Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
5,170
result(s) for
"Leonid Brezhnev"
Sort by:
Reconsidering stagnation in the brezhnev era
This collection brings together an interdisciplinary array of scholars of late socialism in the U.S.S.R. and challenges the dominant narrative of stagnation during the Brezhnev era. It demonstrates that the political and intellectual class remained ideologically committed, recognized systemic challenges, and embarked on a creative search for solutions.
eBook
Brezhnev's Folly
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.
InBrezhnev'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.
eBook
Reconsidering stagnation in the Brezhnev era : ideology and exchange
\"This collection brings together an interdisciplinary array of scholars of late socialism in the U.S.S.R. and challenges the dominant narrative of stagnation during the Brezhnev era. It demonstrates that the political and intellectual class remained ideologically committed, recognized systemic challenges, and embarked on a creative search for solutions\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The Soviet Union under Brezhnev
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.
William Tompson is Reader in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
eBook
The 1990s Chinese Debates Concerning the Causes for the Collapse of the Soviet Union among PRC Soviet-watchers: The Cases of Brezhnev and Stalin
The breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 has had a profound impact on China. The Soviet dissolution has had a variety of significant repercussions on Chinese politics, foreign policy, and other aspects. However, many myths about post-1991 Chinese research on the Soviet Union have been circulated and perpetuated by a body of secondary literature written by Western scholars. Some issues have been unclear or misunderstood in previous studies, and one of these inaccuracies has to do with Chinese perceptions of the role of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A number of the secondary sources argue that, after 1991, because of their impact on China's 1989 pro-democracy movements as perceived by the Chinese communist regime, most Chinese Soviet-watchers considered Gorbachev and his liberalization to be the fundamental catalysts in triggering the collapse of the Soviet Union. The literature seems to agree that those Chinese scholars were univocal in assessing Gorbachev's individual actions and failings, and that they overstated the implications of Gorbachev and his liberal programs for China. This research reveals that since the mid-1990s, many Chinese Sovietwatchers have traced the roots of the tragedy back to the administrations of Leonid Brezhnev and Joseph Stalin, arguing that the conservative forces and the rigid communist system were the decisive factors in bringing it about - rather than the figure of Gorbachev alone. Their writings confirmed and legitimized the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's post-Tiananmen agendas of opposing leftism and saving Chinese socialism by speeding up the reform and open door policy. By depicting that Brezhnev's stagnation and Stalin's rigid centralization as the primary causes of the collapse, their writings suggested that state legitimacy comes more from economic results than democratic politics. They justified that economic prosperity, not political reform, which is the reigning principle for the survival of Chinese socialism after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Journal Article
The Soviet myth of the Great Fatherland War and the limits of inclusionary politics under Brezhnev: The case of Chalmaevist literature
Influential scholarship on the Brezhnev era has described the instrumental official support for Russian nationalist themes and pre-socialist imagery in public discourse as a deliberate “politics of inclusion,” designed to co-opt certain nationalist intellectuals and the sympathies of the state's core of ethnic Russians for the purpose of popular mobilization. How this policy related to and interacted with the ubiquitous official commemoration and mythologization of the Great Fatherland War during this period, however, has remained unexplored. Based on a number of the most important Russophilic publications in the censored press - the writings of the so-called “Chalmaevists” - this article contends that despite unambiguously russocentric, single-stream readings of history in general, when it came to the war in particular, nationalist intellectuals tended to muffle their russocentrism through opaque language or an avoidance of the war's larger significance, or conformed to the war's official (supra-ethnic, socialist) reading. It was only in samizdat that the essentially Russian, primordial nature of victory in 1945 could be fully articulated. The present study thus probes the limits of the concept of inclusionary politics and underscores the party leadership's apparent commitment to maintaining the war myth's predominantly supranational, socialist significance as a means of fostering all-Soviet, rather than Russian national, solidarity.
Journal Article
\PREVENTING ARMAGEDDON\ OR \APPEASEMENT\? THE BATTLE FOR CULTURAL EVANGELICAL HEARTS AND MINDS IN TEXAS OVER JIMMY CARTER AND SALT II
Graham was a cold warrior from the very beginning of his national ministry in the 1940s and 1950s, often preaching about the evils of atheistic communism and the need for Christians in America to succeed in the Cold War. Other prominent white evangelicals shared this view in the flagship publication of conservative evangelicalism, Christianity Today. [...]there was a broad consensus on the need to support SALT I and SALT II talks across the ideological spectrum of white evangelical elites, from the conservative Christianity Today to the progressive Sojourners. POTENTIAL SELLING POINTS FOR SALT II AND ELITE WHITE EVANGELICAL SUPPORT Despite the previous criticisms that Wes Michaelson, Jim Wallis, and other writers at Sojourners, a progressive evangelical periodical, leveled at Carter's foreign policy, in August 1979 they interviewed the most famous evangelical in the country and recent convert to anti-nuclear proliferation, Billy Graham, to provide support for SALT II.
Journal Article