05-15-2016, 11:50 PM
If the Great Patriotic War was not a huge social upheaval, then what was? Consider the changed position of the western border of the Soviet Union and the re-acquisition of the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin from Japan and the forcible transformation of most of central and Balkan Europe into the Soviet bloc, and the effective partitioning of Korea. The Soviet Union endured huge population shifts and demographic change, including gigantic military and civilian casualties due to the war with Nazi Germany -- and Nazi massacres (especially the Holocaust) that had no connection to any military objective.
Britain and America had things easy in contrast to the Soviet Union, but both countries were no less in a Crisis mode.
Maybe we have a need for books related to the generational history that Howe and Strauss have written about America also applicable to other countries. Does Russia fit the theory or does is it violate it?
The fall of the Soviet Union seems much less a crisis (far less violence) than either the Bolshevik Revolution or the Great Patriotic War. I do not have the last word on this -- and don't deserve it. Crises lasting 28 years are rare, but hardly impossible -- especially if the last part of the Crisis is imposed from elsewhere. Other eras have had similar length.
Britain and America had things easy in contrast to the Soviet Union, but both countries were no less in a Crisis mode.
Maybe we have a need for books related to the generational history that Howe and Strauss have written about America also applicable to other countries. Does Russia fit the theory or does is it violate it?
The fall of the Soviet Union seems much less a crisis (far less violence) than either the Bolshevik Revolution or the Great Patriotic War. I do not have the last word on this -- and don't deserve it. Crises lasting 28 years are rare, but hardly impossible -- especially if the last part of the Crisis is imposed from elsewhere. Other eras have had similar length.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.