front cover of The Awakening of the Soviet Union
The Awakening of the Soviet Union
Enlarged Edition
Geoffrey Hosking
Harvard University Press, 1991
Geoffrey Hosking, one of the world’s preeminent scholars of Russian history, provides a unique perspective on the rapid changes the country experienced in the late 1980s. Other books have focused on the political changes that took place under Gorbachev; Hosking’s lively analysis illuminates the social, cultural, and historical developments that created the need—and openness—for sweeping political and economic change.
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Dehexing Sex
Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost
Helena Goscilo
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union revolutionized Russian society. What effects, however, did they have on the status, role, and image of women in Russian culture? Examining the past turbulent decade of transition to "democracy" and a market economy, Dehexing Sex traces the ways in which Russia's concept of womanhood both changed and remained the same, taking into account dominant ideologies and social philosophies, sociopolitical organizations, women's writings, literary criticism, film, and popular cultural forms such as pornography.
The lively, engaging chapters of this book examine texts by contemporary women writers in the context of the political, social, economic, biological, psychological, and aesthetic transformations that helped define them. Goscilo reveals that the Russian cultural revolution has reshaped the female image in varied and often contradictory ways. While increased interaction with the West fostered gender awareness, it also introduced imported Western sexist practices--especially the exploitation of female bodies--formerly proscribed by a puritanical censorship. Popular magazines, newspapers, and television propagated the image of woman as mother, ornament, and sexual object, even as women's fiction conceived of womanhood in complex psychological terms that undermined the gender stereotypes which had ruled Soviet thinking for more than 70 years.
With the aid of feminist and cultural theory, Dehexing Sex investigates the overt and internalized misogyny that combined with the genuinely liberalizing forces unleashed by Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika. It exposes Russia's repressive romance with womanhood as a metaphor for nationhood and explores Russian women's ironic recasting of national mythologies.
"Impressive . . . an important contribution to Russian studies and to women's studies. The author is an outstanding scholar, an energetic and original thinker, and her writing sparkles with imagination and wit." --Stephanie Sandler, Amherst College
Helena Goscilo is Associate Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh.
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Eternal Russia
Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy
Jonathan Steele
Harvard University Press, 1994

Here is an eyewitness account of the six years of turbulent change from the Soviet Union to Russia. Jonathan Steele’s three decades as a journalist covering that eternal nation have given him a keen and deeply informed perspective on the democratic revolution and the issues still threatening the new nation. What does the future hold for Russian democracy under Yeltsin? Can market reform work? Under all the news and confusion, how much has the country really changed?

Eternal Russia draws on Steele’s interviews with key figures, including Gorbachev and the former Communist Party Politburo, as well as senior members of the Yeltsin inner circle.

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The Firebird
The Elusive Fate of Russian Democracy
Andrei Kozyrev
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020

Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin from August 1991 to January 1996. During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, he was present when tanks moved in to seize the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to address the crowd assembled. He then departed to Paris to muster international support and, if needed, to form a Russian government-in-exile. He participated in the negotiations at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in Belazheva, Belarus where the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to secede from the Soviet Union and form a Commonwealth of Independent States. Kozyrev’s pro-Western orientation made him an increasingly unpopular figure in Russia as Russia’s spiraling economy and the emergence of ultra-wealthy oligarchs soured ordinary Russians on Western ideas of democracy and market capitalism.

The Firebird takes the reader into the corridors of power to provide a startling eyewitness account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the struggle to create a democratic Russia in its place, and how the promise of a better future led to the tragic outcome that changed our world forever.
 

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A Foreign Policy in Transition
Moscow’s Retreat from Central America and the Carribbean, 1985–1992
Jan S. Adams
Duke University Press, 1992
During his years of leadership in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated revolutionary changes in that country's foreign and domestic policies. A Foreign Policy in Transition charts the changing Soviet policies toward Central America and the Caribbean during the Gorbachev years, examines the effects of these policies on individual countries, and looks to the role that Russia and the other Soviet-successor states will play in this region in the 1990s.
Jan S. Adams analyzes the factors shaping Gorbachev's foreign policy in Central America by surveying Soviet political views old and new, by describing Gorbachev's bold restructuring of the Soviet foreign policy establishment, and by assessing the implications of his policy of perestroika. A series of country studies demonstrates how changes in Soviet policies and domestic and economic circumstances contributed to significant shifts in the internal conditions and external relations of the Central American and Caribbean nations. Adams discusses in detail such topics as the reduction of Soviet military and economic aid to the region and pressures exerted by Moscow on client states to effect the settlement of regional conflicts by political rather than military means.
The author concludes by speculating about which trends in foreign policy by Russia and other Soviet-successor states toward Central America and the Caribbean may persist in the post-Soviet period, discussing as the implications of these changes for future U.S. policy in the region.
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From Reform to Revolution
The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union
Minxin Pei
Harvard University Press, 1994
The demise of communism in the former Soviet Union and the massive political and economic changes in China are the stunning transformations of our century. Two central questions are emerging: Why did different communist systems experience different patterns of transition? Why did partial reforms in the Soviet Union and China turn into revolutions?
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From Washington to Moscow
US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR
Louis Sell
Duke University Press, 2016
When the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks accords in 1972 it was generally seen as the point at which the USSR achieved parity with the United States. Less than twenty years later the Soviet Union had collapsed, confounding experts who never expected it to happen during their lifetimes. In From Washington to Moscow veteran US Foreign Service officer Louis Sell traces the history of US–Soviet relations between 1972 and 1991 and explains why the Cold War came to an abrupt end. Drawing heavily on archival sources and memoirs—many in Russian—as well as his own experiences, Sell vividly describes events from the perspectives of American and Soviet participants. He attributes the USSR's fall not to one specific cause but to a combination of the Soviet system's inherent weaknesses, mistakes by Mikhail Gorbachev, and challenges by Ronald Reagan and other US leaders. He shows how the USSR's rapid and humiliating collapse and the inability of the West and Russia to find a way to cooperate respectfully and collegially helped set the foundation for Vladimir Putin’s rise.
 
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How the Soviet Union Disappeared
An Essay on the Causes of Dissolution
Wisla Suraska
Duke University Press, 1998
Many theories have been offered to explain the disintegration of the Soviet Union, yet none sufficiently explain the speed and profundity of the empire’s collapse. In this powerful polemic, Wisla Suraska disputes popular interpretations of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and explains how theories, such as totalitarian theory, have failed to examine the exigencies of arbitrary government. At the center of Suraska’s own theories on the Soviet collapse is her claim that it came about not simply because it was an economically declining country that contained too many nationalities but because it was despotic and that despotism is unworkable in modern societies.
Using numerous secondary sources, recently published memoir literature, and new archival research, Suraska’s multidimensional study delves into the many factors involved in the dissolution of the Soviet empire—the role of Gorbachev and his contest with Yeltsin, the weakness of the Soviet state, and the poverty of ideas that informed perestroika. She also examines the complex relationship between the Communist Party, the KGB, and the military; the way Gorbachev dealt with the German question; and the rise of post-Marxist thought in the Soviet Union. Whether discussing how insufficient control over coercive forces or the growing strength of provincial barons impacted the collapse, Suraska furthers her argument that the explosion of nationalisms in the Soviet Union was as much activated by the breakdown of central structures as it actually contributed to the final demolition of the regime. In the end, How the Soviet Union Disappeared reveals Gorbachev’s perestroika as having been nothing short of a radical attempt to rebuild power that the Soviet center had lost in the post-Stalinist period.
In its questioning of the assumptions of most previous scholarship and discourse on the Soviet Union, this book will be of interest to Sovietologists, political scientists, and students of communism and nationalism.
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The KGB Campaign against Corruption in Moscow, 1982–1987
Luc Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
The 1980s brought a whirlwind of change to Communist Party politics and the Soviet Republic. By mid-decade, Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost had opened the door to democratic reform. Later, mounting public unrest over the failed economy and calls for independence among many republics ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Often overlooked in these events, yet monumental to breaking the Communist Party’s institutional stranglehold, were the KGB anti-corruption campaigns of 1982–1987.

Inthis original study,Luc Duhamel examines the KGB at its pinnacle of power. The appointment of former KGB director Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1982 marked the height of KGB influence. For the first time since Stalin, Beria, and the NKVD, there was now an unquestioned authority to pursue violators of Soviet law, including members of the Communist Party. Duhamel focuses on the KGB’s investigation into Moscow’s two largest trade organizations: the Chief Administration of Trade and the Administration of the Moscow Fruit and Vegetable Office. Like many of their Soviet counterparts, these state-controlled institutions were built on a foundation of bribery and favoritism among Communist Party members, workers, and their bosses. This book analyzes the multifarious networks of influence peddling, appointments, and clientelism that pervaded these trade organizations and maintained their ties to party officials.

Through firsthand research into the archives of the Andropov-era KGB and the prosecutor general’s office, Duhamel uncovers the indictment of thousands of trade organization employees, the reprimand of Communist Party members, and the radical change in political ideology manifested by these proceedings. He further reveals that despite aggressive prosecutions, the KGB’s power would soon wither, as the agency came under intense scrutiny because of its violent methods and the ghosts of the NKVD. The reinstatement of Moscow city government control over the trade organizations, the death of Andropov, and the rising tide of democratic reform would effectively end the reign of the KGB and its anticorruption campaigns.
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A Long Goodbye
The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
Artemy M. Kalinovsky
Harvard University Press, 2011

The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how will it withdraw without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy Kalinovsky’s history of the USSR’s nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering perspective on exit options in the region.

What makes Kalinovsky’s intense account both timely and important is its focus not on motives for initiating the conflict but on the factors that prevented the Soviet leadership from ending a demoralizing war. Why did the USSR linger for so long, given that key elites recognized the blunder of the mission shortly after the initial deployment?

Newly available archival material, supplemented by interviews with major actors, allows Kalinovsky to reconstruct the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal would diminish the USSR’s status as leader of the Third World is palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of Afghan factions and the Soviet Union’s superpower rival in the West. This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for much too long.

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Melting the Ice Curtain
The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier
David Ramseur
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.

Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.
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Post-Communism
An Introduction
Leslie Holmes
Duke University Press, 1997

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Reinventing Russia
Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991
Yitzhak M. Brudny
Harvard University Press, 1998

What caused the emergence of nationalist movements in many post-communist states? What role did communist regimes play in fostering these movements? Why have some been more successful than others? To address these questions, Yitzhak Brudny traces the Russian nationalist movement from its origins within the Russian intellectual elite of the 1950s to its institutionalization in electoral alliances, parliamentary factions, and political movements of the early 1990s.

Brudny argues that the rise of the Russian nationalist movement was a combined result of the reinvention of Russian national identity by a group of intellectuals, and the Communist Party's active support of this reinvention in order to gain greater political legitimacy. The author meticulously reconstructs the development of the Russian nationalist thought from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, as well as the nature of the Communist Party response to Russian nationalist ideas. Through analysis of major Russian literary, political, and historical writings, the recently-published memoirs of the Russian nationalist intellectuals and Communist Party officials, and documents discovered in the Communist Party archives, Brudny sheds new light on social, intellectual, and political origins of Russian nationalism, and emphasizes the importance of ideas in explaining the fate of the Russian nationalist movement during late communist and early post-communist periods.

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Revolutionary Passage
From Soviet To Post-Soviet Russia
Marc Garcelon
Temple University Press, 2005
Revolutionary Passage is a cultural, social, and political history of Russia during its critical period of transformation at the end of the twentieth century. Marc Garcelon traces the history of perestroika and the rise of Vladimir Putin, arguing that the pressure Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms put on the Soviet system gave birth to movements for democratic change. He also shows that the very political arrangements that prompted the fall of Communism also killed hopes for subsequent reform. At the turning point of this political revolution stood Democratic Russia, or DemRossiia, the principal organization of the Russian democratic movement that helped to dismantle the Soviet system and force the Soviet leadership to change course. However, as post-Soviet Russia committed itself to globalization and U.S.-style economic reforms, the country directed itself away from the Democratic reforms called for by organizations like DemRossiia, and such groups collapsed. Revolutionary Passage provides a close examination of the DemRossiia. Garcelon deftly illuminates the rise and decline of this organization, and how the processes of revolutionary change impacted both Russia and the world.
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Soviet-American Relations After the Cold War
Robert Jervis and Seweryn Bialer, eds.
Duke University Press, 1991
This important collection of essays explores the terrain of possible Soviet-American relations in the next decade. Starting from the premise that glasnost and perestroika will not be reversed, this expert group of contributors provides a wide-ranging and far-reaching analysis of Soviet-U.S. relations crucial to any current discussion of the topic.
Moving beyond the boundaries of traditional studies of international relations, the contributors here focus on such topics as public opinion and the relationship of domestic policy to foreign policy. Other areas of consideration include the Soviet-U.S. relationship and the Third World and East Asia, the role of the United Nations in Soviet and American policy in the 1990s, international environmental protection, and the Soviet opening to nonprovocative defense. A final section concludes with policy choices for the future regarding security strategies and prospects for peace.

Contributors. Seweryn Bialer, Robert Dallek, Charles Gati, Toby Trister Gati, Colin S. Gray, Ole R. Holsti, Robert Jervis, Alexander J. Motyl, John Mueller, Eric A. Nordlinger, George H. Quester, Harold H. Sanders, Glenn E. Schweitzer, Jack Snyder, Donald S. Zagoria, William Zimmerman

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Stealing the State
Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions
Steven L. Solnick
Harvard University Press, 1998

What led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union? Steven Solnick argues, contrary to most current literature, that the Soviet system did not fall victim to stalemate at the top or to a revolution from below, but rather to opportunism from within. In three case studies--on the Communist Youth League, the system of job assignments for university graduates, and military conscription--Solnick makes use of rich archival sources and interviews to tell the story from a new perspective, and to employ and test Western theories of the firm in the Soviet environment. He finds that even before Gorbachev, mechanisms for controlling bureaucrats in Soviet organizations were weak, allowing these individuals great latitude in their actions. Once reforms began, they translated this latitude into open insubordination by seizing the very organizational assets they were supposed to be managing. Thus, the Soviet system, Solnick argues, suffered the organizational equivalent of a colossal bank run. When the servants of the state stopped obeying orders from above, the state's fate was sealed.

By incorporating economic theories of institutions into a political theory of Soviet breakdown and collapse, Stealing the State offers a powerful and dynamic account of the most important international political event of the later twentieth century.

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The Thaw Generation
Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era
Ludmilla Alexeyeva
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
The Thaw Generation offers an insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement--the intellectuals who, during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, dared to challenge an oppressive system and demand the rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution.  Fired from their jobs, hunted by the KGB, “tried,” and imprisoned, Alexeyeva and other activists including Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, Yuli Daniel, and Andrei Sinyavsky, through their dedication and their personal and professional sacrifices, focused international attention on the issue of human rights in the USSR.
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The USSR and Iraq
The Soviet Quest for Influence
Oles M. Smolansky, with Bettie M. Smolansky
Duke University Press, 1991
In The USSR and Iraq, the first major study of Soviet-Iraqi relations, Oles M. Smolansky examines the history of the relationship between these two countries during the past twenty years and attempts to dispel the misconception that the Soviet Union has enjoyed undue influence over Iraq.
Drawing on ten years of research in Western, Arab, and Soviet sources, Smolansky analyzes the complex issues at the center of Soviet-Iraqi relations from 1968 through 1988, including the nationalization of the oil industry, the Kurdish question, the Iraqi Communist Party, the affairs of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and, ultimately, the war between Iraq and Iran.
Smolansky concludes that Iraq has never been under the dominant influence of Moscow, nor has it even been a loyal Soviet ally. In fact, Iraq has managed to reap major benefits from the relationship without losing its autonomy or sacrificing its major interests. The author discusses the Soviet Union and Iraq within the larger framework of the nature of influence relationships between great and small powers.
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Zhivago's Children
The Last Russian Intelligentsia
Vladislav Zubok
Harvard University Press, 2009

Among the least-chronicled aspects of post–World War II European intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. Young Soviet veterans had returned from the heroic struggle to defeat Hitler only to confront the repression of Stalinist society. The world of the intelligentsia exerted an attraction for them, as it did for many recent university graduates. In its moral fervor and its rejection of authoritarianism, this new generation of intellectuals resembled the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia that had been crushed by revolutionary terror and Stalinist purges. The last representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, heartened by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956, took their inspiration from the visionary aims of their nineteenth-century predecessors and from the revolutionary aspirations of 1917. In pursuing the dream of a civil, democratic socialist society, such idealists contributed to the political disintegration of the communist regime.

Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. The highly educated elite—those who became artists, poets, writers, historians, scientists, and teachers—played a unique role in galvanizing their country to strive toward a greater freedom. Like their contemporaries in the United States, France, and Germany, members of the Russian intelligentsia had a profound effect during the 1960s, in sounding a call for reform, equality, and human rights that echoed beyond their time and place.

Zhivago’s children, the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak’s noble doctor, were the last of their kind—an intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural, and moral mission.

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