Cars For Comrades

Author : Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801461484
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cars for Comrades written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself. Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet Detroits," emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable "roadlessness." In the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs, movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than car-crazy America. Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox practices that the state was helpless to combat. Deeply researched and engagingly told, this masterful and entertaining biography of the Soviet automobile provides a new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most iconic—and important—technologies and a novel approach to understanding the history of the Soviet Union itself.

Author : Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801463211
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Socialist Car written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. In The Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.

Author : John Heitmann
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 147666935X
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Automobile and American Life, 2d ed. written by John Heitmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now revised and updated, this book tells the story of how the automobile transformed American life and how automotive design and technology have changed over time. It details cars' inception as a mechanical curiosity and later a plaything for the wealthy; racing and the promotion of the industry; Henry Ford and the advent of mass production; market competition during the 1920s; the development of roads and accompanying highway culture; the effects of the Great Depression and World War II; the automotive Golden Age of the 1950s; oil crises and the turbulent 1970s; the decline and then resurgence of the Big Three; and how American car culture has been represented in film, music and literature. Updated notes and a select bibliography serve as valuable resources to those interested in automotive history.

Author : Evgeny Steiner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780295977911
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stories for Little Comrades written by Evgeny Steiner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a major reassessment of their work, Evgeny Steiner forcefully demonstrates that the Constructivists were as committed to implementing Utopia - regardless of the human cost - as their establishment counterparts."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : R. W. Byrd
Publisher : Helion & Company Limited
ISBN 13 : 9781874622581
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Once I Had a Comrade written by R. W. Byrd and published by Helion & Company Limited. This book was released on 2006 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once I Had a Comrade is the story of the author's German father-in-law, Karl Roth, who grew up during the tumultuous 1930s in the Franconian town of Schweinfurt, located in northern Bavaria, and of his regiment, 36th Panzer Regiment. When the Second World War began, he found himself conscripted into the army and assigned as maintenance private to the headquarters company of Schweinfurt's new branch of service, the 36th Panzer Regiment, assigned to 4th Panzer Division until November 1940, 14th Panzer Division thereafter. They participated in the campaigns in Poland 1939, France 1940 and Yugoslavia 1941, before serving on the Eastern Front (southern sector) until destruction at Stalingrad 1943. The division was then rebuilt and again served in the southern sector of Russia before being transferred to Kurland in late 1944, where it saw out the rest of the war serving with 18th Army. During these campaigns, Karl Roth repaired nearly every type of tank in the German arsenal, holding the rank of master sergeant by the end of the war. After six years of conflict he survived being blown off his tank, dysentery, malaria, weeks separated behind enemy lines, a possible court-martial, and was awarded the Gold Tank Destruction Badge. As Richard Byrd began to research the story, several questions arose about the unit and his father-in-law, including: What kind of man was he? Where did he fight and what tactics were used? Why wasn't a regimental history written after the war? What was their strength and what strategic events affected them? Many of the answers to these questions were supplied by books, but more important than all the numbers and statistics gathered for the research were the first hand accounts related to him by his mother-in-law and survivors of the regiment, who have provided a host of original photographs and anecdotes explaining the human aspect of the 36th Panzer Regiment's history. This book then is a tribute to Roth and his comrades, and to all soldiers who aspire to commendable and honorable action during time of war. Key sales points: Provides the first history of 36th Panzer Regiment yet published in any language / Combines operational details with fascinating personal accounts telling the story of Karl Roth and his comrades / Features over 150 b/w photos, many previously unpublished / A major contribution to the history of the Panzertruppen.

Author : Robert Edelman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801466164
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spartak Moscow written by Robert Edelman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the informative, entertaining, and generously illustrated Spartak Moscow, a book that will be cheered by soccer fans worldwide, Robert Edelman finds in the stands and on the pitch keys to understanding everyday life under Stalin, Khrushchev, and their successors. Millions attended matches and obsessed about their favorite club, and their rowdiness on game day stood out as a moment of relative freedom in a society that championed conformity. This was particularly the case for the supporters of Spartak, which emerged from the rough proletarian Presnia district of Moscow and spent much of its history in fierce rivalry with Dinamo, the team of the secret police. To cheer for Spartak, Edelman shows, was a small and safe way of saying "no" to the fears and absurdities of high Stalinism; to understand Spartak is to understand how soccer explains Soviet life. Champions of the Soviet Elite League twelve times and eleven-time winner of the USSR Cup, Spartak was founded and led for seven decades by the four Starostin brothers, the most visible of whom were Nikolai and Andrei. Brilliant players turned skilled entrepreneurs, they were flexible enough to constantly change their business model to accommodate the dramatic shifts in Soviet policy. Whether because of their own financial wheeling and dealing or Spartak's too frequent success against state-sponsored teams, they were arrested in 1942 and spent twelve years in the gulag. Instead of facing hard labor and likely death, they were spared the harshness of their places of exile when they were asked by local camp commandants to coach the prisoners' football teams. Returning from the camps after Stalin's death, they took back the reins of a club whose mystique as the "people's team" was only enhanced by its status as a victim of Stalinist tyranny. Edelman covers the team from its days on the wild fields of prerevolutionary Russia through the post-Soviet period. Given its history, it was hardly surprising that Spartak adjusted quickly to the new, capitalist world of postsocialist Russia, going on to win the championship of the Russian Premier League nine times, the Russian Cup three times, and the CIS Commonwealth of Independent States Cup six times. In addition to providing a fresh and authoritative history of Soviet society as seen through its obsession with the world's most popular sport, Edelman, a well-known sports commentator, also provides biographies of Spartak's leading players over the course of a century and riveting play-by-play accounts of Spartak's most important matches-including such highlights as the day in 1989 when Spartak last won the Soviet Elite League on a Valery Shmarov free kick at the ninety-second minute. Throughout, he palpably evokes what it was like to cheer for the "Red and White."

Author : Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801455138
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Broad Is My Native Land written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-06 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether voluntary or coerced, hopeful or desperate, people moved in unprecedented numbers across Russia's vast territory during the twentieth century. Broad Is My Native Land is the first history of late imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia through the lens of migration. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch tell the stories of Russians on the move, capturing the rich variety of their experiences by distinguishing among categories of migrants—settlers, seasonal workers, migrants to the city, career and military migrants, evacuees and refugees, deportees, and itinerants. So vast and diverse was Russian political space that in their journeys, migrants often crossed multiple cultural, linguistic, and administrative borders. By comparing the institutions and experiences of migration across the century and placing Russia in an international context, Siegelbaum and Moch have made a magisterial contribution to both the history of Russia and the study of global migration.The authors draw on three kinds of sources: letters to authorities (typically appeals for assistance); the myriad forms employed in communication about the provision of transportation, food, accommodation, and employment for migrants; and interviews with and memoirs by people who moved or were moved, often under the most harrowing of circumstances. Taken together, these sources reveal the complex relationship between the regimes of state control that sought to regulate internal movement and the tactical repertoires employed by the migrants themselves in their often successful attempts to manipulate, resist, and survive these official directives.

Author : Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501747398
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stuck on Communism written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century—from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up through the implosion of the Soviet Union and beyond. Siegelbaum recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery in the tumult of student rebellion at Columbia University during the Vietnam War, graduate study at Oxford, and Moscow at the height of détente. His story takes the reader into the Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and the newly independent Uzbekistan. An intellectual autobiography that is also a biography of the field of Anglophone Soviet history, Stuck on Communism is a guide for how to lead a life on the Left that integrates political and professional commitments. Siegelbaum reveals the attractiveness of Communism as an object of study and its continued relevance decades after its disappearance from the landscape of its origin. Through the journey of a book that is in the end a romance, Siegelbaum discovers the truth in the notion that no matter what historians take as their subject, they are always writing about themselves.

Author : Mike Mueller
Publisher : Complete Book Series
ISBN 13 : 0760372888
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Complete Book of Ford Mustang written by Mike Mueller and published by Complete Book Series. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complete Book of Ford Mustang, 4th Edition details the development, technical specifications, and history of America’s original pony car, now updated to cover cars through the 2021 model year.

Author : Paulina Bren
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801462142
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Greengrocer and His TV written by Paulina Bren and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.