ensuing demise of Soviet state ideology. This study relates the post-Soviet search for a new state ideology, or new National Idea, at the federal and regional levels, based on the Kremlin’s projects and the case of the ethnic Republic of Kalmykia in south-west Russia.



Russian Eurasianism

Author : Marlène Laruelle

Publisher : Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Page : 304 pages

File Size : 40,31 MB

Release : 2008-10

Category : Education

ISBN :

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Book Description

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of axes: European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.



Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime

Author : Marlene Laruelle

Publisher : Stanford University Press

Page : 330 pages

File Size : 15,33 MB

Release : 2025-01-14

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1503641600

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Book Description

Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits' clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin's grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian regime's ideological production process and the ways it is operationalized in both domestic and foreign policies. Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible and represents a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions. By placing the current Russian regime into a broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history, this book gives readers key insights into how the Russo-Ukrainian War became possible and the role ideology played in enabling it.



Science and Ideology

Author : Mark Walker

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 284 pages

File Size : 38,29 MB

Release : 2013-10-11

Category : History

ISBN : 1136466622

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Book Description

Does science work best in a democracy? Were 'Soviet' or 'Nazi' science fundamentally different from science in the USA? These questions have been passionately debated in the recent past. Particular developments in science took place under particular political regimes, but they may or may not have been directly determined by them. Science and Ideology brings together a number of comparative case studies to examine the relationship between science and the dominant ideology of a state. Cybernetics in the USA is compared to France and the Soviet Union. Postwar Allied science policy in occupied Germany is juxtaposed to that in Japan. The essays are narrowly focussed, yet cover a wide range of countries and ideologies. The collection provides a unique comparative history of scientific policies and practices in the 20th century.



Eternal Putin?

Author : J. L. Black

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 383 pages

File Size : 12,44 MB

Release : 2023-01-24

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1666919047

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Book Description

The short period of time stretching from the dramatic Constitutional amendments of January 2020, to the war launched by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine in February, 2022, marks a sharp turning point in post-Soviet Russian history. The author explains how Russia got to that point of war. Although Putin, termed ‘eternal’ because of amendments that allow him to run for two more terms as president, is everywhere in it, the book is a study of Russia writ large. It features the political uproar over the Navalny phenomenon, the ravages of the pandemic, manifestations of climate change, and intensifying confrontations between Russia on one side, Ukraine, NATO and the US on the other. The book provides a who, what, where and when of the short but volatile period prior to the outbreak of war, and offers a tentative why it happened. Discussed, too, are the highs and lows of Putin’s popularity; the effectiveness, or not, of economic sanctions, and Moscow’s ‘pivot to the east’. Whereas Putin is a more obvious villain in the unhappy tale, the author makes it clear that Ukrainian and Western leaders are by no means blameless for this state of affairs.



Sex in the Land of Genghis Khan

Author : Baasanjav Terbish

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 185 pages

File Size : 30,84 MB

Release : 2023

Category : Mongolia

ISBN : 1666937509

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Book Description

This book examines the history of sexuality in Mongolia over the last 800 years. As a culture-specific and time-specific system of values, practices and identities, sexuality in Mongolia, as elsewhere, has been subject to change as Mongolian society transformed from an empire to a post-imperial regional power to a Qing colony to a socialist country, before embracing liberal democracy in the 1990s. Since every social change tends to become reflected in sexuality, this study takes into account a range of intertwined topics, including religious ideologies, political ideologies, law, gender and relationships between individuals and the state, all of which have evolved throughout Mongolia's history and require rethinking if one is to describe such a complex social phenomenon as human sexuality.



Psychology and Politics

Author : Anna Borgos

Publisher : Central European University Press

Page : 382 pages

File Size : 26,26 MB

Release : 2019-10-01

Category : Psychology

ISBN : 9633862825

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Book Description

Psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminology, special education, etc.) have been connected to politics in different ways since the early twentieth century. Here in twenty-two essays scholars address a variety of these intersections from a historical perspective. The chapters include such diverse topics as the cultural history of psychoanalysis, the complicated relationship between psychoanalysis and the occult, and the struggles for dominance between the various schools of psychology. They show the ambivalent positions of the "psy" sciences in the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany, East European communism, Latin-American military dictatorships, and South African apartheid, revealing the crucial role of psychology in legitimating and "normalizing" these regimes. The authors also discuss the ideological and political aspects of mental health and illness in Hungary, Germany, post-WW1 Transylvania, and Russia. Other chapters describe the attempt by critical psychology to understand the production of academic, therapeutic, and everyday psychological knowledge in the context of the power relations of modern capitalist societies.



Stalin and the Bomb

Author : David Holloway

Publisher : Yale University Press

Page : 507 pages

File Size : 36,95 MB

Release : 2008-10-01

Category : History

ISBN : 0300164459

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Book Description

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.



From Newspeak to Cyberspeak

Author : Slava Gerovitch

Publisher : MIT Press

Page : 386 pages

File Size : 27,16 MB

Release : 2004-09-17

Category : History

ISBN : 9780262572255

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Book Description

In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."



Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Author : Vladislav Lektorsky

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 441 pages

File Size : 19,57 MB

Release : 2019-01-10

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1350040592

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Book Description

Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century is the first book of its kind that offers a systematic overview of an often misrepresented period in Russia's philosophy. Focusing on philosophical ideas produced during the late 1950s – early 1990s, it reconstructs the development of genuine philosophical thought in the Soviet period and introduces those non-dogmatic Russian thinkers who saw in philosophy a means of reforming social and intellectual life. Covering such areas of philosophical inquiry as philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, the history of philosophy, activity approach as well as communication and dialogue studies, the volume presents and thoroughly discusses central topics and concepts developed by Soviet thinkers in that particular fields. Written by a team of internationally recognized scholars from Russia and abroad, it examines the work of well-known Soviet philosophers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili) as well as those important figures (such as Vladimir Bibler, Alexander Zinoviev, Yury Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Genrich Batishchev, Sergey Rubinstein, and others) who have often been overlooked. By introducing and examining original philosophical ideas that evolved in the Soviet period, the book confirms that not all Soviet philosophy was dogmatic and tied to orthodox Marxism and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It shows Russian philosophical development of the Soviet period in a new light, as a philosophy defined by a genuine discourse of exploration and intellectual progress, rather than stagnation and dogmatism. In addition to providing the historical and cultural background that explains the development of the 20th-century Russian philosophy, the book also puts the discussed ideas and theories in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions showing their relevance to nowadays debates in Western philosophy. With short biographies of key thinkers, an extensive current bibliography and a detailed chronology of Soviet philosophy, this research resource provides a new understanding of the Soviet period and its intellectual legacy 100 years after the Russian Revolution.