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The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict

Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 9780674825482

This is the first full-length study of relations among the communist states. The study explores the implications of the status of Yugoslavia and China, the significance of the Hungarian revolution and the position of Poland in the Soviet bloc, and clarifies the Khrushchev-Gomulka clash of 1956 and the complex role of Tito. Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasizes the role of ideology and power in the relations among the communist states, contrasting bloc relations and the unifying role of Soviet power under Stalin with the present situation. He suggests that conflicts of interest among the ruling elites will result either in ideological disputes or in weakening the central core of the ideology, leading to a gradual decline of unity among the Communist states. The author, while on leave from his post as Professor and Director of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University, and serving on the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Council, has revised and updated his important study and added three new chapters on more recent developments. He gives particular attention to the Sino-Soviet dispute.

Soviet Bloc

Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

Author: William Jay Risch

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-12-17

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0739178237

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Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Hungary's Cold War

Author: Csaba Békés

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1469667495

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In this magisterial and pathbreaking work, Csaba Bekes shares decades of his research to provide a sweeping examination of Hungary's international relations with both the Soviet Bloc and the West from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unlike many studies of the global Cold War that focus on East-West relationships—often from the vantage point of the West—Bekes grounds his work in the East, drawing on little-used, non-English sources. As such, he offers a new and sweeping Cold War narrative using Hungary as a case study, demonstrating that the East-Central European states have played a much more important role in shaping both the Soviet bloc's overall policy and the East-West relationship than previously assumed. Similarly, he shows how the relationship between Moscow and its allies, as well as among the bloc countries, was much more complex than it appeared to most observers in the East and the West alike.

The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe

Author: Mark Kramer

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-03-22

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 179363193X

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The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe examines how the neutral European countries and the Soviet Union interacted after World War II. Amid the Cold War division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs, several long-time neutral countries abandoned neutrality and joined NATO. Other countries remained neutral but were still perceived as a threat to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Based on extensive archival research, this volume offers state-of-the-art essays about relations between Europe’s neutral states and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and how these relations were perceived by other powers.

Failed Illusions

Author: Charles Gati

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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A riveting new look at a key event of the Cold War, Failed Illusions fundamentally modifies our picture of what happened during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Now, fifty years later, Charles Gati challenges the simplicity of this David and Goliath story in his new history of the revolt.

Communist Parties Revisited

Author: Rüdiger Bergien

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2018-01-31

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1785337777

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The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries’ informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.

Eastern Blocks

Author: Zupagrafika

Publisher: Brutalist Architecture

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788395057434

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Sleeping districts? of Moscow, Plattenbauten of East Berlin, modernist estates of Warsaw, Kyiv's Brezhnevki: although these are home to the vast majority of city dwellers, post-war suburbs of central and eastern Europe have been invisible for decades.00'Eastern Blocks' by Zupagrafika is a photographic journey through the cityscapes the former Eastern Bloc, inviting readers to explore the districts and peripheries that became a playground for mass housing development after WW2, including objects like Soviet?flying saucers?, houses?on chicken legs? or hammer-shaped tower blocks.00Showcasing modernist and brutalist architecture scattered around the cities of Moscow, (East) Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Kyiv and Saint Petersburg, the book contains over 100 photographs taken by Zupagrafika throughout the last decade as a reference archive for their illustrated kits and books, with special contributions by local photographers. Divided into 6 chapters, 'Eastern Blocks' includes a foreword by writer and journalist Christopher Beanland, orientative maps, index of architects and informative texts on the featured cities and constructions.

The Sino-Soviet Alliance

Author: Austin Jersild

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-02-03

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1469611600

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In 1950 the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance to foster cultural and technological cooperation between the Soviet bloc and the PRC. While this treaty was intended as a break with the colonial past, Austin Jersild argues that the alliance ultimately failed because the enduring problem of Russian imperialism led to Chinese frustration with the Soviets. Jersild zeros in on the ground-level experiences of the socialist bloc advisers in China, who were involved in everything from the development of university curricula, the exploration for oil, and railway construction to piano lessons. Their goal was to reproduce a Chinese administrative elite in their own image that could serve as a valuable ally in the Soviet bloc's struggle against the United States. Interestingly, the USSR's allies in Central Europe were as frustrated by the "great power chauvinism" of the Soviet Union as was China. By exposing this aspect of the story, Jersild shows how the alliance, and finally the split, had a true international dimension.

Soviet Soft Power in Poland

Author: Patryk Babiracki

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1469620901

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Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.