person:leonid brezhnev

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena review – a blistering Latvian bestseller | Books | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/31/soviet-milk-by-nora-ikstena-review

Outre le fait que le livre a l’air d’être très intéressant, cette écrivaine nous fait l’honneur d’une visite sur notre île au milieu du fjord, nous pourrons discuter de cette œuvre.

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A century has passed since the Baltic state of Latvia officially became a nation, and for half that time it was part of the Soviet Union. It’s a bitter history and there’s a sense in Nora Ikstena’s bestselling novel, about women versus the state, of a hard-won creative reckoning.

Running from the end of the second world war to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel – Ikstena’s 20th – is narrated in alternating sections by an unnamed mother and daughter. “My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it,” says the mother, a fertility specialist whose medical career is blighted after she turns on the abusive husband of a childless woman who seeks her help during a research trip to Leningrad.

#Littérature #soviétisme #ex-urss #nora_ikstena

Putin Isn’t a Genius. He’s Leonid Brezhnev. – Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/12/putin-isnt-a-genius-hes-leonid-brezhnev

https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/putinbrezhnev.jpg

“There are two absolutely very well-known historical experiments in the world — East Germany and West Germany and North Korea and South Korea. Now these are cases that everyone can see!” So spoke Russian President Vladimir Putin in an address to the Duma in 2012. As a former KGB operative in communist East Germany, Putin knew of what he spoke. Communism was a “historic futility,” he later explained. “Communism and the power of the Soviets did not make Russia a prosperous country.” Its main legacy, he added, was “dooming our country to lagging steadily behind economically advanced countries. It was a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of world civilizations.”

Yet Russia today is lagging steadily behind economically advanced countries — and Russia’s president is doing nothing about it. Putin recently overtook Leonid Brezhnev as Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin. His economic record, coupling stability with stagnation, looks increasingly like Brezhnev’s too.
[…]
True, Russian economists, politicians, and business leaders are putting forth grand plans to revitalize the country’s economy. There are two main schools of thought. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who has worked with Putin since their days in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, has an array of proposals to liberalize Russia’s economy and to invest in Russia’s population.
[…]
Where Kudrin and his allies believe that Russia can attract investment only by making its economy more appealing to the private sector, an alternative camp thinks that Russia’s government should invest more itself. Russian politician Boris Titov, for example, has urged the government to sharply reduce interest rates, making it cheaper for firms to borrow. He also wants the government to subsidize loans to corporations and to invest directly in industry. Titov’s calls for state-backed investment are supported by many industrialists, who would stand to gain from government-funded infusions of credit.

The Soviet 70s: how Russians made pools of light in the totalitarian darkness | Angus Roxburgh | Opinion | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/06/soviet-union-kitchen-table-russian-revolution-centenary-togetherness

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As the world commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the focus is rightly on the horrors of the regime it ushered in.

Russians, and their captive nations, suffered a century of almost inconceivable pain. Tens of millions perished in the revolution and civil war, in the forced collectivisation of farming, the terror of the 1930s, and the second world war. Then came the postwar repressions, and finally the tumult of the end of communism and the bewildering attempts to introduce capitalism and democracy. Russians should be forgiven for being traumatised by their recent history.

The intelligentsia’s response was ’internal emigration’: free thinking actually stimulated by the lack of freedom

I lived in the Soviet Union for two years in the 1970s, at the height of the cold war, under the dead hand of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule. It was a state that isolated itself from the world, in which the Communist party attempted to exercise total ideological control. It believed that central state planners could organise the economy more efficiently than the market. In fact, the planned economy turned out to be barely controlled chaos, further muddled by everyday corruption and sheer bloody-mindedness. If a shop assistant was more interested in painting her nails than in serving you, there was little you could do about it.

#1917 #révolution_russe #urss #union_soviétique

Discrètement, au milieu de la fureur médiatique, le gouvernement états-unien ajoute quelques pelletées de terre sur le cercueil du grand homme et déclassifie pour la première fois les photos satellites du site d’expériences nucléaires du Kalahari (août 1977)

Proliferation Watch : US Intelligence Assessments of Potential Nuclear Powers, 1977–2001 | Wilson Center
▻http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/proliferation-watch-us-intelligence-assessments-potential-nuclear-powe

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/main-image-max-width-500/public/Satellite%20photo%20of%20Kalihari%20test%20site_0.jpg

The Soviet Union assisted the United States in its effort to curb South Africa’s nuclear program in August 1977 when Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sent President Jimmy Carter a message that Moscow’s spy satellites had noticed signs of nuclear weapons test preparations at a site in the Kalahari Desert. Very quickly the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) directed spy satellites to photograph the site which intelligence analysts later agreed was geared to nuclear testing. The U.S. government has declassified some of those satellite photographs for the first time.