Collapse Of An Empire: Lessons For Modern Russia
Collapse Of An Empire: Lessons For Modern Russia >>>>> https://urloso.com/2tD5jI
Gaidar begins with an erudite, historically wide-ranging account of the collapse of many empires, ancient and modern, and then moves on to a briefer summation of the reasons contemporary authoritarian regimes also perish. This is but an impressive prelude to a detailed exposition of why the Soviet Union failed -- indeed, why at some point it had to fail. It was not, as many in his country want to believe, because of external intrigues or treasonous Soviet leaders but because of the \"very nature of the system.\" An anti-Marxist, Gaidar includes in his argument a strong element of economic determinism: economic development in the modern age dooms empires and authoritarians. The Soviet Union swirled to its death in an economic crisis, driven in no small part by its misplaced dependence on oil wealth. His quite explicit purpose is not simply to warn his fellow Russians against counting too heavily on oil revenues and yielding too easily to authoritarian solutions but also to strike against what he sees as a growing threat, the lingering hold of a \"post-imperial nostalgia\" on much of the political elite. This, he contends, is not only bad for Russia but also dangerous for everyone else.
A survey of the cultural, intellectual, political and socioeconomic developments of modern Western society, including the scientific revolution of the 17th Century, the Enlightenment, the age of democratic revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of nation-states, totalitarianism, two world wars, the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet system. Among the fundamental aims of the course is to identify the defining characteristics of different phases of Western historical development and to study the factors that precipitate long- and short-term historical change. The course is very broad in scope and seeks to provide students with a sense of how Western ideas, social relations and institutions have changed over time and how these changes are interrelated.
This course surveys the making of modern Germany from the creation of the Hohenzollern Empire under Bismarck until the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945. It examines the key social, economic, cultural, and political developments that led to the Empire's collapse at the end of the First World War, the founding of the Weimar Republic, and the rise and fall of Nazism. 781b155fdc