TOL STORE

Slovakia on the Road to Independence: An American Diplomat's Eyewitness Account

During the breakup of the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe underwent transitions to democracy that involved varying degrees of struggle and turmoil. Czechoslovakia eventually split in two, with the establishment of separate Czech and Slovak republics in 1993. Paul Hacker witnessed this transition firsthand from his vantage point as head of the U.S. consulate in Bratislava. This is his story of U.S. diplomacy during this period, from the time the consulate was reestablished there in 1990 after a forty-year hiatus during the Cold War, through the opening of the U.S. Embassy in 1993 after Slovakia had gained its independence. The memoir covers the volatile political intrigues and changes of the era, the administrative challenges of operating a small diplomatic outpost and its dependency on the embassy based in Prague (headed for much of this period by the high-profile Shirley Temple Black as U.S. ambassador), tensions between Slovaks and Czechs and between the Slovak majority and its ethnic Hungarian minority population, the legacy of the Holocaust, and the developments that finally led to independence for Slovakia. In a final chapter, Hacker brings the story of Slovak post-independence political history up to the present, including Slovakia's accession to both NATO and the European Union.

The Russian Revolution excited men, and captured their imaginations. It seemed to herald the fulfillment of the nineteenth-century socialist movement. Socialists believed that with the proper use of technocracy they could scourge poverty and hunger from the earth. They felt that a social system based on equality and social justice could overcome the traditional division of each society into rich and poor. They were convinced that they could overcome social problems that, seething and bubbling beneath the surface, threatened to be as destructive as wars fought between great powers.

These were the ideals and objectives of both 1917 revolutions. They were exciting and contagious. The Russians were seen by many as being on the threshold of a new and great experiment, one which would lead the world to peace, democracy, and security-the dream of ages. Support grew quickly. A worldwide movement committed to the extension of the ideological and moral principles of the Revolution and to the defense of the Soviet Union grew and became a significant factor in world politics. It did not turn out that way.


Much of the story of this tragedy is to be found in labor struggles-the split between the Communist Party, the trade unions, and the workers. The labor movement, which had been pushing for a democratic alternative, turned against the Bolsheviks soon after 1917, and labor opposition left the Bolsheviks at the crossroads of history. The Bolsheviks had to choose between dictatorship or democracy. Under Lenin’s guidance they opted for minority dictator ship, the outcome of which was tyranny over the very people in whose name they fought. This classic volume, originally published in 1969, has not been surpassed as a description of how and why this occurred.

Neoliberalism, Accountability, and Reform Failures in Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Argentina, and Chile in Comparative Perspective

The agenda of neoliberal market reform known as the Washington Consensus, which was meant to turn around the economies of developing and post-Communist countries and provide the bedrock of economic success on which stable democracies could be built, has largely proved to be a failure, with Russia and many Latin American countries like Argentina left in severe economic crisis by the end of the 1990s.
Some proponents of neoliberal reform, such as Anne Krueger, have attributed this failure to the piecemeal and incomplete implementation of reform measures, while others, including Nobel Prize economist and former World Bank vice president Joseph Stiglitz, have pointed to technical flaws in the policies as the reason for failure. With both of these assessments focused narrowly on economic factors, Luigi Manzetti wants to highlight the crucial importance of political institutions and processes to a fully adequate explanation.
His argument is that the ideology of neoliberal reform, rooted in the theories of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, assumed political checks and balances that did not exist in many of these countries undergoing market reform, and that only by taking political accountability as an influential variable in the equation for success can we really understand what happened. Where accountability was weak, patterns of corruption, collusion, and patronage worked to undermine the intended aims of market reform. Manzetti uses both large-n statistical analyses and small-n case studies (of Argentina, Chile, and Russia) to provide empirical evidence for his argument.

Relations between China and Russia have evolved dramatically since their first diplomatic contact, particularly during the twentieth century. During the past decade China and Russia have made efforts to strengthen bilateral ties and improve cooperation on a number of diplomatic fronts. The People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation maintain exceptionally close and friendly relations, strong geopolitical and regional cooperation, and significant levels of trade. In The Future of China-Russia Relations, scholars from around the world explore the current state of the relationship between the two powers and assess the prospects for future cooperation and possible tensions in the new century. The contributors examine Russian and Chinese perspectives on a wide range of issues, including security, political relationships, economic interactions, and defense ties. This collection explores the energy courtship between the two nations and analyzes their interests and policies regarding Central Asia, the Korean Peninsula, and Taiwan.

Justice, Liberty, Security: New Challenges for EU External Relations

Focusing on the bold push forward in the European integration process and delving into the highly sensitive societal subjects relating to the expansion of the European Union, this collection provides an extensive overview of three major issues facing the EU today: immigration and asylum, civil law, and criminal law. Discussing how the development of justice and home affairs raises challenging issues, especially concerning the balance between justice, liberty, and security, this accessible guide offers a detailed analysis of the increasing importance of both internal and external European policies.

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

"The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy" is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland. The idea of democracy survived in Poland through long periods of foreign occupation, the trials of two world wars, and years of Communist subjugation. Whether in Poland itself or among exiles, Polish speculation about the creation of a liberal-democratic Poland has been central to modern Polish political thought. This volume is unique in that it traces the evolution of the idea of democracy, both during the periods when Poland was an independent country - 1918-1939 and after 1989 - and during the periods of foreign occupation before 1918 and through World War II and the Communist era. For those periods when Poland was not free, the volume discusses how the idea of democracy evolved among exile and underground Polish circles. This important work is the only single-volume English-language history of modern Polish democratic thought and parliamentary systems and represents the latest scholarly research by leading specialists from Europe and North America.

Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

The author of the acclaimed "Azerbaijan Diary and Chechnya Diary" now recounts his experiences in the strife-ridden Republic of Georgia. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia fell prey to a series of power struggles, rampant crime and corruption, secessionist wars, and the spillover of the war in neighboring Chechnya. Journalist Goltz traces these developments with the same kind of vivid, personal narrative that made his previous books so compelling. This fast-paced, first-person account is filled with memorable portraits of individuals in high places and low. It traces the story from 1992 through to the present, with a new epilogue for the paperback edition based on the author's experiences in Georgia during the August 2008 war.

Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989

Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers’ role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev’s senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand; and high-level CIA analyses, this volume offers a rare insider’s look at the historic, world-transforming events that culminated in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. Most of these records have never been published before.

Complementing the documents is the inclusion for the first time of the proceedings of an extraordinary face-to-face mutual interrogation (with scholars and documents ) in 1998 of Russian and American senior former officials—Gorbachev advisers Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov, Shevardnadze aide Sergei Tarasenko, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock and CIA chief Soviet analyst Douglas MacEachin—aimed at assessing and explaining Moscow and Washington’s policies during the miraculous year of 1989.

Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.

Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace--the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror--and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991

"Sounds of the Borderland" is the first book-length study of how popular music became a medium for political communication and contested identification during and after Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia. It extends existing cultural studies literature on music, politics, and the state, which has largely been grounded in Western European and North American political systems. It also responds to an emerging fascination with the culture and politics of contemporary south-east Europe, expanding scholarship on the post-Yugoslav conflicts by going on to encompass significant social and political changes into the present day. The outbreak of war in 1991 saw almost every professional musician in Croatia take part in a wave of patriotic music-making and the powerful state television system strive to bring popular music under its control. As the political imperative shifted from securing national survival to consolidating a homogenous nation-state, the music industry responded with several strategies for creating a national popular music, producing messages about the nation and, in the ongoing debates over the origins of the folk music that inspired many songs, a way to define the nation by expressing what Croatia was not. The war on ethnic ambiguity which cut through individuals' social and creative lives played out across the airwaves, sales racks and gossip columns of a small country that imagined itself a historical and cultural borderland. These explicit and implicit narratives of nationhood connect many political phases: the months of fiercest fighting, the stabilised front, the uneasy post-war years when the symbolic frontline region of eastern Slavonia had still not returned to Croatian sovereignty, the euphoria and instability after the end of the Tudjman regime in 2000, and Croatia's fraught journey towards the European Union. Baker's book provides valuable insight into the role of music in a wartime and post-conflict society and will be essential reading for researchers and students interested in south-east Europe or the transformation of entertainment during and after conflict.

Environmental Histories of the Cold War explores the links between the Cold War and the global environment, ranging from the environmental impacts of nuclear weapons to the political repercussions of environmentalism. Environmental change accelerated sharply during the Cold War years, and so did environmentalism as both a popular movement and a scientific preoccupation. Most Cold War history entirely overlooks this rise of environmentalism and the crescendo of environmental change. These historical subjects were not only simultaneous but also linked together in ways both straightforward and surprising. The contributors to this book present these connected issues as a global phenomenon, with chapters concerning China, the USSR, Europe, North America, Oceania, and elsewhere. The role of experts as agents and advocates of using the environment as a weapon in the Cold War or, contrastingly, of preventing environmental damage resulting from Cold War politics is also given broad attention.

Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985

How did rock music and other products of Western culture come to pervade youth culture in Brezhnev-era Dniepropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city essentially closed to outsiders and heavily policed by the KGB? In Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, Sergei I. Zhuk assesses the impact of Westernization on the city's youth, examining the degree to which the consumption of Western music, movies, and literature ultimately challenged the ideological control maintained by state officials. One among many of his stories is how the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar led Dniepropetrovsk's young people to embrace not just one, but two Soviet taboos: rock music and Christianity.

This book is the first historical study -- in any language -- of the everyday lives of Soviet urban youth during the Brezhnev era. A longtime student and resident of Dniepropetrovsk, Zhuk began research for this project in the 1990s. Weaving together diaries, interviews, oral histories, and KGB and party archival documents, he provides a vivid account of how Soviet cultural repression and unrest during the Brezhnev period laid the groundwork for a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism in the 1980s. In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post-Soviet national identity.