scholarly journals Two Worlds: Communism and Western Society

Slavic Review ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-487
Author(s):  
Alfred G. Meyer

The stated purpose of the encyclopedia being reviewed here, Marxism, Communism and Western Society: A Comparative Encyclopedia is to present a comprehensive comparative portrait of two worlds, one called “Communism,“ the other, “Western Society,” including their institutions and self-images, the images they have of each other, and their entire views of the cosmos; the range of topics covered is extremely wide. Several aims might be fulfilled by such a work. One of them is to serve as a reference book for students of Marxism and Communist societies, especially the Soviet Union, and not for specialists only but also for anyone interested in selected aspects of these topics. On the whole, the Encyclopedia serves this purpose very well. The relevant articles tend to be competent and thorough, even though I can understand why one of the anonymous referees of this essay found them “tinged with Germanic pedantry, dry and often verbose, with a penchant for abstraction, reifications, and fine distinctions.“

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-17
Author(s):  
Fuad Ismayilov

Azerbaijan is a nation with a Turkic population which regained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It has an area of approximately 86 000 km2. Georgia and Armenia, the other countries comprising the Transcaucasian region, border Azerbaijan to the north and west, respectively. Russia also borders the north, Iran and Turkey the south, and the Caspian Sea borders the east. The total population is about 8 million. The largest ethnic group is Azeri, comprising 90% of the population; Dagestanis comprise 3.2%, Russians 2.5%, Armenians 2% and others 2.3%.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Zava

Writings by three Italian journalist-authors provide an evocative picture of the Soviet Union during the ’50s and ’60s, interpreted through different personal styles, analytical systems and reporting techniques. In close relationship with the many-sided reality of the Soviet landscape, the meeting with the ‘other’ (geographically, culturally and in personal terms) allows Enrico Emanuelli, Carlo Levi and Guido Piovene to realise individual volumes of reportage (Emanuelli and Levi) or newspaper articles (Piovene) poised between travel literature and the informative-journalistic dimension.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-148
Author(s):  
Strovsky Dmitry L. ◽  
◽  
Antoshin Alexey V. ◽  

This article analyzes the substantive approaches used by the Soviet press when reflecting the topic of the repatriation of Jews from the USSR to Israel in the 1970s. This period is of particular importance in the course of studying information propaganda as an independent socio-political activity aimed at the formation of a certain type of mass consciousness. During this period, information propaganda of the Soviet mass media was perceived as an essential basis for strengthening ideological and political positions of the Soviet Union by leveling the complexities of its daily life. The study of how exactly these media promoted the topic of repatriation seems to be new in the study of the information space. The disclosure of this topic through the use of extensive empirical material enables to see the patterns of development of this space at the final stage of the Soviet period, which in turn, determines the relevance of the study in modern conditions, when manipulative priorities anew have become noticeable in the practice of the Russian media. The authors envisage the editorial policy of such an influential central newspaper as Izvestia. This publication, like all the other Soviet media, was attached to propaganda priorities, which predetermined manipulative approaches when covering the topic of repatriation. In order to determine the main trends of manipulative influence, we used structural-functional and systemic methods, as well as a method of content analysis, which together afford to see the patterns of development of the Soviet print media in the disclosure of the topic presented in the title of this article. The results of the research are not only theoretically but practically oriented, since they provide understanding of effective methods of influencing the audience and using them in everyday media practice. Keywords: media, Soviet ideology, propaganda, manipulation, class approach, Zionism, Jews


Author(s):  
Robert Bird

Viacheslav Ivanov was a leading theoretician of the symbolist literary movement and a prominent figure in the renaissance of religious thought in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. A classical scholar by training, and erudite poet by vocation, Ivanov became known as an acolyte of Nietzsche. Later, along with the other ‘younger’ symbolists Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Belyi, Ivanov presented himself as a disciple of Vladimir Solov’ëv’s idealistic metaphysics and theurgic aesthetics. In the 1910s Ivanov achieved a proto-hermeneutic conception of art, which was the basis of his groundbreaking writings on Dostoevskii. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1924 Ivanov became a Roman Catholic and achieved some notoriety in Catholic intellectual circles between the wars. His powerful influence is evident in many contemporary and later thinkers in fields ranging from aesthetics and literary theory to philosophy and theology.


Modern Italy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Lee

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander's 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers' relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers' personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation's history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Sharipova

AbstractThis article examines the novel Final Respects by Abdi-Jamil Nurpeisov from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective. Nurpeisov was one of the first Kazakh writers to discuss the decolonization of the environment and the “process of self-apprehension” by writing about the tragedy of the Aral Sea, power relations between the center and periphery, and the interconnectivity of humans and the environment in the Soviet Union. Through the prism of a small fishing village, he shows the tragedy of a nation that has an impact on the entire world. The novel is thus a critique of anthropocentric policies imposed by Moscow on Kazakhstan and other Soviet republics. Throughout the text, Nurpeisov reiterates the connection between the local and the global on one hand, and human culture and the environment on the other.


2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-36
Author(s):  
William I. Hitchcock

Three scholars offer separate responses to the article by Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg. The responses include some common points, but they diverge sharply in other respects. The first two respondents generally agree with the conclusions reached by Creswell and Trachtenberg, but one of them believes that the article goes too far (in its contention that France's anxiety about the Soviet Union eclipsed its concerns about Germany), whereas the other argues that the article does not go far enough in showing how the United States adapted its policy to accommodate French leaders. The second respondent also questions whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have added anything new to the latest “revisionist” works on French-German relations in the first decade of Cold War. The third respondent, unlike the first two, rejects the main thrust of the article by Creswell and Trachtenberg and seeks to defend the traditional view that France was very reluctant to go along with U.S. and British policies on the German question. This respondent also questions whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have focused on the most appropriate sources of evidence.


1994 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
BAOHUI ZHANG

Recent studies of democratization generally emphasize the role of elites and political pacts in transitions to democracy. They usually give little attention to the institutional conditions for elite's successful pact making. This article argues that although choices by elites are important, pact making does require certain institutional conditions. By examining the democratization experiences of Spain, Brazil, the Soviet Union, and China in 1989, this article argues that only some types of authoritarian regimes have the historical possibility of following a pacted transition. Specifically, the author argues that corporatist regimes have unique advantages in following such a path. On the other hand, the totalitarian institutional legacies of once-entrenched communist regimes left democratic oppositions as broadly based social movements and their leaders with strong populist tendencies. These, the author argues, create structural obstacles to democratization through elite's pactmaking for these regimes.


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