Book
Sovietnam. Die UdSSR in Afghanistan 1979-1989
The Soviet-Afghan war was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. Afghanistan was not only the battlefield of the Soviet-American system competition, but was also a place of more or less violent Encounter between "modern" Soviets and "backward" Afghans.
An important aspect of the effectiveness of the strategy commemoration embodied in rituals, archives, virtual practices and other matters, is proposed term resonance - in response to the coherence the content and form of commemorative practices. An interesting question is how the new media, especially the Internet, resonates with the content posted on the collective memory, the last revaluation offline. So whether held online rediscovery Afghan phenomenon? In our view, there was a rather capsulisation of this phenomenon, as an escape from the resonance like a virtualization of military memory of the Afghan war.
The article considers the phenomenon of nostalgia for the late Soviet times. The author presents the results of his observations over the nostalgia segment of the Russian blogosphere. The article is based on the concepts of the past, collective memory and nostalgia, which have been worked out by M. Halbwachs, D. Lowenthal and S. Boym.
Narrative functions very greatly and are studied in a wide interdisciplinary spectrum. However, one of the functions of the narrative have not yet been studied in detail and therefore deserves a special attention. This is an alarm function: narratives can not only reconstruct past events, but they can also warn on the possible danger, predict the future events and simulate the reactions of recipients. In theoretical narratology, this function is perceived with caution: narrative is usually considered as a form referring to the past. At the same time, the applied research shows that narratives could be actively involved in the practices of predicting the future. This mechanism is largely based on the collective memory. The article deals on the problem of narrative representation of risk and its relation to collective memory.
The Asia-Pacific region is of growing importance for both the United States and Russia, each of which seeks to “pivot” or “rebalance” its global commitments toward Asia. Yet the focus of U.S.-Russia relations remains on Europe and the former Soviet Union, and neither country has paid sufficient attention to the implications of their respective Asian pivots for the bilateral relationship. Since U.S.-Russia relations in Asia and the Pacific remain underdeveloped, the region holds the potential to act as a sort of laboratory for trying out new mechanisms for bilateral and multilateral cooperation.
Both countries are turning to Asia primarily to benefit from Asia’s economic dynamism. At the same time, they recognize that Asia’s growth is imperiled by a range of traditional and nontraditional security threats, from the nuclear-tipped standoff on the Korean Peninsula to territorial disputes in the East China Sea and South China Sea to terrorism, climate change, migration, and other transnational challenges. Among the most important drivers of change in Asia is the continued rise of China, which is in different ways a critical partner for both Washington and Moscow.
Because Asia’s economic and security landscape remains in flux and the legacies of mistrust hanging over U.S.-Russia relations in Europe are less pronounced, Moscow and Washington have an opportunity to build more effective forms of cooperation from the ground up. This will require efforts from both sides. The United States must reconcile cooperation with Russia with its existing commitments, including long-standing alliance relationships and growing security cooperation with several states in the region. Russia’s challenge lies mainly in convincing states and regional institutions that it is an important player in the region—which in turn requires it to more fully integrate Siberia and the Russian Far East into Asia’s regional economy—and more than a regional satellite of China.
This article is about nostalgic memory of soviet regional intelligentsia.