Russia Social Science

After going through three elderly leaders in three years, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as the new General Secretary of the Soviet Union at the relatively youg age of 54 in March 1985. Gorbachev hoped to build the Soviet economy to relieve the persistent shortages of consumer goods it faced, which were caused by enormous military spending of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev tried to introduce some economic reforms, but they were blocked by communist hardliners. Gorbachev then came to the belief that the Soviet economy could not improved without political reform as well.

Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world's attention during the Cold War. Their stories were given sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. Upon reaching the West, they were entitled to special benefits, including financial assistance and permanent residency. In contrast to other migrants, defectors were pursued by the states they left even as they were eagerly sought by the United States and its allies. Defectors follows their treacherous journeys and looks at how their unauthorized flight via land, sea, and air gave shape to a globalized world.

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged. Mark Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nicolai Lilin ricostruisce la vita sorprendente e la folgorante ascesa politica di Vladimir Putin, da una misera casa popolare nel quartiere criminale di Leningrado alla poltrona presidenziale del Cremlino. Con il suo tipico stile potente che ti cattura e non ti lascia andare fino alla fine, Lilin indaga non solo la storia ma anche l'animo di Putin. Come in un romanzo ne racconta le origini, ne descrive le trasformazioni, ne ricorda i talenti che lo hanno portato a diventare il personaggio che conosciamo.

Zaskočilo vás ruské válečné tažení na Ukrajinu? Chcete uvést do kontextu, ale nemáte rádi sáhodlouhá vědecká pojednání? Pak je pro vás kniha Petra Holého tím pravým úvodem do aktuálního problému. Autor si v ní nebere servítky a svižně a s humorem rozebírá, proč je Putin v Rusku tak oblíbený, v čem selhal Západ, jak se liší přístupy světových velmocí i jaká jsou možná východiska tohoto konfliktu. „Rusko by hrozně chtělo překreslovat s ostatními velmocemi mapu Evropy, ale má zásadní problém.

Spätestens seit dem Beginn von Wladimir Putins zunehmend aggressivem Vernichtungskrieg gegen die Ukraine im Februar 2022 ist klar: Eine friedliche Weltordnung MIT Putin ist kaum denkbar. Doch wie kann ein totalitäres Regime beendet werden? Durch wen? Eher von innen oder von außen? Gäbe es überhaupt eine Chance auf einen einigermaßen friedlichen Machtwechsel? Und wer käme dann in Russland an die Macht – und wie würde diese aussehen? Diese drängenden Fragen werden nicht nur von Politikern und Entscheidungsträgern gestellt, sondern im Grunde von allen freiheitsliebenden Menschen in Russland und auf der ganzen Welt.

Fascinující popis Ruska a jeho společnosti od odborníka z nejpovolanějších – českého novináře, překladatele a komentátora ruského původu, Alexandra Mitrofanova. Autor nejen trefně popisuje současný stav země rozkládající se na dvou světadílech, který směřuje k totalitnímu státu, ale hledá odpovědi na otázky, proč se tak děje, kde je počátek toho všeho a zda tomu lze zabránit.

Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of WWII, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. But what has the Iron Curtain left in its wake? Timothy Phillips travels its full 3,000-mile route to craft this new people's history of a defining twentieth-century conflict. Here, in the borderlands where a powerful clash of civilizations took form in concrete and barbed wire, he uncovers the remarkable stories of everyday people forever imprinted by life in the Curtain's shadow.

Lo storico e giornalista Aldo Giannuli torna sulla fondazione del sistema di potere sovietico nel suo momento cruciale: il passaggio di testimone tra Lenin e Stalin. Se è possibile rintracciare in Lenin alcune premesse per il successivo sviluppo storico che porterà all’affermazione dello stalinismo, secondo l’autore è errato sostenere una continuità diretta tra le posizioni politiche dei due leader. Leninismo e stalinismo sono stati dunque fenomeni tra loro ben distinti, separati da una profonda rottura politica e da visioni spesso contrastanti.

The Cold War was a crucial conflict in American history. At stake was whether the world would be dominated by the forces of totalitarianism led by the Soviet Union, or inspired by the principles of economic and political freedom embodied in the United States. The Cold War established America as the leader of the free world and a global superpower. It shaped US military strategy, economic policy, and domestic politics for nearly 50 years.

Russia's stealth invasion of Ukraine and its assault on the US elections in 2016 forced a reluctant West to grapple with the effects of hybrid war. While most citizens in the West are new to the problems of election hacking, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, influence operations by foreign security services, and frozen conflicts, citizens of the frontline states between Russia and the European Union have been dealing with these issues for years. The Lands in Between contends that these "lands in between" hold powerful lessons for Western countries.

The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda 'proved' it was 'the will of the people', but few know that the brutal rebellion, which killed millions and raised Lenin's numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power, was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered through a Swedish bank and a shady arms dealer who had made a fortune in the Balkan wars.

If we rely on logic of history of political and legal teachings, then this implies that this history began in Rus' at the time when pagans were huddled into a river. This fact in itself is of little interest. What is of interest is the following: what is the essence of this fact?

Das ist neu in Russland: Hunderttausende gehen gegen die gefälschten Wahlen auf die Straße. Ihr Protest richtet sich gegen den Mann, der hinter der Fassade der Demokratie das alleinige Sagen hat: Wladimir Putin. Masha Gessen entlarvt den unscheinbaren Mann ohne Gesicht als das, was er wirklich ist: ein skrupelloser Machthaber, umgeben von Korruption und Terror.

The failure of Gorbachev's Asian initiatives has had dramatic consequences, by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was in full retreat from Asia, and since the Soviet collapse, Russia has been left on the sidelines of the "Pacific century." In this exceptionally wide-ranging and deeply researched audiobook, Sergey Radchenko offers an illuminating account of the end of the Cold War in the East, tracing the death of Soviet ambitions in Asia.

From the capture of Sidney Reilly, the "Ace of Spies", by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1925, to the deportation from the USA of Anna Chapman, the "Redhead under the Bed", in 2010, Kremlin and Western spymasters have battled for supremacy for nearly a century. In Deception Edward Lucas uncovers the real story of Chapman and her colleagues in Britain and America, unveiling their clandestine missions and the spy-hunt that led to their downfall. It reveals unknown triumphs and disasters of Western intelligence in the Cold War,

April of 1958 - the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit. This is the story of what unfolded that spring - for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome.

Susan Butler's brilliantly listenable audiobook firmly places FDR where he belongs, as the American president engaged most directly in diplomacy and strategy, who not only had an ambitious plan for the postwar world but had the strength, ambition, and personal charm to overcome Churchill's reluctance and Stalin's suspicion to bring about what was, in effect, an American peace and to avoid the disastrous consequences that followed the botched peace of Versailles in 1919.

It was known as 'the vast prison without a roof'. From the beginning of the 19th century until the Russian Revolution, the tsars exiled more than one million prisoners and their families beyond the Ural Mountains to Siberia. Daniel Beer illuminates both the brutal realities of this inhuman system and the tragic and inspiring fates of those who endured it.

Drawing on new interviews and previously unavailable documents, James Mann offers a fresh and compelling narrative - a new history assessing what Ronald Reagan did and did not do to help bring America's four-decade conflict with the Soviet Union to a close. As he did so masterfully in Rise of the Vulcans, Mann sheds new light on the hidden aspects of American foreign policy.