Monday begins on Saturday - Понедельник начинается в субботу
Added by: otherwordly | Karma: 222.42 | Fiction literature | 28 December 2008
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Monday Begins on Saturday (Russian: Понедельник начинается в субботу) is a 1964 science fiction (science fantasy) novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Set in a fictional town in northern Russia, where highly classified research in magic occurs, the novel is a satire of Soviet scientific research institutes, complete with an inept administration, a dishonest, show-horse professor, and numerous equipment failures. It offers an idealistic view of the scientific work ethic, as reflected in the title which suggests that the scientists' weekends are nonexistent.
The "Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry" located in a fictional Northern Russian town of Solovets is portrayed as a place where everyone must work hard willingly, or else their loss of honesty is symbolized by hair growing from their ears. These hairy-eared people are viewed with disdain, but, in a turn symbolic of Soviet times, many of them stay in the institute because it provides them with a comfortable living no matter what.
Tale of the Troika, which describes Soviet bureaucracy at its worst, is a sequel, featuring many of the same characters.
This book provides a wide-ranging history of every aspect of Stalin's dictatorship over the peoples of the Soviet Union. Drawing on a huge array of primary and secondary sources, The Stalin Era is a first-hand account of Stalinist thought, policy, and the effects of both of these. The book places the man and his ideology into context both within pre-Revolutionary Russia, Lenin's Soviet Union, and post-Stalinist Russia. The Stalin Era examines collectivization; industrialization; terror; government; the cult of Stalin; education and science; family; religion and the Russian Orthodox Church; and art and the state.
Yegor Gaidar, a hero of Russian reform, has provided a courageous and clear-headed wakeup call for his own people and the world. He argues persuasively that today s Kremlin leaders are heading down the same economic path that led their Communist predecessors to disaster. Combining personal experience, deep analysis and a rare grasp of facts--including from previously classified documents--Gaidar has produced a book of insight and importance. It is must-reading for anyone trying to comprehend what really happened to the Soviet Union, why its system was inherently instable, and why nostalgia for the days of empire fashionable at the highest levels in Russia today--is wrongheaded and dangerous.
Superman
Red Son is a comic book
published by DC Comics that was released under their Elseworlds imprint in
April, 2003. Author Mark Millar created the comic with the premise "what
if Superman had been raised in the Soviet Union?" It received critical
acclaim and was nominated for the 2004 Eisner Award for best limited series. (Source:
Wikipedia)
Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism
A brilliant and original analysis of the fall of communism that focuses on the impact of its cumulative failures on the communist elite.
Despite its arid title, this is a significant and interesting book. Hollander, well known for his excellent study of Western champions of the Soviet system (Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1927-1978), here examines 22 members of the ruling elite in the USSR and Eastern Europe who lost their faith. How, he wonders, was the determination to rule gradually undermined. He explores this question through interviews with defectors, exiles, high-ranking current political functionaries, and police officials and a careful reading of a collection of memoirs. While not minimizing the effects of economic collapse, Hollander rightly stresses the human component in communism's fall: the elites' loss of confidence in its right to govern played a vital part in the utterly unforeseen denouement. A worthy volume for academic and major public libraries.
