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CATEGORIES:Academic,Lectures & Speakers,Research,Politics & Policy
DESCRIPTION:From Lenin and Stalin to Putin\, Russia's economic development 
 has relied on large scale technologies. These technologies—often called "he
 ro projects\," "projects of the century\," or "megaprojects"—have been cent
 ral to the nation's economic growth and military power. Despite their massi
 ve environmental and social costs\, hero technologies moved ahead in servic
 e of the unbridled interests of state officials\, the hubris of engineers\,
  and the coalescence of the masses under a national ideology of glorious ac
 hievement and military grandeur.\n\n \n\nIn Hero Projects\, Paul R. Josephs
 on traces how\, over the last one hundred years\, the Russian tsars\, commi
 ssars\, and oligarchs embraced megaprojects to create the world's largest e
 mpire. Built by peasants\, gulag prisoners\, and Communist volunteers\, the
  wide-ranging projects—including pipelines across the tundra\, railroads fr
 om Europe to the Pacific Ocean\, hydropower stations and canals from the no
 rthwest to arid Central Asia\, and nuclear facilities—forever altered the l
 andscape\, politics\, and society. As Josephson argues\, if hero projects w
 ere embraced by the public as showcasing technological wonder\, they have a
 lways ultimately served to enrich the Kremlin and demonstrate the nation's 
 technological prowess on the global stage. And they continue to be a major 
 feature of authoritarian Russian political rule in the twenty-first century
 \; having rebuilt Russia's resource state and pushed a self-proclaimed "ren
 aissance" of nuclear weapons and reactors\, Putin has determined in 2022 to
  expand the empire to its Soviet borders by war on Ukraine\, in Crimea\, an
 d against Georgia and Moldova.\n\n\n\nSweeping in scope\, Hero Projects es
 tablishes the strong continuities in political culture in Russian history\;
  reshapes the meaning of empire\, extending it to include internal coloniza
 tion\; and expands environmental and social history through the study of bi
 g technology.
DTEND:20240425T210000Z
DTSTAMP:20260416T112502Z
DTSTART:20240425T200000Z
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SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY:Hero Projects: The Russian Empire and Big Technology from Lenin to 
 Putin
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_46075858769531
URL:https://calendar.gwu.edu/event/hero-projects-the-russian-empire-and-big
 -technology-from-lenin-to-putin
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