What We Are Reading This Week
August 1991, Moscow residents read a statement by the leaders of a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratic reforms. The USSR dissolves later that year.
Credit: Alexander Nemenov via AFP/Getty Images
Julia Klimova, University College London
Victor Maxian and Amos Chapple, “Soviet Moldova, Then and now,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
Victor Maxian and Amos Chapple celebrate thirty years of Moldovan independence with a series of pictures capturing life under the Soviets.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, “Gorbachev says lessons of failed 1991 coup still relevant today.”
Thirty years after the dissolution of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, argues that there are still lessons to learn.
Jonathan Bousfield, “Marx on the beach: The forgotten story of Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school,” The Calvert Journal
Jonathan Bousfield writes about Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school that was attended by intellectual thinkers from both East and West in 1963 to 1974.
Mary Dejevsky, “For Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova the break-up of the union isn’t over,” Independent
Mary Dejevsky remembers her experience of the breakup of the Eastern block and discusses the remains of Soviet heritage in contemporary societies, arguing that many of them still have a long way to go in their transformation.
Cindy Ewing, University of Toronto
Timothy Nunan, “The end of nation building,” Noema Magazine
Timothy Nunan eschews analogies and reflects on the end of the United States’ experiment in Afghanistan through constructed myths about development, modernity, and internationalism that have fueled a long history of intervention there.
Michael Luo, “America was eager for Chinese immigrants. What happened,” The New Yorker
Mae Ngai’s new book, The Chinese Question, situates the history of Chinese migration to the United States in the nineteenth century gold rush within a global story about the coterminous evolution of race and capitalism in the modern era.
Rafael Vizcaíno, “Between the decolonial and the postcolonial: An interview with Mahmood Mamdani,” Political Theology Blog
An interview with Mahmood Mamdani explores the themes of nationalism and colonialism in his new book, Neither Settler nor Native, and its argument that genocidal violence is an essential facet of political modernity. For an excerpt from the book, see: “The South African model.”