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American Letters from Khrushchev's Russia - Surprising Impressions of Life Behind the Iron Curtain 1961-62 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
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American Letters from Khrushchev's Russia - Surprising Impressions of Life Behind the Iron Curtain 1961-62 (Paperback)
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Loot Price R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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During the Cold War our understanding of life in the Soviet Union
was layered with so much ideology and competition that it was
difficult to get a feel for the realities of daily existence there.
The early 1960s were seen in the West as the height of the 'Cold
War'. In the Soviet Union, however, they were perceived as the
'Khrushchev Thaw', a warming trend in Russia's political
atmosphere. Few Americans had access of sufficient duration to
paint a nuanced portrait of life there. A major exception was the
group of American graduate students who lived in the Soviet Union
for substantial periods of time under auspices of the US-USSR
Inter-University Exchange. This book describes the experiences of a
twenty-five-year-old Stanford medical student who participated in
that exchange during 1961-62. In American Letters from Khrushchev's
Russia he documents impressions gathered during a year of research
at Moscow State University. From that unprecedented vantage point
he shares candid insights on a vast range of topics. He describes a
visit to the Berlin Wall the week it went up and the rousing Moscow
State University reception of Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut who just
months earlier had performed the historic first flight of man in
space. And he describes shaking hands with Nikita Khrushchev during
a Fourth of July celebration at the US Ambassador's residence in
Moscow...an event that proved to be the setting for the first
contact between a US Embassy attache and the Soviet military
intelligence officer who tipped off the West to Khrushchev's plan
to install missiles in Cuba. The author describes typical attitudes
of Russian scientists, academics, and university students toward
such topics as the Stalinist past, the threat of nuclear war, and
the likelihood that peoples of the capitalist world could reach
communism without bloody revolutions. He describes exasperatingly
inefficient services and bureaucratic machinations intermixed with
spontaneous acts of genuine compassion and goodwill. And he
explores typical attitudes toward more personal aspects of life,
such as dating, marriage, parenting, professional life, and
religion. American Letters from Khrushchev's Russia will enrich
scholars' understanding of the interaction of the transient
totalitarian Soviet societal model with enduring Russian familial,
educational and religious institutions. The informal style will
make the book a fascinating read for anyone who wishes to
reconstruct the social atmosphere and conventional wisdom of
Russians during the early post-Stalinist era. It provides a rare
glimpse of life behind the curtain of a society unique in the
political history of humankind.
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