The Soviet Union and the Challenge of the Future. Vol. I: The Soviet System: Stasis and Change

1989 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
John C. Campbell ◽  
Alexander Shtromas ◽  
Morton A. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

Some Recent Changes in Soviet Economic Policy

1956 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

SOVIET economic policy in the few years since Stalin's death has been characterized by flamboyance and ferment. In an attempt to free economic growth from the bottleneck of stagnation in agriculture, Khrushchev has sponsored some extravagant gambles in corn-growing and in expansion of the sown acreage. Policy toward the consumer has gone through two complete reversals: the regime at first experimented with offering the population an improvement in the standard of living, but is now once again asserting that abundance in the future requires austerity today. Perhaps the most startling innovation of all emerged in the past year when the regime began to develop a program of foreign economic assistance as a weapon in its economic competition with the capitalist part of the world. Because of their spectacular nature, these shifts of policy have attracted considerable attention in the West and have been commented on at length. Aware diat the Soviet Union is expanding her economic power at a more rapid rate than are the capitalist countries, Western students of the Soviet economy have sought in these policy changes-some clue as to whether its rate of growth is likely to decline or to be maintained in the future. The early indications of a rise in standards of living that would cause a reduced growth of heavy industry and so a decline in investment and in the rate of growth have now been dispelled. The inability of Soviet agriculture to provide an expanding food supply for a growing work force certainly appears to be a real threat to industrial growth, and with die failure of Khrushchev's gambles, this threat remains. Thus the evidence as to the over-all effect of these changes on the rate of expansion of die Soviet economy is still inconclusive.

The Challenges to Social Control in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, 1964-1982

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-173
Author(s):  
Fedor L. Sinitsyn
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Central State ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Russian State ◽  
The Government ◽  
General Secretary

This article examines the development of social control in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, who was General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982. Historians have largely neglected this question, especially with regard to its evolution and efficiency. Research is based on sources in the Russian State Archive of Modern History (RGANI), the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and the Moscow Central State Archive (TSGAM). During Brezhnevs rule, Soviet propaganda reached the peak of its development. However, despite the fact that authorities tried to improve it, the system was ritualistic, unconvincing, unwieldy, and favored quantity over quality. The same was true for political education, which did little more than inspire sullen passivity in its students. Although officials recognized these failings, their response was ineffective, and over time Soviet propaganda increasingly lost its potency. At the same time, there were new trends in the system of social control. Authorities tried to have a foot in both camps - to strengthen censorship, and at the same time to get feedback from the public. However, many were afraid to express any criticism openly. In turn, the government used data on peoples sentiments only to try to control their thoughts. As a result, it did not respond to matters that concerned the public. These problems only increased during the era of stagnation and contributed to the decline and subsequent collapse of the Soviet system.

scholarly journals One for all, each on its own: Analysing the post-Soviet system of collective security

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-110
Author(s):  
David Erkomaishvili
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Collective Security ◽  
Subsequent Transformation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Security Relations ◽  
Independent States ◽  
Soviet Space ◽  
Post Soviet Space

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed independent states, which emerged in its place, to construct their own alignments. The choice of the case for empirical analysis had been made based on several unique characteristics. Orthodox Alliance Theory had almost never properly addressed alignments in the post-Soviet space due to the lack of access to information during the Soviet period - along with the structure of the state: only Soviet alignment policies were taken into consideration, instead of those of its constituent republics as well - and modest interest of alliance theorists in the region. Continued disintegration of the post-Soviet space, which has not stopped with the collapse of the Soviet Union but keeps fragmenting further, creates a unique setting for researching the adequacy of Alliance Theory's classic assumptions as well as developing new approaches. This work traces the development of the post-Soviet system of collective security and its subsequent transformation into a series of bilateral security relations, along with the shortfall of multilateralism.

Armageddon and the Gulag, 1939–1945

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven A. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Red Army ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on the Gulag during the Armageddon of the Great Patriotic War. It shows how the institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag shifted in accord with the demands of total war. The war was an era of mass release on an unprecedented scale side by side with the highest mortality rates in the history of the Gulag system. After four years of brutal, exhausting warfare and a disastrous initial stage, the Soviet Union emerged from its Armageddon victorious. The early postwar period offered no indication that the Gulag would cease to be a mass social phenomenon within fifteen years. Rather, the Gulag remained a pillar in the reestablishment of the Soviet system, following the Red Army into liberated territories, so that every liberated district received its own corrective labor colony. By 1944, the camp and colony population began to grow again.

The Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom ◽  
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
China Threat

Is China bent on world domination? Although Americans perceived the Soviet Union as posing the greatest Cold War-era military challenge, they also periodically feared a “China threat” during those decades. Since the days of Mao, the PRC’s penchant for staging parades showing off its...

The Future of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency: 2015–2035

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James K. Conant ◽  
Peter J. Balint
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Niels Bohr ◽  
Prediction Errors ◽  
Protection Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

In this chapter, we consider possible futures for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under several scenarios. Before beginning, we offer some caveats and disclaimers. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” This quotation—often credited to physicist Niels Bohr—captures the dilemma of prediction by stating it as a truism. Statistician Nate Silver, who won fame for accurately forecasting the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, argues that in general the record of prognostication in public affairs, the field encompassing the ideas in this book, is particularly poor. For example, in the late 1980s few specialists predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event of enormous scale and importance that appears in hindsight to have been imminent and inevitable. More recently on the domestic front political experts generally failed to foresee the rise of the Tea Party, which has roiled the last three American electoral cycles and generated a significant rightward pull on the Republican Party and on U.S. politics more broadly. Psychologist Phillip Tetlock, who examined the record of expert predictions in the arena of public affairs, reports poor results. In his research he found that “expertise . . . had no across-the-board effect on forecasting accuracy.” He observed that egregious prediction errors are surprisingly common, even among experts whose prediction skills are otherwise rated as better than average. About 10 percent of the time events actually occurred that these higher-performing experts had estimated to be impossible, while about 20 percent of the time events failed to occur that these experts had estimated to be sure things. The results were 10 percentage points worse in both directions for the poorer-performing experts in Tetlock’s studies. Given these findings, the predictive limitations of the agency life cycle models we consider in this book are not surprising.

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