Russia and the Western World. the Place of the Soviet Union in the Comity of Nations

This chapter deals with the history of Soviet music’s relations with the outside world from the mid-1920s until the end of the millennium. During all these decades the Soviet musical production of any coloration was perceived by the free Western world as something largely strange or alien, often exotic, almost ‘barbarian’. The inevitable spiritual distance between the Soviet world and the ‘non-Soviet’ one resulted in some significant misunderstandings. Though some important recent publications by Western musicologists display a well qualified view on the music and musical life in the Soviet Union, the traces of past naiveties and/or prejudices are still felt quite often even in the writings of major specialists.

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Chinese Criticism of Humanism: Campaigns Against the Intellectuals 1964–1965

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000013187 ◽

1966 ◽

Vol 26 ◽

pp. 68-81 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

D. W. Fokkema

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Short Story ◽

Party Leader ◽

Western World ◽

Old Russian ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Humanistic Spirit ◽

Soviet Literature ◽

Story Writing ◽

Communist Countries

During the heyday of the Hundred Flowers period the Chinese literary rebels sought their models outside China. They understood that, if liberalisation were to have any chance at all, it should reach China via the communist countries and not via the Western world. Therefore many Chinese writers studied Soviet literature, and made no secret of their admiration for those Soviet writers who had presented unorthodox views, or views that, though correct in the Soviet Union, seemed to be unorthodox in the Chinese context. Zoshchenko, Ehrenburg, Galina Nikolayeva, Ovechkin and Simonov were admired by the very Chinese writers who were later labelled as major “rightists,” such as Liu Pin-yen, Ch'in Chao-yang and Huang Ch'iu-yün. Several liberal Chinese writers also readily adopted the Soviet habit of extolling the Russian classics as literary models. Thus, in 1956, during the Chinese commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dostoyevsky's death, one Chinese critic spoke of “humanism” (jen-tao-chu-i) as one of Dostoyevsky's contributions. Feng Hsüeh-feng praised the humanistic spirit of the old Russian literature and criticised contemporary Chinese works as untruthful. Hsiao Ch'ien, another major “rightist,” in an essay on short story writing advocated the style of Chekhov and I. A. Bunin. One dogmatic Party leader, moreover, was criticised by the non-conformists for having a low opinion of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

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Bibliographic Article: Baltic Émigré Publishing and Scholarship in the Western World

Nationalities Papers ◽

10.1080/00905998808408084 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 225-241

Author(s):

David Crowe

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Western World ◽

Ethnic Communities ◽

World War ◽

The West ◽

Academic Field ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

History Of ◽

To Come

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.

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On the Historiography of the Russian Revolution

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2492453 ◽

1967 ◽

Vol 26 (2) ◽

pp. 247-264 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Robert D. Warth

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

French Revolution ◽

Russian Revolution ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Soviet Society ◽

Western World ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Party Line ◽

The Status ◽

Intellectual Climate

The Russian Revolution has not yet achieved the status of the French Revolution as an academic preserve for battalions of professional historians, but few are likely to deny that its impact on the twentieth century is already more profound than that of the French upheaval on the nineteenth. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution is now upon us, and it is a melancholy commentary on the uncertain intellectual climate of the Soviet Union that despite lavish funds, abundant trained personnel, and access to archives and primary sources unavailable in the West, Soviet historians have failed to produce a work of permanent importance on this crucial episode of modern Russian history. Yet the stifling orthodoxy of Stalinism has given way to the uncertain but relative freedom under his successors, and the auguries point to a further mellowing of the party line as Soviet society haltingly approaches the educational and living standards of the Western world.

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Bilingual Education

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0267190500001239 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

pp. 103-121 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Arturo Tosi

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Bilingual Education ◽

Language Change ◽

Western World ◽

Republic Of China ◽

The Past ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Language Spread ◽

The One

In the past two decades bilingual education has become an educational movement and a field of academic inquiry of remarkable growth throughout the world. At first glance this appears to be the outcome of the increasingly hegemonic role of a few languages like English in the western world and countries economically affiliated to it, Russian in the multilingual republics of the Soviet Union, and Putonghua in the People's Republic of China. But a closer look at the first of these areas—the one better known to us—shows how complex the dynamics of language spread and language change are in diverse sociopolitical contexts.

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Xerxes in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Play Adam and Eve

Slovene ◽

10.31168/2305-6754.2015.4.1.30 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 507-510

Author(s):

Souren A. Takhtajan

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Capital Punishment ◽

The Other ◽

Western World ◽

Adam And Eve ◽

The Soviet Union

In his Histories 8:118, Herodotus tells the dramatic story of Xerxes’ return to Asia from Greece by sea. The overcrowded ship was caught in a storm, and the captain advised the king to get rid of most of the passengers. Xerxes called on the Persians to prove their loyalty to the king, and they showed their obeisance by leaping into the sea. After his return, Xerxes awarded the captain of the ship with a golden crown for saving the king’s life—and cut off his head for causing the deaths of so many Persians. In the play Adam and Eve, Bulgakov depicts the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and the Western world. Nearly everyone in Leningrad dies from a gas attack. But Efrosimov, a chemistry professor and a man of genius, has managed to save the lives of the other characters in the play, the Soviet fighter pilot Daragan included. Nevertheless, Daragan hates Efrosimov for his efforts to prevent the war and then to stop it. The fighter pilot imagines for the professor both an award for his merits and subsequent capital punishment for his alleged crime. In this article, I suggest that Bulgakov has borrowed the motif of award and execution from Herodotus.

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Inequality, Recognition, Irrationalism and Populism. From liberal Democracy and the democratic Rule of Law to post-Democracy. Two crucial historical moments and their consequences: 1945 and 1989/91

Ελληνική Επιθεώρηση Πολιτικής Επιστήμης ◽

10.12681/hpsa.22312 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 7

Author(s):

Dimitris Charalambis

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Social Recognition ◽

Western World ◽

Paradigm Change ◽

Dominant Position ◽

Digital Revolution ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Constituent Element ◽

The Social ◽

Private Power

After the inequality turn of the late 1970s and mainly after the collapse of the Soviet Union deregulation, globalization, hyperconcentration of wealth and private power, oligopolies, monopolies and the dominant position of the financial capital are the consequences of paradigm change from the post 1945 Keynesian consensus to the neoliberal dismantling of the social contract. The end of the heavy industry era, the relocation of production to China and the digital revolution and industrialization 4.0 undermine the classical negotiation between capital and labor leading again to marginalization of social recognition and to oligarchy and transforms the classes dangereuses of the industrial era to classes irrelevantes. The erosion of Democracy and the rise of irrationalism as the systemic rationalization of inequality are the consequences in the declining Western world parallel to the aggressive authoritarian capitalism in China. It seems that the era of the social state between 1945 and the end of the 1970s and mainly after 1989/91 was only a historical intermezzo and that exorbitant inequality reappears as the constituent element of capitalism.

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1968

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199602056.013.043 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Maud Anne Bracke

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Third World ◽

Western World ◽

Revolutionary Change ◽

The West ◽

Political Crises ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Generational Identity ◽

Global Movement ◽

The Times

Around 1968 communism expanded as a global movement, especially in the developing world, while hitting a crisis of legitimation in Europe. In the Western world the late 1960s saw young people aspiring to revolutionary change that involved both individual liberation and social justice. Generational identity underpinned a revolt against authority, leading to acute political crises in France, Italy, and elsewhere. While presenting opportunities to communist parties, this revolt threatened, from Moscow’s perspective, a dangerous proliferation of ‘heterodox’ Marxist thought. In Eastern Europe rebellious populations in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia demanded greater rights of expression, causing the Soviet Union to intervene militarily in Czechoslovakia. By contrast, Maoism was able to capture the revolutionary, anti-imperialist spirit of the times. Claiming to offer an anti-bureaucratic alternative to the Soviet model, and resituating heroic agency at the heart of communist politics, Maoism appealed to Third World revolutionary leaders and radicals in the West.

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The Soviet Union as a Great Power: The Need for Reform

The American Economist ◽

10.1177/056943459203600112 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 36 (1) ◽

pp. 77-84 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Thomas G. Brown

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Great Power ◽

Western World ◽

Economic Decline ◽

Soviet Government ◽

Soviet History ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Long Run ◽

Political Sector ◽

Military Expenditures

The reforms of perestroika took the western world by surprise. However, the application of economic analysis to the last half century of Soviet history reveals a country in economic decline. Additionally, while the country contracted economically, the Soviet political sector insisted upon increased military expenditures to preserve the nation as a great power. I propose that this combination was impossible to sustain in the long-run, and that perestroika is evidence that some members of the Soviet government have recognized this fact. I then examine the prospects of perestroika, in present form, curing the Soviet Union's economic and military woes.

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France and the United Nations

International Organization ◽

10.1017/s0020818300012522 ◽

1965 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 695-713 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

J.-B. Duroselle

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

United Nations ◽

Foreign Minister ◽

The United States ◽

League Of Nations ◽

Major Influence ◽

Western World ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Fundamental Phenomenon ◽

The United Nations

When French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand proposed in 1929 to establish “a sort of federal bond” between the European members of the League of Nations, these states numbered 27 out of a total membership of 60. Today the United Nations has a membership of 114 states of which 23 are European. Of these 23 states, seven are popular democracies. (The Soviet Union, a special case, is not included in this calculation.) There remain sixteen countries extending in the form of a crescent from Finland to Ireland to France and from Portugal to Turkey which are part of the “free” or “Western world.” The conclusion is obvious. The League of Nations was dominated by Europeans who furthermore controlled a large part of the overseas world in the form of colonies, protectorates, and mandates. The United Nations, where the major influence, linked to power, is exerted by the United States and the Soviet Union, is dominated by non-Europeans. This non-European domination—political, psychological, and moral—is the fundamental phenomenon, and it is the subject of this study.

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