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The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy
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2012
Summary
In The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, Metta Spencer recounts the political and military changes that have occurred in Russia up to mid-2010. Using hundreds of interviews she conducted with officials, dissidents, and liberal intellectuals, she describes the various groups, forces, and individuals that worked to liberalize the totalitarian Soviet Union and its fellow nations behind the Iron Curtain, and which ultimately brought about the dissolution of those repressive governments. Spencer identifies four political orientations to describe Soviet society: 'Sheep,' ordinary citizens who accepted the undemocratic regime they lived in without challenging it; 'Dinosaurs,' hard-line Communist officials; 'Termites,' including Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers and government; and 'Barking Dogs,' a few hundred dissidents who made 'a lot of noise' protesting, hoping to awaken a grass-roots demand for democracy. The strange rivalry between the Termites and Barking Dogs would ultimately doom perestroika. Spencer's research dispels the widely-held perception that US President Ronald Reagan 'won' the Cold War by standing firm until the Soviet Union 'blinked first.' There are vitally important lessons to be learned from the Soviet period, about how to assist citizens of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the world. The irony is that transnational civil society organizations, major sources of the progress in Soviet Russia, are still needed today in authoritarian Russia, under Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, for totalitarianism remains a potential social trap. In The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, Metta Spencer suggests new ways of building urgently-needed social capital in today's Russia, where democracy has yet to flourish.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2012
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-4472-5
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-4474-9
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
340
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Table of Contents No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 4
Chapter 1: Termites and Barking Dogs No access Pages 5 - 34
Chapter 2: Social Capital and Ideology No access Pages 35 - 56
Chapter 3: Two Scientists, Two Paths No access Pages 57 - 66
Chapter 4: Foreign Communists No access Pages 67 - 86
Chapter 5: Three Freelance Diplomats No access Pages 87 - 102
Chapter 6: A Civil Society: Elite Bears and Doves No access Pages 103 - 118
Chapter 7: Scientists and Weaponeers No access Pages 119 - 136
Chapter 8: In The Hands of Experts No access Pages 137 - 170
Chapter 9: Do Peace and Democracy Work? No access Pages 171 - 204
Chapter 10: The Soviet Peace Movement At The Time of The Coup No access Pages 205 - 218
Chapter 11: The End and The Beginning No access Pages 219 - 248
Chapter 12: From Below and Sideways No access Pages 249 - 282
Chapter 13: Social Traps-Toward an Explanation of Totalitarianism No access Pages 283 - 296
Chapter 14: Quest? What Quest? No access Pages 297 - 306
Chapter 15: Conclusion No access Pages 307 - 316
Acknowledgements No access Pages 317 - 318
Bibliography No access Pages 319 - 327
RussianPeaceAndDemocracy.com No access Pages 328 - 328
