Brad’s Reviews > The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 > Status Update

"There is scarcely a scientific axiom that is not nowadays denied by somebody. And at the same time almost any nonsensical theory would be almost sure to find believers and disciples somewhere or other." - Max Planck, 1933

Well damn.

"The USSR remained culturally fallow, at least in comparison with its pre-1917 glories."

"The light shining out of Communist China in the arts remained dim."

Yikes, some major Eurocentric pompousness. Kristen Ghodsee had some similar critiques of the Soviet system (particularly during the 30s/40s), but it's possible to have those and still recognize artistic merit.

"It is an interesting sign of the interpenetration of official reformers and dissident thinking in the Brezhnev years, that glasnost was what the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had called for in his open letter to the Congress of the Union of Soviet writers in 1967, before his expulsion from the USSR."

Interesting indeed.

"The aims of Communist economic reformers since the 1950s had been to make the centrally planned command economies more rational and flexible by the introduction of market pricing and calculations of profit and loss in enterprises."

This was *one path* put forward. Another group put hopes in the field of cybernetics, and linear programming. See my reviews of "Balkan Cyberia" and Kantorovich.

"It remained a police state, an authoritarian society and...an unfree one."

"In all these respects [i.e. freedom of travel and speech] the USSR remained distinctly inferior to Tsarist Russia."

"Unlike the USSR, the USA was a democracy."

Some nuggets of conventional rhetorical wisdom from this brick of a book. Sigh.

"The shift in labour's mood was far more significant than the great burst of student unrest in and around 1968...Its cultural significance was far greater than its political significance."

"So 1968 was neither an end nor a beginning, but only a signal. Unlike the wage explosion, the collapse [Bretton Woods]...it does not figure much in the explanation of economic historians about the end of the Golden Age."

"The most convenient world for multinational giants is one populated by dwarf states or no states at all."

Some good, some cringe. Maybe not a go-to read when you're overtired.
Not feeling the hype, but gonna see this one through.