1,721,126 research outputs found
Cucciolla/Pesenti: la maschera "suicidabile"
No full textAnalisi della figura di Riccardo Cucciolla nei film di Damiani, Ferrara, Montaldo e Vancini, attraverso la condizione del candidato "suicida" da parte di un potere oscuro, tipico dell'Italia degli anni della strategia della tensione, in concomitanza con un'esigenza di riforma del codice di procedura penale
La «promessa infranta»: la Russia e l’allargamento della NATO
No full textIntroduzione
Le idee sbagliate sul conflitto - Marcello Flores e Niccolò Pianciola
L’Ucraina post sovietica: nazione etnica e nazione politica - Simone Attilio Bellezza
Il crollo dell’URSS: insegnamenti per chi voglia ricostruire l’Impero - Marco Buttino
La «promessa infranta»: la Russia e l’allargamento della NATO - Riccardo Mario Cucciolla e Niccolò Pianciola
La questione russa e i limiti della politica di influenza moscovita nelle Repubbliche ex sovietiche - Carolina de Stefano
Perché i russi sostengono l’avventura mortifera di Putin - Alexis Berelowitch
Guerra e memoria nella Russia di Putin - Andrea Gullotta
Il genocidio: l’accusa di Putin nella terra dell’Holodomor - Marcello Flores
«La guerra che verrà / non è la prima». Il diritto internazionale alla prova della crisi ucraina - Gabriele Della Morte
La memoria del passato nella Russia di Putin - Francesca Gori
Bibliografia
Profili degli autori
Memorial Itali
State and Political Discourse in Russia
No full textThe collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the de-legitimization of Marxism-Leninism as the primary state and political discourse in post-Soviet Russia.
Nowadays, instead of forming an official and explicit ideology, the Russian political space offers a multiplicity of political discourses associated with the contemporary state and its various organs, such as: the Party, the presidential administration, the bureaucracies and media or with the different places of ideological production such as scholars, think tanks and other intellectuals revealing plurality and fluidity within their political languages.
The main neo-conservative ideological constructs promoted by Moscow (its’ statism, counterrevolution and anti-‘Maidanism’, traditional values, sovereign democracy, unique civilization, nation, real Europe etc.) are apparently correllated in terms of their mutual influences, adaptations, imitations or rejections with their existing counterparts and similar notions in the West.
The apparent demise of Russian notions of Liberalism; the multiplicity of ‘liberalisms’ in contemporary Russia; the influence of the Soviet experience, perestroika, the instability of the 90s, of Western thought and foreign policies on Russia’s liberal ideas and expectations; all continue to determine the role of the remaining institutions and actors promoting political, economic and constitutional liberalism, manifesting as an alternative discourse that, although weakened, is still accredited
The Power State is Back? The Evolution of Russian Political Thought After 1991
No full textThis volume, based on the proceedings from “The evolution of Russian Political Thought After 1991” workshop organized by Reset-Dialogues (Berlin, 22-23 June 2015), is aimed at analysing the cultural background of the political and economic élites in post-Soviet Russia and other post-Soviet countries in order to understand and explain today’s prevailing nationalist political ideologies and behaviours of post-Soviet élites.
To avoid the repetition of old clichés (liberal-western opinions versus a despotic eastern world) the international scientific community has to overcome the lack of knowledge about Russia’s post-Soviet history and raise a second, but not less important, question: what intellectual and human resources can we find in the Russian past and present that suggest latent potentials for democracy and freedom
The many dimensions of Russian liberalism
No full textLiberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within usually rapidly-changing institutional and international settings. This volume provides a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience—through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists, and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law (Pravovoe Gosudarstvo), and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). The second part focuses on Soviet times when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR. The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Although Russian liberals had begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals.” Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism
The Crisis of Soviet Power in Central Asia: The 'Uzbek cotton affair' (1975-1991)
Full text linkThe crisis of Soviet power in Central Asia: The 'Uzbek cotton affair', 1975-1991 aims at reconstructing and interpreting the final phases of Soviet political history and its effects in Uzbekistan. To this end, the reconstruction of the ‘Uzbek cotton affair’ – a judicial and political case linking the falsification of cotton production data and corruption that involved thousands of party and state officials in the republic – is something of a case study in evaluating Moscow’s grip on the ‘periphery’ of its empire. This case tracks the life story of Uzbekistan from its consolidation as a Soviet republic, through crisis and ultimately its transition into an independent state. Thus, we can identify ‘the Uzbek cotton affair’ as a critical reason for the transformations within republican political society. At the same time, it can be read as a symptom of a greater incurable disease within the whole Soviet Union itself, a system that collapsed when this kind of top-down hierarchical order – led by ideology, elite politics, social forces and interest groups and even administrators and bureaucrats – cracked down. This dissertation is divided in three parts with a total of seven chapters. The first part is introductory and aims to contextualize the Uzbek ‘periphery’ within the Soviet state, at both the political and at socio-economic level. In the first chapter, I introduce the political features that determined the consolidation of Soviet power in the UzSSR. After the formation of Uzbekistan, the Stalinist terror and the destalinization transition, the Soviet leadership transitioned to a peaceful, decentralized and tolerant pattern of control over the farthest regions of the USSR. During the 70s, the Moscow leadership and the republican party cadres built a patrimonial system that relied on local figures who could ensure loyalty to the central state. This led to the creation of autonomous client networks inside the republic and the mediation of the FS CPUz between Moscow and the national elites. This approach was particularly evident during the long ‘reign’ of the FS CPUz Sharaf Rashidov (1959-1983), a controversial figure at the center of the Cold War who – as we will see in the second chapter – turned Uzbekistan into a ‘cotton republic.’ In fact, the UzSSR became the main supplier of ‘white gold’ and from the ‘60s it essentially doubled down on cotton monoculture as a strategic task for ‘building communism’: for the tenth FYP (1976-1981), Soviet planners demanded an annual production of six million tons of raw cotton from Tashkent and reaching this target at any cost became a matter of political stability and legitimacy for the Uzbek ruling elite. The second part is argumentative and focuses on the three phases of the ‘Uzbek cotton affair.’ Hence, the third chapter analyzes the context of the second economy in the USSR and the features related to corruption and falsification of cotton production data in Uzbekistan. The rise of Andropov and his ‘moralization campaign’ would see an attempt to legalize, cleanse and – ultimately – revitalize a system in which stagnation and fraud had reached unprecedented levels. In 1983, the so called ‘Bukhara affair’ exposed the level of ‘official corruption’ and overwhelmed the higher echelons of the party and state of the UzSSR. Nevertheless, this ‘silent phase’ – characterized by preliminary inquiries, the preservation of power structures in Uzbekistan and general institutional silence – culminated in the death of Rashidov, the subsequent struggle among local elites and a nominal transformation of the patrimonial system. Thus, in the fourth chapter we analyze the ‘systemic phase’ of the Uzbek affair (1984-1985), when Moscow’s moralizing campaign was extended during the XVI plenum CPUz (1984) to map on to discord within the national party elites, the donos (complaints) wars and the internal struggles within the bureaucracy in post-Rashidovian Uzbekistan. The fifth chapter analyzes Moscow’s subsequent ‘trusteeship’ over the republic, reflected in the ‘krasnyi desant’ campaign endorsed by the CC CPSU, the derashidovization crusade, and the zenith of internal struggles in the wake of the ouster of the FS CPUz Usmankhodzhaev and his replacement with the Moscow loyalist Nishanov who attempted and failed to destroy local patrimonial networks. Third and final part is aimed at evaluating the results of the Uzbek cotton affair in the center and in the periphery, and see if this story became a factor determining the collapse of the Soviet system as in Moscow as in Tashkent. The sixth chapter focuses on the investigators Gdlyan and Ivanov who became a symbol of the prosecution of the ‘big fish’ and alleged prominent members of the CC CPSU – and even Gorbachev – of being in collusion with the ‘Uzbek mafiya.’ The case, the related media circus and the political campaign of the two radical mavericks threatened the credibility of Gorbachev and the legitimacy of the CPSU, the state and its survival in a time of serious changes and great internal challenges. Democrats and the inner opposition to the Gensek in the CPSU exploited the ‘Gdlyan-Ivanov affair’, and the whole case became a symptom of the collapsing system. The seventh chapter deals with the myth-building of the ‘Uzbek cotton affair’ in early Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where the story was narrated using critical discourse – such as ‘colonial,’ ‘purge,’ ‘terror,’ ‘new 1937,’ and even ‘genocide’ – in a Republic that had once been considered one of the most loyal within the Soviet system. Thus, the ‘Uzbek affair’ became a crucial event of Karimov’s ‘ideological shift’ from communism to Mustaqillik – the ideology based on the values of the Uzbek independence – and a sensitive identity issue of revenge/resistance against the former rulers, investing in a post-colonial trauma that contributed to legitimize the president’s regime and his relations with local power networks. Thus, dealing with recent Soviet times still represents a great challenge for contemporary historiography. The last decades of USSR history are still debated, defining a period that needs more work still to understand the characteristics, the limits and the contradictions that led to the end of the Soviet system. In that sense my primary goal in reconstructing these crucial and still obscure events here has been historiographical and it is intended at using primary unpublished sources, literature and oral history to uncover opaque aspects of the past. Relatedly, this research aims at offering a non-centrally oriented historiographical reconstruction of the final decades of the Soviet system, analyzing the evolutions of patrimonialism in USSR and the impact of perestroika, the dynamics of the purges and the symptoms of the collapse in the periphery of the empire in order to fill a historiographical gap of research on perestroika in Central Asia that is practically nonexistent. Furthermore, this research aims to recompose the framework of the ‘Uzbek cotton affair’ beyond its existence as a ‘simplistic label’ created by the media and too often related to the ‘Gdlyan-Ivanov affair’ only. Nevertheless, the case proceeded at different levels involving the party, prokuratura, MVD, KGB and soviets at the local and even at the central level, while only a part of the corruption and the other ‘negative phenomena’ revealed in the republic were related to cotton and a great part of the involved officials were not Uzbeks. Finally, this research aims at interpreting the last decades of Soviet history through a new interpretative key to understand how collapse-symptoms that had been exploited in Moscow and in Tashkent in order to avow the split from the USSR. The research is based on extensive unpublished archival material, literature and interviews and is aimed at expanding the horizon of current historiography
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