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To see Paris and die : the Soviet lives of Western culture
The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin's death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. At the heart of this story is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political rabble-rouser; Rockwell Kent as a quintessential American painter; Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway as teachers of love and courage under fire; J. D. Salinger and Giuseppe De Santis as saviors from Soviet clichâes. Imported novels challenged fundamental tenets of Soviet ethics, while modernist paintings tested deep-seated notions of culture. Western films were eroticized even before viewers took their seats. The drama of cultural exchange and translation encompassed discovery as well as loss. Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate possessions. With the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet West disappeared from the cultural map. Gilburd's history reveals how domesticated Western imports defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, as well as its death and afterlife.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Afgantsy
A timely and eye-opening account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979-89), from the high politics of the Kremlin to the lonely Russian conscripts in remote mountain outposts.
eBook
The Right to Be Helped
\"Doesn't an educated person—simple and working, sick and with a sick child—doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?\" Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her daughter. While the welfare of able-bodied and industrially productive people in the first socialist country in the world was protected by a state-funded insurance system, the social rights of labor-incapacitated and unemployed individuals such as Zolotova-Sologub were difficult to define and legitimize. The Right to Be Helped illuminates the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations regarding the socialist state between 1917 and 1950.
Maria Galmarini-Kabala shows how definitions of state assistance and who was entitled to it provided a platform for policymakers and professionals to engage in heated debates about disability, gender, suffering, and productive and reproductive labor. She explores how authorities and experts reacted to requests for support, arguing that responses were sometimes characterized by an enlightened nature and other times by coercive discipline, but most frequently by a combination of the two. By focusing on the experiences of behaviorally problematic children, unemployed single mothers, and blind and deaf adults in several major urban centers, this important study shows that the dialogue over the right to be helped was central to defining the moral order of Soviet socialism. It will appeal to scholars and students of Russian history, as well as those interested in comparative disabilities and welfare studies.
eBook
From red to gray
Conventional wisdom holds that aging populations are unfavorable for economic growth because of their potential impacts on labor supply, productivity, and savings. When this is coupled with the increased spending pressures because of pension requirements and health care, aging societies are likely to face serious fiscal problems. This report addresses these concerns in the unique context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union where many countries are aging rapidly without the economic resources and institutional capacity of other aging societies in Western Europe and Japan.
eBook
Agitating Images
Following the socialist revolution, a colossal shift in everyday realities began in the 1920s and '30s in the former Russian empire. Faced with the Siberian North, a vast territory considered culturally and technologically backward by the revolutionary government, the Soviets confidently undertook the project of reshaping the ordinary lives of the indigenous peoples in order to fold them into the Soviet state. InAgitating Images, Craig Campbell draws a rich and unsettling cultural portrait of the encounter between indigenous Siberians and Russian communists and reveals how photographs from this period complicate our understanding of this history.
Agitating Imagesprovides a glimpse into the first moments of cultural engineering in remote areas of Soviet Siberia. The territories were perceived by outsiders to be on the margins of civilization, replete with shamanic rituals and inhabited by exiles, criminals, and \"primitive\" indigenous peoples. The Soviets hoped to permanently transform the mythologized landscape by establishing socialist utopian developments designed to incorporate minority cultures into the communist state. This book delves deep into photographic archives from these Soviet programs, but rather than using the photographs to complement an official history, Campbell presents them as anti-illustrations, or intrusions, that confound simple narratives of Soviet bureaucracy and power. Meant to agitate, these images offer critiques that cannot be explained in text alone and, in turn, put into question the nature of photographs as historical artifacts.
An innovative approach to challenging historical interpretation,Agitating Imagesdemonstrates how photographs go against accepted premises of Soviet Siberia. All photographs, Campbell argues, communicate in unique ways that present new and even contrary possibilities to the text they illustrate. Ultimately,Agitating Imagesdissects our very understanding of the production of historical knowledge.
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Roosevelts lost alliances
In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.
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The rise of Russia and the fall of the Soviet empire
This is the first work to set one of the great bloodless revolutions of the twentieth century in its proper historical context. John Dunlop pays particular attention to Yeltsin's role in opposing the covert resurgence of Communist interests in post-coup Russia, and faces the possibility that new institutions may not survive long enough to sink roots in a traditionally undemocratic culture.
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The Republic of China’s Fantasy Frontier: Shifting Portrayals of Mongolia in the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission
In 2017, the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC) was disbanded after 68 years of operation on Taiwan, raising the question of how an anachronistic institution evolved as the Republic of China (ROC) underwent democratisation. Documentary analysis finds that until the end of military rule (1987), the MTAC retained a Han-chauvinist mission to civilise its “frontier” through development policy and reform. By the twenty-first century, rhetoric emphasising bilateral and international exchange emerged. However, MTAC literature continued to highlight the relatively higher status of Taiwanese development to that of Mongolia, even as espousal of political “Chineseness” had faded. As ROC statehood in the early twenty-first century has increasingly embraced Taiwanese “multiculturalism,” the history of the MTAC sheds light on a neglected but significant aspect of the evolution there of discourse on national identity.
Journal Article
Soviet Cultural Offensive
The author has \"tried to understand the realities of Soviet society, drawing both upon a superb critical judgment and a warmly sympathetic human insight.\" He \"has given the American public material for thought and a prod in the right direction.\"
Originally published in 1960.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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