Soviet foreign policymaking and the Afghanistan war: from ‘second Mongolia’ to ‘bleeding wound’

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRED HALLIDAY
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Afghanistan War ◽  
The West ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, lasting from 1979 to 1989, was one of the major chapters in the Cold War. Analysis of how Soviet policy was made has, hitherto, focused on the decision to intervene, in December 1979. Equally important, however, as an episode in the final stages of the Cold War, and as an example of Soviet policy formulation, was the decision to withdraw. Basing itself on declassified Soviet documents, and on a range of interviews with former Soviet and Afghan officials, this article charts the protracted history of the Soviet decision and sets it in context: as with the decision to invade, the withdrawal reflected assessment of multiple dimensions of policymaking, not only the interests and calculation of Soviet leaders, but also relations within the Afghan communist leadership on the one hand, and strategic negotiation with the West on the other.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

Limonov: vita e avventure di un teppista lirico

2012 ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Roberto Valle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Event ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Eduard Limonov, a maudit writer, idol of the Soviet and post-Soviet underground, is the Limonov's eponymous hero of Emmanuel Carrčre, a book that in France has been a literary and political event; a kind of anatomy of the innards of the thug that narrates the novelistic and dangerous life of a voyou, a rogue. From the adventurous life of Limonov you can take the narration of the not official but eccentric and infamous history of the Russia and the West by the Cold War to the rise of Putin. Limonov, National-Bolshevik thug, has joined the Other Russia, an heteroclite coalition, and considers Putin his sworn enemy to be destroyed by a revolution. But Limonov will forfeit the seizure of power and retire to Samarkand or like Rudin, superfluous man of Turgenev's novel, will be forced to die for a cause not his, for the hated democracy.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Wallace Stegner's Arabian Discovery: Imperial Blind Spots in a Continental Vision

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-438
Author(s):  
ROBERT VITALIS
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Oil Company ◽  
Blind Spots

In 1956 Wallace Stegner wrote a history of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), but it was only published fifteen years later——in Beirut. The book complicates the view of Stegner as a destroyer of American western myths and a forerunner of the social and environmental turn in western history. Stegner shared with those who bought his services some problematic ideas about American identity and history in the context of the Cold War. His forgotten history of oil exploration in Saudi Arabia reveals the blind spots in his ““continental vision,”” an inability or unwillingness to see the moment as part of the long, unbroken past of the U.S. West. Stegner's journey, from chronicler of the despoiling of the West by eastern oil and copper barons to defender of cultural diversity and the collective commons, stopped, as it has for many other Americanists, at the water's edge.

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 537-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Kornbluh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Military Law ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The New Deal

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

scholarly journals International Slavic Studies: Concepts, History and Evolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenfei Liu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The West ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Formal Establishment ◽  
Slavic Studies

Abstract This paper departs from the definition of Slavistics and reviews the history of international Slavic studies, from its prehistory to its formal establishment as an independent discipline in the mid-18th century, and from the Pan-Slavic movement in the mid-19th century to the confrontation of Slavistics between the East and the West in the mid-20th century during the Cold War. The paper highlights the status quo of international Slavic studies and envisions the future development of Slavic studies in China.

scholarly journals Eco-utopia or eco-catastrophe? Re-imagining California as an ecological utopia

Elem Sci Anth ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronnie D. Lipschutz
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nuclear Threat ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Neal Stephenson ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Trump Administration

In this article, I explore four California-based eco-utopias: The Earth Abides (George Stewart, 1949), Ecotopia (Ernest Callenbach, 1975), Pacific Edge (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990), and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992). All four novels were written during, and deeply informed by, the Cold War (Although published in 1992, Snow Crash was clearly written toward the end of the Cold War and in the shadow of Soviet implosion), against a backdrop of imminent nuclear holocaust and a doubtful future. Since then, climate change has replaced the nuclear threat as a looming existential dilemma, on which a good deal of writing about the future is focused. Almost 70 years after the appearance of The Earth Abides, and 40 years after the publication of Ecotopia, eco-utopian imaginaries now seem both poignant yet more necessary than ever, given the tension between the anti-environmental proclivities of the Trump Administration, on the one hand, and the tendency of climate change to suck all of the air out of the room, on the other. And with drought, fire, flood, wind and climate change so much in the news, it is increasingly difficult to imagine eco-utopias of any sort; certainly they are not part of the contemporary zeitgeist—except in the minds of architects, bees and futurists, perhaps. But does this mean there is no point in thinking about them, or seeking insights that might make our future more sustainable? This article represents an attempt to revive eco-utopian visions and learn from them.

Latin American Tercermundistas in the Soviet Union

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.

The UAE

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-202
Author(s):  
Islam Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Middle Powers ◽  
The Cold War

Middle powers rise at times of instability in the international or regional orders. Two sets of middle powers, namely the traditional and the so-called “emerging” middle powers, came to being during and after the Cold War, respectively. On the one hand, traditional middle powers, such as Australia and Canada, emerged during the Cold War. On the other hand, emerging middle powers ascended after the Cold War, and are not the traditional “good citizens” but controversial reformists with independent foreign policy portfolios, and they are becoming increasingly vocal in world affairs.

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