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Author: James H. Billington Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ISBN: 0801879760 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Billington describes the contentious discussion occurring all over Russia and across the political spectrum. He finds conflicts raging among individuals as much as between organized groups and finds a deep underlying tension between the Russians' attempts to legitimize their new, nominally democratic identity, and their efforts to craft a new version of their old authoritarian tradition. After showing how the problem of Russian identity was framed in the past, Billington asks whether Russians will now look more to the West for a place in the common European home, or to the East for a new, Eurasian identity.
Author: James H. Billington Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ISBN: 0801879760 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Billington describes the contentious discussion occurring all over Russia and across the political spectrum. He finds conflicts raging among individuals as much as between organized groups and finds a deep underlying tension between the Russians' attempts to legitimize their new, nominally democratic identity, and their efforts to craft a new version of their old authoritarian tradition. After showing how the problem of Russian identity was framed in the past, Billington asks whether Russians will now look more to the West for a place in the common European home, or to the East for a new, Eurasian identity.
Author: James H. Billington Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1725220849 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
When the Soviet communist empire was overthrown by the Russians themselves in August 1991, the change was more clearly anticipated by humanistic students of creativity than by economic and political scientists surrounded by statistics and information. Does the Russian pattern of creativity provide any hints as to how the Russians might solve problems today? Having borrowed the democratic political model of their erstwhile American enemy, will they be able to create a distinctive Russian variant that can endure? Or will they end up destroying their own experiment at accountable, constitutional government and returning to their long tradition of authoritarianism? The Face of Russia--a companion book to the corresponding PBS series--addresses these questions. This is a dazzling and forward-looking history of the Russian people as told through their art--from one of the world's great experts on Russian culture. The story covers eight hundred years of Russian creativity, and introduces us to the new art forms that burst onto the Russian scene and became the vehicles for expressing the creative aspirations of an age as well as the enduring Russian quest to find salvation and entertainment in art.
Author: Shireen Hunter Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315290111 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 625
Book Description
This richly detailed study traces the shared history of Russia and Islam in expanding compass - from the Tatar civilization within the Russian heartland, to the conquered territories of the Caucasus and Central Asia, to the larger geopolitical and security context of contemporary Russia on the civilizational divide. The study's distinctive analytical drive stresses political and geopolitical relationships over time and into the very complicated present. Rich with insight, the book is also an incomparable source of factual information about Russia's Muslim populations, religious institutions, political organizations, and ideological movements.
Author: Eliot Borenstein Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501716352 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
In this original and timely assessment of cultural expressions of paranoia in contemporary Russia, Eliot Borenstein samples popular fiction, movies, television shows, public political pronouncements, internet discussions, blogs, and religious tracts to build a sense of the deep historical and cultural roots of konspirologiia that run through Russian life. Plots against Russia reveals through dramatic and exciting storytelling that conspiracy and melodrama are entirely equal-opportunity in modern Russia, manifesting themselves among both pro-Putin elites and his political opposition. As Borenstein shows, this paranoid fantasy until recently characterized only the marginal and the irrelevant. Now, through its embodiment in pop culture, the expressions of a conspiratorial worldview are seen everywhere. Plots against Russia is an important contribution to the fields of Russian literary and cultural studies from one of its preeminent voices.
Author: Paul B. Richardson Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 9780824888879 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Debates over the remote and beguiling Southern Kuril Islands have revealed a kaleidoscope of divergent and contradictory ideas, convictions, and beliefs on what constitutes the “national” identity of post-Soviet Russia. Forming part of an archipelago stretching from Kamchatka to Hokkaido, administered by Russia but claimed by Japan, these disputed islands offer new perspectives on the ways in which territorial visions of the nation are refracted, inverted, and remade in a myriad of different ways. At the Edge of the Nation provides a unique account of how the Southern Kurils have shaped the parameters of the Russian state and framed debates on the politics of identity in the post-Soviet era. By shifting the debate beyond a proliferation of Eurocentric and Moscow-focused writings, Paul B. Richardson reveals broad alternatives and possibilities for Russian identity in Asia. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Russia was suffering the fragmentation of empire and a sudden decline in its international standing, these disputed islands became symbolic of a much larger debate on self-image, nationalism, national space, and Russia’s place in world politics. When viewed through the prism of the Southern Kurils, ideas associated with the “border,” “state,” and “nation” become destabilized, uncovering new insights into state-society relations in modern Russia. At the Edge of the Nation explores how disparate groups of political elites have attempted to use these islands to negotiate enduring tensions within Russia’s identity, and traces how the destiny of these isolated yet evocative islands became irrecoverably bound to the destiny of Russia itself.
Author: Laura Engelstein Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501721291 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
The revolution of 1905 challenged not only the social and political structures of imperial Russia but the sexual order as well. Throughout the decade that followed-in the salons of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde, on the pages of popular romances, in the staid assemblies of physicians, psychiatrists, and legal men—the talk everywhere was of sex. This eagerly awaited book, echoing the title of a pre-World War I bestseller, The Keys to Happiness, marks the first serious attempt to understand the intense public interest in sexuality as a vital dimension of late tsarist political culture. Drawing on a strong foundation of historical sources—from medical treatises and legal codes to anti-Semitic pamphlets, commercial fiction, newspaper advertisements, and serious literature—Laura Engelstein shows how Western ideas and attitudes toward sex and gender were transformed in the Russian context as imported views on prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and other themes took on distinctively Russian hues. Engelstein divides her study into two parts, the first focusing on the period from the Great Reforms to 1905 and on the two professional disciplines most central to the shaping of a modern sexual discourse in Russia: law and medicine. The second part describes the complicated sexual preoccupations that accompanied the mobilization leading up to 1905, the revolution itself, and the aftermath of continued social agitation and intensified intellectual doubt. In chapters of astonishing richness, the author follows the sexual theme through the twists of professional and civic debate and in the surprising links between high and low culture up to the eve of the First World War. Throughout, Engelstein uses her findings to rethink the conventional wisdom about the political and cultural history of modern Russia. She maps out new approaches to the history of sexuality, and shows, brilliantly, how the study of attitudes toward sex and gender can help us to grasp the most fundamental political issues in any society.
Author: Masha Gessen Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 159463453X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 530
Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Author: Gregory Carleton Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 067497848X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war. While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride. War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.
Author: Stephen Hutchings Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000538214 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 189
Book Description
This book presents a new perspective on how Russia projects itself to the world. Distancing itself from familiar, agency-driven International Relations accounts that focus on what ‘the Kremlin’ is up to and why, it argues for the need to pay attention to deeper, trans-state processes over which the Kremlin exerts much less control. Especially important in this context is mediatization, defined as the process by which contemporary social and political practices adopt a media form and follow media-driven logics. In particular, the book emphasizes the logic of the feedback loop or ‘recursion’, showing how it drives multiple Russian performances of national belonging and nation projection in the digital era. It applies this theory to recent issues, events, and scandals that have played out in international arenas ranging from television, through theatre, film, and performance art, to warfare.
Author: James H. Billington
Author: James H. Billington
Author: Mary Platt Parmele
Author: James H. Billington
Author: Shireen Hunter
Author: Eliot Borenstein
Author: Paul B. Richardson
Author: Laura Engelstein
Author: Masha Gessen
Author: Gregory Carleton
Author: Stephen Hutchings