Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russiaoffers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike ...developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Gábor T. Rittersporn shows, the "little tactics" people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system's development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras.For Rittersporn, citizens' conscious and unreflected actions at all levels of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual's relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and the culture it engendered. Through a meticulous reading of primary documents and materials uncovered in numerous archives located in Russia and Germany, Rittersporn identifies three related responses-anguish, anger, and folkways-to the pressures people in all walks of life encountered, and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated.Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system's persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror.He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior.In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life's pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices.As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime's ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee.
Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World ...War II, Cold War generation. It is based on interviews with sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in Saratov. Illuminating a critical generation of people who had remained largely faceless up until now, the book reveals what it meant to "live Soviet" during the twilight of the Soviet empire.
Using the Indonesian annexation of East Timor in 1975 and Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia between 1978 and 1989 as case studies, this article examines how ASEAN understood the principles of ...non-intervention and non-interference as juxtaposed against the right to self-determination in the 1970s. As ASEAN's first "crises" in its formative years, they illustrate how the bloc's initial norm-making processes evolved as individual member states attempted to make their case for or against intervention. The article contends that ASEAN's principles of non-intervention and non-interference are non-static and adaptive. It also suggests that while ASEAN's normative framework may have been sufficiently accommodative of its members' different standards and approaches towards protecting sovereignty, the right to self-determination and independence in the past, it is questionable whether the adherence to non-interference would be sufficient for the grouping to address the present crisis in Myanmar and future challenges.
Do rebel group violations of international humanitarian law during civil war—in particular, attacks on noncombatant civilians—affect conflict outcomes? I argue that in the post-Cold War era, rebel ...groups that do not target civilians have used the framework of international humanitarian law to appeal for diplomatic support from Western governments and intergovernmental organizations. However, rebel group appeals for international diplomatic support are most likely to be effective when the rebel group can contrast its own restraint toward civilians with the government's abuses. Rebel groups that do not target civilians in the face of government abuses, therefore, are likely to be able to translate increased international diplomatic support into more favorable conflict outcomes. Using original cross-national data on rebel group violence against civilians in all civil wars from 1989 to 2010, I show that rebel groups that exercise restraint toward civilians in the face of government violence are more likely to secure favorable conflict outcomes. I also probe the causal mechanism linking rebel group behavior to conflict outcomes, showing that when a rebel group exercises restraint toward civilians and the government commits atrocities, Western governments and intergovernmental organizations are more likely to take coercive diplomatic action against the government. The evidence shows that rebel groups can translate this increased diplomatic support into favorable political outcomes.
After a devastating world war, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clear that the United States and the Soviet Union had to establish a cooperative order if the planet ...was to escape an atomic World War III.
In this provocative study, Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko show how the atomic bomb pushed the United States and the Soviet Union not toward cooperation but toward deep bipolar confrontation. Joseph Stalin, sure that the Americans meant to deploy their new weapon against Russia and defeat socialism, would stop at nothing to build his own bomb. Harry Truman, initially willing to consider cooperation, discovered that its pursuit would mean political suicide, especially when news of Soviet atomic spies reached the public. Both superpowers, moreover, discerned a new reality of the atomic age: now, cooperation must be total. The dangers posed by the bomb meant that intermediate measures of international cooperation would protect no one. Yet no two nations in history were less prepared to pursue total cooperation than were the United States and the Soviet Union. The logic of the bomb pointed them toward immediate Cold War.
End of Cold War Illusions Magdoff, Harry; Sweezy, Paul M.
Monthly review (New York. 1949),
11/2022, Letnik:
74, Številka:
6
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Recenzirano
In this reprint of the February 1994 "Notes from the Editors," former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy ask: "The United States could not have won a more decisive victory in the Cold War. ...Why, then, does it continue to act as though the Cold War is still on?"
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