A look at how the desire to improve international status affects Russia's and China's foreign policies Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko argue that the desire for world status plays a key role in shaping the foreign policies of China and Russia. Applying social identity theory—the idea that individuals derive part of their identity from larger communities—to nations, they contend that China and Russia have used various modes of emulation, competition, and creativity to gain recognition from other countries and thus validate their respective identities. To make this argument, they analyze numerous cases, including Catherine the Great’s attempts to westernize Russia, China’s identity crises in the nineteenth century, and both countries’ responses to the end of the Cold War. The authors employ a multifaceted method of measuring status, factoring in influence and inclusion in multinational organizations, military clout, and cultural sway, among other considerations. Combined with historical precedent, this socio-psychological approach helps explain current trends in Russian and Chinese foreign policy.
A look at how the desire to improve international status affects Russia's and China's foreign policies Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko argue that the desire for world status plays a key role in shaping the foreign policies of China and Russia. Applying social identity theory--the idea that individuals derive part of their identity from larger communities--to nations, they contend that China and Russia have used various modes of emulation, competition, and creativity to gain recognition from other countries and thus validate their respective identities. To make this argument, they analyze numerous cases, including Catherine the Great's attempts to westernize Russia, China's identity crises in the nineteenth century, and both countries' responses to the end of the Cold War. The authors employ a multifaceted method of measuring status, factoring in influence and inclusion in multinational organizations, military clout, and cultural sway, among other considerations. Combined with historical precedent, this socio-psychological approach helps explain current trends in Russian and Chinese foreign policy.
This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.
This prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023. Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.
Miller addresses the fabric of interaction between the imperial authority and local communities in the Romanov empire. How did the authorities structure the space of the empire? What were the economic relations between the borderlands and the center? How was the use of different languages regulated? How did the central authorities and local officials implement policies regarding different population groups? How did the experience, acquired in particular borderlands, influence the policies elsewhere —among others—through officials who often changed their place of service during their careers? How did the local elites and communities react to the policies of the imperial authorities? How did they uphold their special interests if the empire encroached on them, but also—how did they collaborate with the empire and how did they use imperial resources for local interests?
The summer of 1980. The Moscow Olympics. A small pioneer camp on the banks of the Volga. The pioneers fall out, make up, play tricks. Romances start up among the young leaders. The river bus brings in drums of milk and boxes of pasta. Life in the quirky gingerbread cake buildings of the camp establishes its rhythms against the backdrop of the Volga’s ceaseless flow and the sunset’s daily blush over the Zhiguli mountains. But something, or someone, is at work. Something that no one except twelve-year-old Valerka can see for what it is. When he confides in the young leader Igor, only to be disbelieved, Valerka finds himself carrying the burden of what he knows completely alone. Valerka resists the vampires on principle, while Igor finally joins forces with him only when what is happening touches him personally. Together, they brace themselves to do battle with a power they have no reason to believe they can withstand. Ivanov brings us a gallery of colourful characters: idealistic, dogged Valerka; seventeen-year-old Igor, groping to find himself and on the way finding his first love; the spiky and beautiful Veronika; the blithely self-absorbed Anastasiika; the drunken doctor who knows too much; the steadily-growing cast of bloodsuckers and their ‘carcasses’. Through them, Ivanov gives us both a thriller and a book of subtlety and depth. Building steadily towards its enthralling climax, The Food Block crackles with delightful dialogue, exudes humour that does not make fun, and explores with apparently effortless insight the loves and energy, hopes and doubts, and fears and courage of childhood and youth.
Cosmology, anthropology, and Christology are deeply interrelated. This implies that one cannot talk about the structure of the world without human presence in it, as well as it is impossible to produce any reasonable understanding of humanity without positioning it in the universe. In the same fashion, in order to comprehend where the human capacity of predicating the universe comes from, one needs to appeal to humanity’s Divine Image, that is, to its archetype in the incarnate Christ. Whereas Christians traditionally believe that the human phenomenon is unique as created in the Divine Image, such scientific disciplines as evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, the sciences of artificial intelligence, psychology, and others, challenge the vision of humanity as a unique formation thus challenging the doctrine of Imago Dei. All these disciplines place humans in a mediocre position in the world accompanied by the feeling of anxiety, insecurity, and non-attunement to the universe. Theology needs to respond to these challenges by incorporating into its scope the data from the sciences in order to neutralize such anxieties. The resulting dialogue of theology with science provides a hermeneutics of the human condition with no objective to change the latter. Then the sense of the universe is disclosed from within the Divine Image reflecting the predicaments of the human created condition.
This monograph is devoted to the systematic presentation of foundations of the quantum field theory. Unlike numerous monographs devoted to this topic, a wide range of problems covered in this book are accompanied by their sufficiently clear interpretations and applications. An important significant feature of this monograph is the desire of the author to present mathematical problems of the quantum field theory with regard to new methods of the constructive and Euclidean field theory that appeared in the last thirty years of the 20th century and are based on the rigorous mathematical apparatus of functional analysis, the theory of operators, and the theory of generalized functions. The monograph is useful for students, post-graduate students, and young scientists who desire to understand not only the formality of construction of the quantum field theory but also its essence and connection with the classical mechanics, relativistic classical field theory, quantum mechanics, group theory, and the theory of path integral formalism.
“I did remember: Whenever we moved our troops, advanced or retreated, we had written ‘your turn,’ usually just ‘Y.T.,’ to confirm that we’d made our final decision . . . Looking at the letters now, I felt something in the world change forever.” Ukraine, 1984. The Soviet Union is creaking toward collapse, and a group of bored radiophysics students devise a strategy game to keep themselves entertained. But war games are no joke, and no sooner does their game get underway than the KGB pulls the students in for questioning. Eventually they’re released, but they remain marked men. Twenty years later, capitalism is in full swing when one member of the group, Davidov, receives an e-mail with a familiar ultimatum attached, signed, eerily, “Y.T.” Someone has revived the game, but it’s not any of his friends from the university . . . and the consequences now feel more real than ever. The first English-language publication of a major Russian novelist, Y.T. follows an innocent-seeming game to its darkest places, and the result is a disturbing vision of war and tyranny. Y.T. is a wildly inventive novel that explores the banality deep in the heart of a paranoid totalitarian state.
In 1964 Faisal bin Abdul Aziz became king of a country holding a quarter of the world's oil reserves, also home to Mecca and Medina. He was called 'the most powerful Arab ruler in centuries'. Eleven years later, in front of television cameras, his nephew shot him at point-blank range. In this authoritative biography, Alexei Vassiliev tells the story of a pious, cautious and resolute leader who steered Saudi Arabia through a minefield of domestic problems, inter-Arab relations and the decline of Soviet influence in the Middle East. King Faisal maintained ties with both Egypt and the United States through two Arab - Israeli wars and the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which revolutionized the world energy market. Throughout, he staked high hopes on cooperation with the US, a relationship that is still vital to both countries' interests. Exhaustively researched and including original documents and interviews in Arabic, Russian and English, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia: Personality, Faith and Times offers a unique perspective of this seminal figure and is key to understanding the Arab world today.
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.
This book provides an important review of the present state and possible future development of high-level nuclear waste disposals. The author discusses the structure, thermal history, and dynamics of the earth's crust, explaining their importance in nuclear safety. The author presents critical reviews of disposal methods and proposes an original method for high-level nuclear waste disposal that involves placing capsules with nuclear waste into deep boreholes filled with sulfur. The behavior of such a complex system is analyzed, considering such aspects as thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, possible chemical and mineralogical reactions, radionuclides diffusion, and mass transfer. The book takes a physical approach to nuclear waste disposal making it different from other books that take a geological viewpoint. A diskette included with the book provides modeling executive programs and Pascal computer codes that will be valuable for developing an in-depth understanding of calculations.
The Sense of the Universe deals with existential and phenomenological reflection upon modern cosmology with the aim to reveal hidden theological commitments in cosmology related to the mystery of human existence. The book proposes a new approach to the dialogue between science and theology based in a thorough philosophical analysis of acting forms of subjectivity involved in the study of the world and in religious experience. The book contributes to the synthesis of appropriation and incorporation of modern philosophical ideas in Christian theology, in particular its Eastern Orthodox form.
One of the most ambitious and wildly inventive novels to have come out of Russia in years, this short novel embraces the Brehznev years, the USSR's disintegration, and capitalist shock therapy in the post-Soviet blocThe eponymous hero, part of a brood of bored science students, helps concoct a strategy game set in different eras where each "ruler" of his territory competes in Orwellian permanent war. But the KGB uncovers highly plausible and suspicious military plans and a long penance for each "combatant" ensues. All too late, Istemi is the first to realize the mysterious and disturbingly prophetic nature of a seemingly innocent invention. He is powerless as events long foretold for each unfold, including a hellish tour of duty in Afghanistan, incarceration in an asylum, and mindless bureaucratic drudgery—but what fate awaits Istemi as communist absurdist reality turns into postcapitalism nightmare?
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