17 Ergebnisse.

Combining social science with the multi-disciplinarity of area studies, Alexander Motyl discusses in fifteen essays the malleability and modernity of national identity, the attractions and limits of social constructivist imaginings of nations, the impact of national discourses, binary morality, and historical narratives on interpretations of the Holocaust and the Holodomor, the relationship between liberalism, nationalism, and fascism, and the...

Ukraine vs. Russia offers indispensable background knowledge and analysis on one of the most important issues of the day--Vladimir Putin's war against democratic Ukraine. Alexander J. Motyl's articles and blogs offer in-depth analysis as well as a running commentary on current events and historical controversies in both Russia and Ukraine--from the rise of Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovych to the impending fall of Russian dictator Putin. Mo...

Fiction. SWEET SNOW is set in the winter of 1933 in Ukraine. A terrible famine is raging in the countryside, while the Soviet secret police is arresting suspected spies in the cities. A German nobleman from Berlin, a Jewish communist from New York, a Polish diplomat from Lwow, and a Ukrainian nationalist from Vienna come to share a cell in some unknown prison. One day, as they are being transported to another prison, their van overturns, their...

With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the nationality question has assumed central importance. In this collection of essays, twelve leading specialists analyze the current situation.

Despite their historical importance, empires have received scant attention from social scientists. Now, Alexander J. Motyl examines the structure, dynamics, and continuing relevance of empire -- and asks, "Why do empires decline? Why do some empires collapse? And why do some collapsed empires revive?"Rejecting choice-centered theories of imperial decline, Motyl maintains that the very structure of empires promotes decay and that decay in turn ...

Themes of identity, faith, and redemption combine as a disillusioned KGB assassin and an insecure female U.S. diplomat track down an Ivy League professor running a prostitution ring in Ukraine. Anatoly Filatov is the "whiskey priest, " a despairing Communist true believer, whose world comes crashing down with the collapse of the USSR. Jane Sweet is the foreign-service officer, a Ukrainian-American woman who discovers her identity, as both a wo...

In this concise, provocative, and trenchant book, Alexander J. Motyl argues that social scientists must pay more rigorous attention to the formulation of concepts, as they provide the basis for clear thinking, good research, and intelligent formulation of theories. Before even contemplating the question of whether or not theories "fit the facts" and explain what they purport to explain, it behooves us to ask whether or not theories make sense ...

Keine Beschreibung.

After Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, slaughtered between 10, 000 and 40, 000 political prisoners in Western Ukraine in only eight days, a massacre that had been coordinated and planned by Soviet authorities.The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 is important for several reasons. First, although it is one of the greatest atrocities committed by the ...

Welcome to the Kremlin's phantasmagoric world, where a heady mixture of Orthodoxy, socialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and Mother Russia worship defines and distorts reality. Vovochka is the fictional story of "Vovochka Putin" and his intimate friend-a KGB agent with the same nickname. The two Vovochkas recruit informers in Berlin's gay bars, spy on East German dissidents, survive the trauma of the Soviet Union's collapse, figh...

-- Slavic Review

How must Sovietology change as a result of the Soviet Union's collapse? Motyl and his colleagues suggest that the first step in reorientation of the field must involve recognizing the non-Russians and their republics as central to both Soviet politics and to the post-Soviet reality.The authors, all leading Sovietologists, illustrate how nationality interacted with and shaped ideology, law, elite recruitment, political repression, modernization...

The Putin and Bush presidencies, the 9/11 attack, and the war in Iraq have changed the dynamics of Russian-European-U.S. relations and strained the Western alliance. Featuring contributions by leading experts in the field, this work is the first systematic effort to reassess the status of Russia's modernization efforts in this context. Part I examines political, economic, legal, and cultural developments in Russia for evidence of convergence w...

The Putin and Bush presidencies, the 9/11 attack, and the war in Iraq have changed the dynamics of Russian-European-US relations and strained the Western alliance. Divided into two parts and featuring contributions by experts in the field, this work is a systematic effort to reassess the status of Russia's modernization efforts in this context.

Keine Beschreibung.

Chester Milosz, a very minor American poet who teaches at a very minor American college and aspires to win the Nobel, receives an invitation to a meeting of global high-flyers at the Otto Nabokov Foundation's Ardor Haus estate in Caravaggio, Italy. The organizers are Dickey Lemon, a British billionaire who made his fortune in hamster bedding, and Joe Zsasz, an ex-communist functionary-turned-international consultant. The participants are a sun...

Freedom House asked leading regional specialists and in-house experts to answer a checklist of more than 70 indicators for 27 post-communist countries in ten key areas, from political process to media. This volume contains the results, in the form of country-by-country reports.