Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
147
result(s) for
"Stalinismus."
Sort by:
Stalinist city planning : professionals, performance, and power
\"Based on research in previously closed Soviet archives, this book sheds light on the formative years of Soviet city planning and on state efforts to consolidate power through cityscape design. Stepping away from Moscow's central corridors of power, Heather D. DeHaan focuses her study on 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod, where planners struggled to accommodate the expectations of a Stalinizing state without sacrificing professional authority and power. Bridging institutional and cultural history, the book brings together a variety of elements of socialism as enacted by planners on a competitive urban stage, such as scientific debate, the crafting of symbolic landscapes, and state campaigns for the development of cultured cities and people. By examining how planners and other urban inhabitants experienced, lived, and struggled with socialism and Stalinism, DeHaan offers readers a much broader, more complex picture of planning and planners than has been revealed to date.\"--Dust jacket.
Book
Work Flows
Work Flows investigates the
emergence of \"flow\" as a crucial metaphor within Russian labor
culture since 1870. Maya Vinokour frames concern with
fluid channeling as immanent to vertical power structures-whether
that verticality derives from the state, as in Stalin's Soviet
Union and present-day Russia, or from the proliferation of
corporate monopolies, as in the contemporary Anglo-American West.
Originating in pre-revolutionary bio-utopianism, the Russian
rhetoric of liquids and flow reached an apotheosis during Stalin's
First Five-Year Plan and re-emerged in post-Soviet \"managed
democracy\" and Western neoliberalism.
The literary, philosophical, and official texts that Work
Flows examines give voice to the Stalinist ambition of
reforging not merely individual bodies, but space and time
themselves. By mobilizing the understudied thematic of fluidity,
Vinokour offers insight into the nexus of philosophy, literature,
and science that underpinned Stalinism and remains influential
today. Work Flows demonstrates that Stalinism is not a historical
phenomenon restricted to the period 1922-1953, but a symptom of
modernity as it emerged in the twentieth century. Stalinism's
legacy extends far beyond the bounds of the former Soviet Union,
emerging in seemingly disparate settings like post-Soviet Russia
and Silicon Valley.
eBook
Making the Soviet Intelligentsia
Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these fêted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state.
eBook
Song of the Forest
The Soviets are often viewed as insatiable industrialists who saw nature as a force to be tamed and exploited.Song of the Forestcounters this assumption, uncovering significant evidence of Soviet conservation efforts in forestry, particularly under Josef Stalin. In his compelling study, Stephen Brain profiles the leading Soviet-era conservationists, agencies, and administrators, and their efforts to formulate forest policy despite powerful ideological differences.By the time of the revolution of 1905, modern Russian forestry science had developed an influential romantic strand, especially prevalent in the work of Georgii Morozov, whose theory of \"stand types\" asked forest managers to consider native species and local conditions when devising plans for regenerating forests. After their rise to power, the Bolsheviks turned their backs on this tradition and adopted German methods, then considered the most advanced in the world, for clear-cutting and replanting of marketable tree types in \"artificial forests.\" Later, when Stalin's Five Year Plan required vast amounts of timber for industrialization, forest radicals proposed \"flying management,\" an exaggerated version of German forestry where large tracts of virgin forest would be clear-cut. Opponents who still upheld Morozov's vision favored a conservative regenerating approach, and ultimately triumphed by establishing the world's largest forest preserve.Another radical turn came with the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, implemented in 1948. Narrow \"belts\" of new forest planted on the vast Russian steppe would block drying winds, provide cool temperatures, trap moisture, and increase crop production. Unfortunately, planters were ordered to follow the misguided methods of the notorious Trofim Lysenko, and the resulting yields were abysmal. But despite Lysenko, agency infighting, and an indifferent peasant workforce, Stalin's forestry bureaus eventually succeeded in winning many environmental concessions from industrial interests. In addition, the visionary teachings of Morozov found new life, ensuring that the forest's song did not fall upon deaf ears.
eBook
Reflections on Stalinism
Reflections on Stalinism distills decades of historical thought and research, bringing together twelve senior scholars of Soviet history who began their careers during the Cold War to examine their views of Stalinism. They present insights into the role of personality in statecraft, the social underpinnings of dictatorship and state terrorism, historians' attachments to their subjects, historical causality, the applicability of Marxist categories to Soviet history, the relationship of Soviet history to post-Soviet Russia, and more. Essays address the transformation of a peasant country into a superpower and the causes and scale of domestic bloodshed. Reflections on Stalinism ultimately tackles an age-old question: Do powerful people make history or are they the product of it?
eBook
Showcasing the great experiment : cultural diplomacy and western visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941
This book is a history of the Soviet tours of European and American intellectuals, writers, bohemians, professionals, and political tourists who saw the “Soviet experiment” in the 1920s and 1930s. It provides a new framework for understanding the relationship between intellectuals and communism and the Soviet reception of foreign visitors, including the leading fellow-travelers who praised Stalin and Stalinism in the interwar period. The work is based on a far-reaching analysis of the declassified archives of agencies charged with crafting the international image of the first socialist society, including VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad). The book brings this story into new focus as one of the great transnational encounters of the twentieth century. As many visitors were profoundly influenced by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system itself: the experiences of building showcases and tutoring outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making comprise a neglected international dimension to the emergence of Stalinism. Probing entanglements between far-left and far-right ideological extremes, the work pays special attention to the covert interaction between communism and fascism, including Soviet attempts to recruit German “National Bolsheviks” and fascist intellectuals. The unprecedented scope of Soviet efforts to mold foreign, particularly Western public opinion created a new chapter in the history of modern cultural diplomacy. Setting the revolutionary regime's innovations in the context of the entire history of foreign visitors in Russia, the book argues that Soviet mobilization for the international ideological contest directly paved the way for the cultural Cold War.
eBook
Stalin's Final Films
Stalin's Final Films explores
a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new
life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle
of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in
this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked
as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a
clearly popular postwar cinema.
Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology
and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment,
inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial
considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how
the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced
by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing
how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies
alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the
war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding
of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same
films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a
diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at
the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were
denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new
heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and
filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising
results.
Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an
invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of
postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in
Soviet history.
eBook
Torture and democracy
This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe.
As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to \"clean\" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods.
Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
eBook