In this widely praised book, Vladislav Zubok argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the ...interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok offers the first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side. A Failed Empire provides a history quite different from those written by the Western victors. In a new preface for this edition, the author adds to our understanding of today's events in Russia, including who the new players are and how their policies will affect the state of the world in the twenty-first century.
The phrase "Cold War" was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: "We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly ...stable as the slave empires of antiquity." The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors." But as a leading historian of Soviet foreign policy, Jonathan Haslam, makes clear in this groundbreaking book, the epoch was anything but stable, with constant wars, near-wars, and political upheavals on both sides.
Whereas the Western perspective on the Cold War has been well documented by journalists and historians, the Soviet side has remained for the most part shrouded in secrecy-until now. Drawing on a vast range of recently released archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe,Russia
's Cold Waroffers a thorough and fascinating analysis of East-West relations from 1917 to 1989.
Far more than merely a straightforward history of the Cold War, this book presents the first account of politics and decision making at the highest levels of Soviet power: how Soviet leaders saw political and military events, what they were trying to accomplish, their miscalculations, and the ways they took advantage of Western ignorance.Russia's Cold Warfills a significant gap in our understanding of the most important geopolitical rivalry of the twentieth century.
The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands investigates the Soviet response to nationalist insurgencies that occurred between 1944 and 1953 in the regions the Soviet Union annexed after ...the Nazi-Soviet pact: Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Based on new archival data, Alexander Statiev presents the first comprehensive study of Soviet counterinsurgency that ties together the security tools and populist policies intended to attract the local populations. The book traces the origins of the Soviet pacification doctrine and then presents a comparative analysis of the rural societies in Eastern Poland and the Baltic States on the eve of the Soviet invasion. This analysis is followed by a description of the anti-communist resistance movements. Subsequently, the author shows how ideology affected the Soviet pacification doctrine and examines the major means to enforce the doctrine: agrarian reforms, deportations, amnesties, informant networks, covert operations, and local militias.
"A reconstruction of Cold War-era cultural networks between the Second and Third Worlds that offers a compelling genealogy of contemporary postcolonial studies. Would there have been a Third World ...without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism addresses this historical blind spot by recounting the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema: the Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958-1991) and the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968-1988). The inclusion of writers and filmmakers from the Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia and extensive Soviet support aligned these organizations with Soviet internationalism. While these cultural alliances between the Second and the Third World never achieved their stated aim--the literary and cinematic independence of the literatures and cinemas of these societies from the West--they did forge what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o called "the links that bind us," along which now-canonical postcolonial authors, texts, and films could circulate across the non-Western world until the end of the Cold War. In the process of this historical reconstruction, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism inverts the traditional relationship between Soviet and postcolonial studies: rather than studying the (post-) Soviet experience through the lens of postcolonial theory, it documents the multiple ways in which that theory and its attendant literary and cinematic production have been shaped by the Soviet experience."--
One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that,
for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police
and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and
...attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government's
policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward
religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this,
especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both
the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and
the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records
concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the
Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts
provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the
Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the
topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of
John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron
Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian
Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church
in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious
underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally
the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous
events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This valuable
primary source collection also contains a historical introduction
written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at
the University of Scranton.
