The 2014 Russia–Ukraine conflict has transformed relations between Russia and the West into what many are calling a new cold war. The West has slowly come to understand that Russia’s annexations and interventions, interference in elections, cyber warfare, disinformation, assassinations in Europe and support for anti-EU populists emerge from Vladimir Putin’s belief that Russia is at war with the West. This book shows that the crisis has deep roots in Russia’s inability to come to terms with an independent Ukrainian state, Moscow’s view of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions as Western conspiracies and, finally, its inability to understand that most Russian-speaking Ukrainians do not want to rejoin Russia. In Moscow’s eyes, Ukraine is central to rebuilding a sphere of influence within the former Soviet space and to re-establishing Russia as a great power. The book shows that the wide range of ‘hybrid’ tactics that Russia has deployed show continuity with the actions of the Soviet-era security services.

his kit helps decode the messages of political posters created by Soviet regimes from Lenin and Stalin through Brezhnev and Gorbachev. Teachers lead students through the interactive process of applying their historical knowledge to the analysis of these documents using background and additional information and carefully selected probe questions. Students will learn core information and vocabulary about the history of the USSR, political and historical perspectives as communicated through visual media, visual literacy and media literacy skills, especially the ability to identify bias in art and propaganda.

Through a series of articles written between 2013 and 2017, this book examines Ukraine during its period of conflict – from the protests and uprising of Euromaidan, to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces Donetsk and Luhansk. It also looks at Ukraine’s response to Russian incursions in the form of Decommunisation – the removal of Lenin statues, Communist symbols, and the imposition of the so-called Memory Laws of the spring of 2015. The book places these events in the context of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine’s geostrategic location between Russia and the European Union. It seeks to provide answers to questions that are too often mired in propaganda and invective and to assess whether the road Ukraine has taken is likely to end in success or failure.

This is the first book to analyse the Russian-Ukrainian war considering the role played by the Dnipropetrovsk region as the country’s forpost (outpost) in Russia’s war against Ukraine. In the Soviet Union, Dnipropetrovsk was a closed city due to its large military industrial complex, and it was the world’s biggest producer of nuclear missiles. This book analyses how a city that was once the pride of Soviet power became a bastion of Ukrainian patriotism in the face of Russian military aggression in 2014 and thereafter. Led by Jewish-Ukrainian Russian speakers, the city of Dnipro and the region of Dnipropetrovsk prevented the spread of the Kremlin’s so-called ‘New Russia’ project beyond the Donbas into the heart of Ukraine. This book challenges disinformation and stereotypes which portray Ukraine as a regionally divided country with the military conflict as a ‘civil war’ between Russian and Ukrainian speakers.

Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be).

Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways—cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on.

In this Wonder of the DayR, learners will be introduced to the French Revolution. They will explore what the French Revolution was,What caused the French Revolution, and What the French Revolution accomplished. 

This course will present a comparative overview of world history from the 17th century to the present era. The student will examine the origins of major economic, political, social, cultural, and technological trends of the past 400 years and explore the impact of these trends on world societies. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: Think critically about world history in the early modern and modern eras; Assess how global trade networks shaped the economic development of Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries; Identify the origins of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe and assess the social and political consequences of these movements for the peoples of Europe; Identify the origins of the Enlightenment in Europe and assess how Enlightenment ideas led to political and social revolutions in Europe and the Americas; Identify the origins of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Europe and assess how these intellectual and economic movements altered social, political, and economic life across the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries; Compare and contrast how European imperialism affected the states and peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the 19th century; Identify the origins of World War I and analyze how the war's outcome altered economic and political balances of power throughout the world; Identify the origins of totalitarian political movements across the globe in the 1920s and 1930s and assess how these movements led to World War II; Analyze how World War II reshaped power balances throughout the world and led to the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as global superpowers; Assess how decolonization movements in the 1950s and 1960s altered political, economic, and social relationships between the United States, the nations of Europe, and developing countries throughout the world; Assess how the end of the Cold War led to political and economic realignments throughout the world and encouraged the growth of new global markets and systems of trade and information exchange; Analyze and interpret primary source documents from the 17th century through the present, using historical research methods. (History 103)