Russia On The Edge

Download or read book Russia on the Edge written by Edith W. Clowes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today. Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin’s extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book. In Russia on the Edge literary and cultural critics will find the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture. For intellectual historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the book is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold. The book introduces nonspecialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia’s writers and public intellectuals.

Download or read book On the Edge written by Franck BillŽ and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the RussiaÐChina border, one of the worldÕs least understood and most politically charged frontiers. The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. ItÕs a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the worldÕs political giants. Franck BillŽ and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the worldÕs most consequential and enigmatic borderlands. It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as BillŽ and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to ÒreviveÓ their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to ÒEurope,Ó building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. BasilÕs Cathedral to woo tourists. Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

Download or read book Turkey between the United States and Russia written by Nur Çetinoglu Harunoglu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current debates on Turkish foreign policy flamed by Turkey’s purchase of S-400 air defense systems from Russia throws into question Turkey-US relations and poses a challenge to Turkey’s membership in NATO, which has been regarded as the most important symbol of Turkey’s alliance with the West. However, Turkey’s maneuvers between the US and Russia are not unique to the present era as they can be traced back to the Cold War period. In fact, Turkey’s alliance with the West did not prevent Turkey from establishing special relations with the Soviet Union. This book, which is spurred by Glenn Snyder’s theory on alliance politics, indicates that Turkey’s foreign policy moves shaped in accordance with the fear of abandonment and the fear of entrapment with regards to its relations with the US, did not only stay within the boundaries of the Cold War, but further moved beyond that era. The authors argue that Turkey’s maneuvers to balance the US with Russia in the historical context constitute a strong element of continuity and a significant pattern in Turkish foreign policy. Yet, the authors underline that the motives behind this legacy have changed in the 2010s due to the transformations occurred within global, regional as well as domestic contexts.

Download or read book At the Edge of the Nation written by Paul B. Richardson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates over the remote and beguiling Southern Kuril Islands have revealed a kaleidoscope of divergent and contradictory ideas, convictions, and beliefs on what constitutes the “national” identity of post-Soviet Russia. Forming part of an archipelago stretching from Kamchatka to Hokkaido, administered by Russia but claimed by Japan, these disputed islands offer new perspectives on the ways in which territorial visions of the nation are refracted, inverted, and remade in a myriad of different ways. At the Edge of the Nation provides a unique account of how the Southern Kurils have shaped the parameters of the Russian state and framed debates on the politics of identity in the post-Soviet era. By shifting the debate beyond a proliferation of Eurocentric and Moscow-focused writings, Paul B. Richardson reveals broad alternatives and possibilities for Russian identity in Asia. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Russia was suffering the fragmentation of empire and a sudden decline in its international standing, these disputed islands became symbolic of a much larger debate on self-image, nationalism, national space, and Russia’s place in world politics. When viewed through the prism of the Southern Kurils, ideas associated with the “border,” “state,” and “nation” become destabilized, uncovering new insights into state-society relations in modern Russia. At the Edge of the Nation explores how disparate groups of political elites have attempted to use these islands to negotiate enduring tensions within Russia’s identity, and traces how the destiny of these isolated yet evocative islands became irrecoverably bound to the destiny of Russia itself.

Download or read book Crater's Edge written by Michal Giedroyc and published by Bene Factum Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1939, as a 10 year-old boy, Michal Giedroyc watched the Russian security police seize his home in Eastern Poland. His father, a senator and judge, was imprisoned while his mother, with Michal and his two sisters, were left on the streets of the local town to fend for themselves. Later they were transported in cattle trucks to the wastes of Soviet Siberia, with hundreds of thousands of other deportees. "Here, by the will of the rulers of the Soviet Empire, we were to toil and die." Eighteen months of deprivation and hunger on a collective farm brought them to the brink of extinction. Exhausted, half starved, and ill, Michal's mother and her children set off on a second grueling journey that would take them across Central Asia to Persia, the Middle East, and finally England. In one dramatic incident their survival hinged remarkably on the just two simple objects—a potato and a penknife.

Download or read book Ukraine Over the Edge written by Gordon M. Hahn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ukrainian crisis that dominated headlines in fall 2013 was decades in the making. Two great schisms shaped events: one within Ukraine, its western and southeastern parts divided along cultural and political lines; the other was driven by geopolitical factors. Competition between Russia and the West exacerbated Ukraine's divisions. This study focuses on the historical background and complex causality of the crisis, from the rise of mass demonstrations on Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) to the making of the post-revolt regime. In the context of a "new cold war," the author sheds light on the role of radical Ukrainian nationalists and neofascists in the February 2014 snipers' massacre, the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, and Russia's seizure of Crimea and involvement in the civil war in the eastern region of Donbass.

Download or read book Settlers on the Edge written by Niobe Thompson and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive research in the Arctic Russian region of Chukotka, Settlers on the Edge is the first English-language account of settler life anywhere in the circumpolar north to appear since Robert Paine's The White Arctic (1977), and the first to explore the experiences of Soviet-era migrants to the far north. Niobe Thompson describes the remarkable transformation of a population once dedicated to establishing colonial power on a northern frontier into a rooted community of locals now resisting a renewed colonial project. He also provides unique insights into the future of identity politics in the Arctic, the role of resource capital and the oligarchs in the Russian provinces, and the fundamental human questions of belonging and transience.