Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context. Edited by David Rainbow. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. Pp. viii+350. $120.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

2021 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-998
Author(s):  
Jeff Sahadeo
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Queen's University

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

scholarly journals Viewing ‘the other’ over a hundred and a score more years: South Africa and Russia (1890–2010)

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
I Liebenberg
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Auto Ethnography

Whether novel is history or history is novel, is a tantalising point. “The novel is no longer a work, a thing to make las t, to connect the pas t with the future but (only) one current event among many, a ges ture with no tomorrow” Kundera (1988:19). One does not have to agree with Kundera to find that social sciences , as his toriography holds a s tory, a human narrative to be shared when focused on a case or cases. In this case, relations between peoples over more than a century are discussed. At the same time, what is known as broader casing in qualitative studies enters the picture. The relations between the governments and the peoples of South Africa and Russia ( including the Soviet Union), sometimes in conflict or peace and sometimes at variance are discussed. Past and present communalities and differences between two national entities within a changing international or global context deserve attention while moments of auto-ethnography compliment the study. References are made to the international political economy in the context of the relations between these countries.Keywords: Soviet Union; South Africa; Total Onslaught; United Party; Friends of the Soviet Union; ideological conflict (South Africa); Russians (and the Anglo-Boer War); racial capitalism; apartheid; communism/Trotskyism (in South Africa); broader casing (qualitative research)Subject fields: political science; sociology; (military) history; international political economy; social anthropology; international relations; conflict studies

The United States and Southeast Asia: A Case of Strategic Surrender

1983 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leszek Buszynski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
United States Policy ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Soviet Union

Southeast Asia in United States policy fell from a region of high priority during the Vietnam war to become, after the fall of Indochina, an area of relatively minor interest. For the United States, Southeast Asia evoked memories of misperception, intensified over-commitment, and simplistic assumptions that characterized the American effort to defeat local Vietnamese national communism. Since the formulation of the Nixon doctrine of disengagement in 1969, United States policy towards Southeast Asia has been undergoing a process of long-term readjustment in recognition of the exaggerated significance that the region had assumed in American thinking. The fall of Saigon in April 1975 was a major stimulus to this readjustment as it gave the Americans compelling reasons to anticipate a reassertion of Soviet influence in the region. Successive American administrations attempted to place the region in a wider global context to avoid the dangers of extreme reaction to local national communism while developing the flexibility to coordinate a response to the Soviet Union at a global level. The main concern of American policy was to remove the basis for direct United States involvement in the region in a way that would satisfy post-Vietnam war public and congressional opinion and the demands of strategic planners for greater freedom of manoeuvre against the Soviet Union.

Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia since the End of Communism

2013 ◽  
pp. 424-462
Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New Period ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
Independent States

This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.

In the Name of State Sovereignty? The Justification of War in Russian History and the Present

2021 ◽  
pp. 395-416
Author(s):  
Paul Robinson ◽  
Mikhail Antonov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Necessary Evil

This chapter shows that the Russian philosophical and legal traditions regarding war have advanced along a number of different tracks. In Imperial Russia, some thinkers adopted pacifist positions; others regarded war as a necessary evil. A similar bifurcation of thought can be seen in the Soviet era. The Soviets expounded a belief in the principles of non-interference and peaceful coexistence. At the same time, they also sometimes portrayed war in a positive light. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scholars and political leaders have generally supported state sovereignty and rejected attempts to justify humanitarian interventions, regime change, and preventive war (on these Western strategies, see Geis/Wagner, Stohl, and Jahn in this volume). Nevertheless, they have on occasion resorted to very similar language themselves. Russian narratives thus oscillate between favouring pacifism and sovereignty as means of preserving the status quo and, as an exception, supporting military interventions when these are required by the transient goals of Russian foreign policy.

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