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"Soviet studies"
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Patronage and politics in the USSR
How did Soviet politicians rise to power? How were conflicting political interests brought together as policies were developed in the Soviet Union? These questions long absorbed historians and political scientists, yet none had systematically examined the crucial role played by patron-client relations until John P. Willerton.
Book
The Geography of Ethnic Violence
The Geography of Ethnic Violenceis the first among numerous distinguished books on ethnic violence to clarify the vital role of territory in explaining such conflict. Monica Toft introduces and tests a theory of ethnic violence, one that provides a compelling general explanation of not only most ethnic violence, civil wars, and terrorism but many interstate wars as well. This understanding can foster new policy initiatives with real potential to make ethnic violence either less likely or less destructive. It can also guide policymakers to solutions that endure.
The book offers a distinctively powerful synthesis of comparative politics and international relations theories, as well as a striking blend of statistical and historical case study methodologies. By skillfully combining a statistical analysis of a large number of ethnic conflicts with a focused comparison of historical cases of ethnic violence and nonviolence--including four major conflicts in the former Soviet Union--it achieves a rare balance of general applicability and deep insight.
Toft concludes that only by understanding how legitimacy and power interact can we hope to learn why some ethnic conflicts turn violent while others do not. Concentrated groups defending a self-defined homeland often fight to the death, while dispersed or urbanized groups almost never risk violence to redress their grievances. Clearly written and rigorously documented, this book represents a major contribution to an ongoing debate that spans a range of disciplines including international relations, comparative politics, sociology, and history.
eBook
States and social revolutions : a comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China
Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations.
Book
Soviet intelligence gathering in Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s: a review article
The wave of independence in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, combined with the 'thaw' after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, resulted in renewed Soviet interest after two decades of ignoring African affairs. Newly established diplomatic relations with liberation movements and independent states required the rapid training of middle-level cadres who could report back accurately to Moscow, as the USSR struggled to limit US and European influence in Africa. A volume in Russian of over 400 documents from the 1960s and early 1970s excludes the Arabic-speaking north, but allows readers to understand how intelligence was gathered on the ground by Soviet functionaries attempting to interpret local politics for power centres at home. This review article focuses on the political context in which African expertise was acquired, and analyses three cases from the volume - Ghana, Congo-Léopoldville in crisis, and Namibia in the early struggle for liberation.
Journal Article
Russia's People of Empire
A fundamental dimension of the Russian historical experience has been the diversity of its people and cultures, religions and languages, landscapes and economies. For six centuries this diversity was contained within the sprawling territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and it persists today in the entwined states and societies of the former USSR. Russia's People of Empire explores this enduring multicultural world through life stories of 31 individuals-famous and obscure, high born and low, men and women-that illuminate the cross-cultural exchanges at work from the late 1500s to post-Soviet Russia. Working on the scale of a single life, these microhistories shed new light on the multicultural character of the Russian Empire, which both shaped individuals' lives and in turn was shaped by them.
eBook
Economy and Ritual
According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people’s economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.
eBook