Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Dissolution of the Soviet Union


The collapse of the Soviet Union is one of those exceedingly complex events that seems to lie beyond the realm of basic understanding. Despite being one of the most momentous historical developments in the modern era, it is commonly explained in a pseudo-historical fashion, full of half-truths and outright misconceptions (Sorry, true American patriots, but Ronald Reagan didn’t single-handedly bring about the demise of the “Evil Empire.”)


Daggumit.
So how does a global superpower with a nuclear arsenal large enough to blow up the world many times over simply dissolve? Well, the explanation is multi-faceted, but can be explained through three main points:
  • "Cultural Thaw"
  • Protracted Economic & Political Stagnation
  • Destabilizing Reform


"Cultural Thaw"

If Joseph Stalin ruled with an iron fist, Nikita Khrushchev ruled with a leather shoe. 
In his effort to bring about "socialism with a human face," Khrushchev temporarily relaxed state-imposed censorship during his reign as General Secretary of the Communist Party in the 1950's and '60's. His principle objective in doing so was to push forward the "De-Stalinization Campaign," which denounced the Great Purges, Industrialization, and other inhumane aspects of the Stalinist regime. More than doing that, Khrushchev's unprecedented openness proved that the Soviet system could be safely challenged, at a time when reform-minded Soviet youths, including future General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, were coming of age.

Protracted Political & Economic Stagnation

The state's growth vegetated under Brezhnev, who suffered multiple strokes while in office.
Khrushchev wasn't without his critics, and after a series of unsuccessful reforms, he was removed from power by the Communist Party Secretariat in 1964. Under Leonid Brezhnev (see: Great Moments in Mustaches) and a series of gerontocrats (read: Geezers), Soviet political and economic life had quietly ground to a halt by the 1980's.
  • As much as 30% of the GDP was committed to military expenditure, causing the consumer & technology sectors of the Soviet economy to remain in infancy. 
  • The "advanced" industrial sector was inefficient & obsolete. Factories built during Stalin's First Five Year Plan (1928-32) continued to operate, and did so according to quotas based on the weight of their products, not on their profits.
  • From 1973-85, a lopsided 80% of Soviet earnings relied upon energy exports- which were sustained by the discovery of vast oil reserves in Siberia during the 1960's (Kotkin 15).
The Soviet economy failed to keep pace with those its capitalist contemporaries in the West, which had undergone unprecedented economic growth following World War II. The tenets of socialism held that it was a fundamentally superior system to capitalism, yet the stagnation of the Soviet economy suggested that system required change.

Destabilizing Reform

An idealist reformer, Gorbachev unwittingly sowed the seeds of inevitability.

Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in 1985 with the aim of initiating radical economic & political reforms to make socialism live up to the ideals of the October Revolution. Those sweeping liberal reforms came to be known as Glasnost and Perestroika, and had disastrous implications for the Soviet Union.
  • Glasnost, or "openness," eased censorship once again. It discredited not only Stalin, but the entirety of Soviet socialism by revealing the political & economic inefficiencies of the Soviet Bureaucracy to the general public.
  • Perestroika relaxed the planned economy, but without first introducing the market mechanisms needed to compete with advanced capitalist economies. The most advanced sectors of the economy (defense & heavy industry) were downsized, and Soviet industrial output plummeted.
  • To make matters worse, global oil prices sharply declined in the 1980's, submerging the oil-dependent Russian economy into an outright recession. Faced with crippling shortages, the USSR became reliant on foreign loans for importing goods that it could not afford.
Worse than the economic aspect of Perestroika, though, was the bureaucratic reform that it introduced:
  • Ever since the Russian Civil War, which immediately followed the October Revolution of 1917, a dual administrative structure existed within the USSR. The bureaucracy of the party grew alongside that of the state, acting as a central control mechanism for maintaining the unitary structure of the Soviet Union.
  • In 1989, Gorbachev disbanded the Communist Party Secretariat- replacing the unitary structure with a federalized one, which emphasized the state powers of the constituent republics of the Union.
  • With the socialist ideology of the Soviet Union discredited by Glasnost, the planned economy disrupted by Perestroika, and no central control mechanism in place, the Union Republics began to act as independent states.
Amazingly, the Soviet elite willingly disassembled the very institutional mechanisms that held the state together. Over the course of the next two years, the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe crumbled in a remarkably peaceful manner. The republics declared independence in a piecemeal fashion, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union formally dissolved on December 26, 1991.


_________________________________________________________________________________
Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.



Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The Photographic Past, Part II

At last, the long-awaited second installment of "The Photographic Past" is here. Rejoice and Ponder! This series of photos will take you from the United States to Outer Space; there's physicists and bicyclists, and that's not to mention Lennon's Missus...  Enjoy, folks.

One of 250,000 people in attendance for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington. August 28, 1963.


"Earthrise," a humbling & awe-inspiring photo brought to you by the crew of Apollo 17. December 1972.

Caption: A WWII-era military parade through Washington DC.
Alternate Caption: A scene from 1 of 14 upcoming movies about DC under attack.

The who's who of Quantum Theory: Almost every scientist mentioned in your high school textbooks in one photo...
(Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger,
Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and more.)

Yoko Ono & John Lennon following their marriage in Gibraltar, Spain- the inspiration behind "The Ballad of John and Yoko," The Beatles' final number one single in the UK. March 20, 1969.


The world's tallest buildings as of 1884; Yes, that's the Washington Monument (555 ft) checking in at Number One. Here's a modern diagram for reference.


Ok. What's more shocking here- the man LEANING OUT OF A MOVING CAR to oil the spokes of a bicycle mid-race, or Tour de France cyclist Gino Sciardis's BURGEONING LEG MUSCLES?
Please excuse the liberal use of capslock, but that gastrocnemius warrants it. 1949.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Remember

Every year since 2001, September 11th has carried with it an air of solemn reflection. The events of that day live on in infamy, much like the attacks on Pearl Harbor that occurred sixty years before. Please take a few moments out of your day to honor the memory of the 2,977 victims of the attacks, and to remember the resilience of the community's response in the wake of tragedy. We all watched the world change that day, in so many ways.


Sunday, September 8, 2013

A Sampler of Samples


Many have expressed frustration over the lack of originality in Hollywood lately, a trend that has been echoed to some degree by the music industry. The good folks at Universal, Sony, and Warner have been rehashing the same hit singles longer than ‘NSync patriarch Chris Kirkpatrick has been around (the old one, not the Fatone).  Their cyclical hit-peddling can be owed in large part to the use of sampling.

For those of you who haven't listened to any music released after the mid-1970's, a sample is "an excerpt from a musical recording that is used in another artist's recording" ("sample"). In the 1960's, bands such as The Beatles pioneered the use of tape loops (rhythmic or textural parts pre-recorded onto magnetic tape), setting off the psychedelic era of rock music ("Tape Loop"). Within a decade, DJs began manipulating vinyl on two turntables—an experiment in sampling that led to the proliferation of the electronic and disco music, profoundly influencing the sound of current pop & hip hop music.

Thanks, sampling.
Since vinyl exists mostly for hipsters and old people nowadays, most sampling is performed using computer programs. Rhythm breaks from existing songs are traditionally used to construct beats for new songs (see: James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” sampled by the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Sublime, and others), while melodic loops are utilized in more conspicuous ways (see: “Under Pressure vs. “Ice Ice Baby”).

Predictably, the use of sampling has prompted both legal and artistic controversy (most recently, over the similarities between Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” & Marvin Gaye’s 1977 classic “Got To Give It Up”).


While I’ll leave the moral and creative aspects of sampling to your own judgment, I will say that works prominently featuring sampled recordings can act as a gateway into the historical catalogue of music.

I promise you, his song is better.
The essence of History lies in viewing the past through the lens of the present, which sampled music allows us to do on a fundamental level. The following recordings are reconfigurations of past music that are analogous to modern historians’ interpretations of past events.

 M.I.A.- "Paper Planes" (Sampling "Straight to Hell," by The Clash)

 The Sugar Hill Gang- "Rapper's Delight"(Sampling "Good Times," by Chic)


Notorious B.I.G.- "Big Poppa" (Sampling "Between the Sheets," by The Isley Brothers)

  

_________________________________________________________________________________
"Sample." Def. 3. 2013. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Web. <http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/sample>.
"Tape Loop." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Aug. 2013. Web. 08 Sept. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_loop>.