History - Armageddon Averted-The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 - (Stephen Kotkin) Oxford University Press 2001.pdf - 004 Historia po angielsku - książki - ajatollah666

Armageddon Averted

The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000

STEPHEN KOTKIN

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town

Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi

Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi

Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw

with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2001

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

ISBN 0–19–280245–3

13579108642

Typeset in New Baskerville

by ReﬁneCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by

Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King’s Lynn

In memory of my great-grandfather

Michael Korolewicz

(1889–1969)

who had been a teacher in tsarist Poland and in America

built a chrome, silver, and gold plating business. He used

to take me to the park, beginning when I was in a stroller,

and talk history.

Preface

My ﬁrst encounter with the Soviet bloc took place one

summer in 1983. As a graduate student of Habsburg his-

tory, I made my way to Prague from northern California to

advance my language skills in pursuit of a bygone empire.

On the day of my arrival in the capital of Bohemia, I dis-

covered a mass ‘socialist peace rally’. Surprised to hear a

familiar voice booming over the loudspeakers, I pushed

my way through the crowd to the front, and sure enough it

was him: the then socialist mayor of Berkeley.

Socialism in the bloc turned out to be nothing like what

I, as an American, had been led to believe. Rather than an

ironclad dictatorship in a world completely unto itself,

or an unremarkable system gradually converging with that

of the West, it proved to be very different from the West yet

increasingly penetrated by the West, and its highly rigid

structures had to be constantly circumvented to make

them function. It was full of incessant complaining but

also thoroughgoing conformism, and had a relatively

impoverished material culture but a richly engaging

sociability. I made up my mind that, upon returning to

the University of California, I would begin the study of

Russian, and switch empires.

These were the days of Polish Solidarity and its under-

ground ‘ﬂying universities’, which were hailed as ‘civil

vii

History - Armageddon Averted-The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 - (Stephen Kotkin) Oxford University Press 2001.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: