Konecny (history, Carleton U.) explores how students in the rapidly expanding higher education system in Leningrad attempted to accommodate personal ambition and cultural tradition with the obligations that came with their privileged status. He discusses changes in the higher education system and everyday life from the pre-Revolutionary period to the beginning of WWII, considering the world of politics and political activism, training in and out of the classroom, and the ways in which students both conformed to and deviated from explicit standards of social conduct under Stalinism. Canadian card order number: C99-900681- 9. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ayn Rand remains a truly significant figure of modern philosophy. Her unique vision of a world in which man, relying on reason, acts wholly for his own good is skillfully developed and illustrated in her most famous novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. But Rand's first novel, We the Living, a lesser-known but no less important book, offers an early form of the author's nascent philosophy—the philosophy Rand later called Objectivism. In the second edition, Robert Mayhew once again brings together pre-eminent scholars of Rand's writing. The edition includes three new chapters, as well as an epilogue by renowned Rand-scholar Leonard Peikoff. In part a history of We the Living, from its earliest drafts to the Italian film later based upon it, Mayhew's collection goes on to explore the enduring significance of Rand's first novel as a work both of philosophy and of literature. For Ayn Rand scholars and fans alike, this enhanced second edition is a compelling examination of a novel that set the tone for some of the most influential philosophical literature to follow.

The study of Soviet youth has long lagged behind the comprehensive research conducted on Western European youth culture. In an era that saw the emergence of youth movements of all sorts across Europe, the Soviet Komsomol was the first state-sponsored youth organization, in the first communist country. Born out of an autonomous youth movement that emerged in 1917, the Komsomol eventually became the last link in a chain of Soviet socializing agencies which organized the young. Based on extensive archival research and building upon recent research on Soviet youth, this book broadens our understanding of the social and political dimension of Komsomol membership during the momentous period 1917–1932. It sheds light on the complicated interchange between ideology, policy and reality in the league's evolution, highlighting the important role ordinary members played. The transformation of the country shaped Komsomol members and their league's social identity, institutional structure and social psychology, and vice versa, the organization itself became a crucial force in the dramatic changes of that time. The book investigates the complex dialogue between the Communist Youth League and the regime, unravelling the intricate process that transformed the Komsomol into a mere institution for political socialization serving the regime's quest for social engineering and control.

A revelatory look at a momentous undertaking-from the workers' point of view The Panama Canal has long been celebrated as a triumph of American engineering and ingenuity. In The Canal Builders, Julie Greene reveals that this emphasis has obscured a far more remarkable element of the historic enterprise: the tens of thousands of workingmen and workingwomen who traveled from all around the world to build it. Greene looks past the mythology surrounding the canal to expose the difficult working conditions and discriminatory policies involved in its construction. Drawing extensively on letters, memoirs, and government documents, the book chronicles both the struggles and the triumphs of the workers and their fami­lies. Prodigiously researched and vividly told, The Canal Builders explores the human dimensions of one of the world's greatest labor mobilizations, and reveals how it launched America's twentieth-century empire.

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Dictatorships destroy intellectual freedom, yet universities need it. How, then, can universities function under dictatorships? Are they more a support or a danger for the system? In this volume, leading experts from five countries explore the many dimensions of accommodation and conflict, control and independence, as well as subservience and resistance that characterized the relationship of universities to dictatorial regimes in communist and fascist states during the twentieth century: Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Francoist Spain, Maoist China, the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc countries of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Comparisons across these cases reveal that the higher-education policies of modern dictatorships were characterized by a basic conflict of aims. On the one hand, universities were supposed to propagate reigning ideology and serve as training grounds for a dependable elite. Consequently, university autonomy was restricted, research used for political legitimation, personnel policies subjected to political calculus, and many undesired scholars simply put out on the street. On the other hand, modern dictatorships needed well-educated scientists, physicians, teachers, and engineers for the implementation of their political, economic, and military agendas. Communist and fascist leaders thus confronted the basic question of whether universities should be seen primarily as producers of ideology and functionaries loyal to the party line or as places where indispensable knowledge was made available. Dictatorships that opted to subject universities to rigorous political control reduced their scholarly productivity. But if the institutes of higher learning were left with too much autonomy, there was a danger that they would go astray politically. Besides the editors, the contributors are Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Michael David-Fox, Jan Havránek, Ralph Jessen, György Péteri, Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, and Douglas Stiffler.

"American quarterly of Soviet and East European studies" (varies).