Böcker i Russian Shorts-serien

This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations - in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

In the first cultural and political history of the Russian nuclear age, Paul Josephson describes the rise of nuclear physics in the USSR, the enthusiastic pursuit of military and peaceful nuclear programs through the Chernobyl disaster and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ongoing, self-proclaimed 'renaissance' of nuclear power in Russia in the 21st century. At the height of their power, the Soviets commanded 39,000 nuclear warheads, yet claimed to be servants of the 'peaceful atom' - which they also pursued avidly. This book examines both military and peaceful Soviet and post-Soviet nuclear programs for the long durée - before the war, during the Cold War, and in Russia to the present - whilst also grappling with the political and ideological importance of nuclear technologies, the associated economic goals, the social and environmental costs, and the cultural embrace of nuclear power. Nuclear Russia probes the juncture of history of science and technology, political and cultural history, and environmental history. It considers the atom in Russian society as a reflection of Leninist technological utopianism, Cold War imperatives, scientific hubris, public acceptance, and a state desire to conquer nature. Furthermore the book examines the vital - and perhaps unexpected - significance of ethnicity and gender in nuclear history by looking at how Kazakhs and Nenets lost their homelands and their health in Russia in the wake of nuclear testing, as well as the surprising sexualization of the taming of the female atom in the Russian 'Miss Atom' contests that commenced in the 21st century.