The Modernization of Party Propaganda in the USSR

Slavic Review ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Mickiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Mass ◽  
Communications Networks ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
The Soviet Union

Lenin was one of the first political theorists to emphasize the enormous potential impact that manipulation of modern communications channels could have on a recipient population. It may therefore not be surprising that indices of penetration by the communications networks of the world's states suggest that the Soviet pattern is unique. For example, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators places groups of states on a developmental spectrum and finds that the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, are “industrial revolution” societies, one stage behind the more developed “high mass-consumption” societies, where the United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe have been placed. It is true that according to the indices of Gross National Product and urbanization the Soviet-type states do cluster in the range that includes such states as Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. However, if we look at percentage adult literacy or percentage voting, the Soviet-type states easily rank with the highest “high mass-consumption” societies.

„Socialist postmodernism”: residential architecture in Kyiv Podil district (Ukraine)

BUILDER ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 293 (12) ◽  
pp. 46-51
Author(s):  
Svitlana Linda
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Construction Projects ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Residential Architecture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Residential Quarters

Despite the short chronological span of the socialist era architecture heritage, it remains little investigated and underappreciated. Given the political and cultural isolation of the Soviet Union republics and strict architectural design regulations, there was a widespread belief that architects should not use innovative trends. This article exemplifies residential quarters in the historic Podil district, designed and built in the 1970s-1980s in Kyiv. They vividly demonstrate the postmodern ideas embodied in Ukrainian architecture. Methodologically, the article bases on the Ch. Jencks definition of postmodernism and in the comparison of his ideology with the implemented Kyiv project. It states that Kyiv architects proposed not typical Soviet construction projects but international postmodern architectural solutions. It proves that, on the one hand, Ukrainian architects had perfect qualifications to draw construction projects implementing advanced world trends of the time. But on the other hand, it highlights that postmodernism in architecture did not merely confine to Western Europe and the United States but also penetrated the Iron Curtain, exemplifying innovative architectural thinking which ran contrary to the modernist paradigm.

6. Maintaining the Spheres of Influence

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines how the United States and the Soviet Union tried to maintain their respective spheres of influence during the Cold War, especially in three regions: Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Latin America. The death of Joseph Stalin and the assumption of power by the triumvirate of Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Georgi Malenkov resulted in a fresh approach to domestic issues and to the nature of Soviet control over its European satellites. The apparent change produced a new Soviet approach to East–West relations. The chapter first considers how the new Soviet leadership addressed the crisis in East Germany before analysing American influence in Western Europe and US relations with Latin America. The discussion covers themes and events such as the Soviet policy on Hungary and Poland, the Messina Conference and the Spaak Committee, nuclear cooperation and multilateral force, and the US response to the Cuban Revolution.

The Rise and Decline of NATO

Worldview ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
William Pfaff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union

NATO was born of a crisis, and its trouble today results from the fact that the crisis is gone. The ruins of war have been cleared away. The drama of 1949—of a clash between Germany's conquerorshas faded. The ambition of the Soviet Union to dominate Western Europe undoubtedly still exists, but it is a passive threat, a latent threat which no longer has in it an immediacy and power sufficient to compel great measures of defense, The states of Western Europe are no longer the unconfldent nations they were in the last years of the 1940's; they no longer need rely upon the United States to defend them from the Soviet Union; and the Soviet Union is no longer quite the bizarre society it was in those years of menace.

Denuclearization on NATO's Southern Front: Allied Reactions to Soviet Proposals, 1957–1963

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 197-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lykourgos Kourkouvelas
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union and its East European allies sought to prevent the installation of U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe by embarking on a diplomatic “peace offensive” that included proposals for the creation of denuclearized zones in various geographical areas of Europe. This article considers how the NATO countries responded to these proposals. In the end, the Western allies rejected proposals for the denuclearization of the Balkans and other areas in Europe, but discussions within NATO's councils often proved complicated, especially regarding southern Europe. In the case of the 1957 Stoica proposal for the denuclearization of the Balkans, the leading NATO countries stepped back and let Turkey and Greece reject the proposal, but by 1963, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and other key allied countries as well as the NATO bureaucracy assumed a more active role in evaluating and ultimately rejecting the notion of denuclearization in the Mediterranean.

scholarly journals Introduction to Special Issue: Japan as Studied in Japan's Neighbors and Japan Itself

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-273
Author(s):  
TAKASHI INOGUCHI
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
East Asian ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Total Trade ◽  
The Soviet Union

This special issue highlights one of the important subjects of this journal, Japanese politics and international relations, as studied in Japan's neighbors, Korea and China, and Japan itself. The aim is to elucidate the angles taken by these three countries when examining Japan. Before going into the similar and different angles taken, it may be helpful to note two noteworthy features of their interactions and transactions. They are, first, the steady integration of these economies and societies; second, the tenacity of ill-feelings held toward Japan. First, if the lifting in 1991 of the embargo imposed on China for its Tiananmen massacre of 1989 is a key benchmark for the steady and swift regional integration in East Asia since, it did not take a dozen years before the intra-regional trade ratio over total trade went beyond 50%. As compared to parallell figures for Europe at various time points, say 1962 when the Rome Treaty was signed and 1990 when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, the number of years necessary for intraregional trade over total trade to exceed 50% are a dozen years for East Asia versus thirty odd years for Western Europe. It has a lot to do with the pattern of inclusion in East Asian regional integration. It includes China and the United States. In Europe regional integration was meant to enable Western Europe to stand alone. Bothvis-à-visthe United States andvis-à-visthe Soviet Union, Western Europe wanted to band together and bind together those with shared values. East Asian regional integration differs from this European model. The East Asian model is first to strengthen themselves, while seeking opportunities regionally and globally to attain, as a result of their self-strengthening strategy, high regional strength and high regional integration.

Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-Alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States, and the Genesis of NATO's Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Spohr Readman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
East West

On the basis of recently released archival sources from several member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), this article revisits the making of NATO's landmark 1979 dual-track decision. The article examines the intersecting processes of personal, bureaucratic, national, and alliance high politics in the broader Cold War context of increasingly adversarial East-West relations. The discussion sheds new light on how NATO tried to augment its deterrent capability via the deployment of long-range theater nuclear missiles and why ultimately an arms control proposal to the Soviet Union was included as an equal strand. The 1979 decision owed most to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's political thought and initiative. Intra-alliance decision-making, marked by transatlantic conflict and cooperation, benefitted from the creativity and agency of West German, British, and Norwegian officials. Contrary to popular impressions, the United States did not truly lead the process.

Western Europe

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Etges
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter explores the role and experience of Western Europe in the Cold War. It explains that Western Europe is not a precise political or geographical entity, and that its role in the Cold War can only be understood in the context of its changing internal dynamics and changing relationship with the United States, the Soviet Union, and countries of Eastern Europe. The chapter argues that Western Europe both shaped and was shaped by Cold War in a political, economic, military, cultural, and ideological sense, and also considers the German question, Franco-German rapprochement and European integration, and military aspects of the Western alliance.

Globalizing Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 408-430
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Short Period ◽  
European Jewish

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from small towns in Eastern Europe to the United States. Smaller groups went to other destinations in the Americas, Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. This chapter discusses the background and impact of that mass migration around the world. The global diffusion of Jews from Eastern Europe concentrated in three new Jewish centers: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. The Eastern European Jewish mass migration, however, did not ultimately lead to the formation of a distinct diaspora of Yiddish-speaking Jews, but rather became the driving force behind a dramatic transformation of the Jewish diaspora as a whole. The reasons for this can be explained by several factors: accelerated Jewish assimilation in these centers, the short period of the mass migration, the great diversity of the migrants, and the almost complete destruction of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.

From Nuclear Winter to the Anthropocene

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Computer Models ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
Nuclear Winter

This chapter looks at the nuclear winter project, an outcome of global modeling. The idea that the Earth could be plunged into a “nuclear winter” as the catastrophic outcome of a nuclear war was announced by a group of leading climate and environment scientists from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union shortly after Ronald Reagan delivered his “Star Wars” speech in March 1983. Drawing on experiments with data-based computer models, these scholars claimed that a nuclear war, unlike the two world wars, would be not simply a regional, but a truly global disaster. Nuclear missiles, detonated over urban areas, would ignite massive fire storms, which in turn would propel soot particles and aerosols into high levels of the atmosphere. As a result, the computer models predicted, a dust shield would emerge that would be transported by air currents to both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document