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The transnational world of the Cominternians
\"The 'Cominternians' who staffed the Communist International in Moscow from its establishment in 1919 to its dissolution in 1943 led transnational lives and formed a cosmopolitan but closed and privileged world. Full of sympathy, eager to learn, hopeful of emulating Bolshevik success 'at home', they were first-hand witnesses to the difficulties of the young Russian Revolution, before seeing it descend into the terror to which many of them fell victim. This book tells of their experience through these decades, of the encounter between utopian imagination and the real, and how the Party as institution sought to bend subjectivity to its needs, even as they became ever more questionable. Opened some 25 years ago, the Comintern archives provide a surprising wealth of autobiographical materials generated by these militants, and it is on these that this account of political commitment and its vicissitudes is based\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Moscow, the fourth Rome : Stalinism, cosmopolitanism, and the evolution of Soviet culture, 1931-1941
In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the \"Third Rome.\" By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world.
Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today—transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin.
Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.
eBook
Russia on the Edge
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors-whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border-have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. InRussia on the Edge, Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.
Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin's extreme views and their many responses-in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism-form the body of this book.
InRussia on the Edge, literary and cultural critics will find the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture. For intellectual historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the book is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold. The book introduces nonspecialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia's writers and public intellectuals.
eBook
The Environmental Impact of Transition : A Case Study of Moscow City
The development policies of the Soviet period resulted in widespread environmental damage within the USSR. The profound societal changes initiated by the transition period led many to envisage an improving environmental situation within the successor states. This paper takes the example of Moscow city and assesses the environmental impact of the transition period within the region. The changing pressures being placed upon air, water and vegetation resources are examined. It would seem that many of the expected improvements in environmental quality have not materialized. New environmental pressures are a significant contributor to this situation. For example, the increasing number of motor vehicles is encouraging high levels of air pollution within the city. Water quality is being threatened by new housing developments and the violation of sanitary protection zones. Furthermore, the construction of office and retail space is placing pressure upon the city's green spaces. Nevertheless, the influence of the Soviet legacy should not be underestimated. The considerable physical and cultural heritage is having a profound impact upon the contemporary situation.
Journal Article