SSCS Speaker Series: Jeffrey Surovell "The First Time as Deception, the Second As Farce: Post-Soviet Russian Policy Vis-a-Vis NATO Expansion and the Wars in Yugoslavia
6:45 PM
The Department of
Social Science and Cultural Studies
Speakers Series
2012-2013
presents
Social Science and Cultural Studies
Speakers Series
2012-2013
presents
Jeffrey Surovell
The First Time as Deception, the Second As Farce:
Post-Soviet Russian Policy Vis-a-vis NATO Expansion and the Wars in Yugoslavia
Post-Soviet Russian Policy Vis-a-vis NATO Expansion and the Wars in Yugoslavia
Tuesday, November 27th
5pm
Library Alumni Reading Room
Please join us for our final speaker for Fall 2012, Jeff Sorovell of the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies discussing a topic of increasing importance as social conflicts involving the US, Russia, and NATO intensify in Syria, Spain, Greece, Gaza and around the Mediterranean.
It has been a practically universal assumption among Russian studies analysts--indeed, people generally--that Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union has been an "opponent" of the West's policies. This was nowhere more manifest than toward the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO, probably the most momentous foreign policy issues of the early post-Soviet years. My talk will attempt to demonstrate that far from being an "opponent," Moscow has in fact been a willing accomplice in the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and played the dutiful role of the West's "errand boy" in its campaign to coerce Belgrade to submit to NATO's dictates. These cases demonstrate, above all, the close community of interests that exists between Russia's capitalist elites and their Western "masters."
Jeff Surovell has written on Soviet and post-Soviet Russian domestic politics and foreign policy, including politics and foreign policy (vis-a-vis the Third World) in the Soviet era, Russian economic and political developments after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Moscow's policy vis-a-vis the advanced capitalist countries. In his book, Capitalist Russia and the West (2000), Surovell became the first to apply Marxist class analysis and dependency theory to the field of Russian politics, an approach which hardly endeared him to either the ruling elites in Russia and the West or the mainstream within the--universally pro-Western--community of analysts in the field of Russian studies. Surovell is Adjunct Associate Professor of History in the department.
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