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Putin's war is a "special operation" against modernity. The invasion has been directed against Ukraine, but the war has a broader target: the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor. By trading oil and gas, promoting Trump and Brexit, spreading corruption, boosting inequality and homophobia, subsidizing far-right movements and destroying Ukraine, Putin's clique aims at suppressing the ongoing transformation of modern societies. Alexander Etkind distinguishes between Russia's pompous, weaponized paleomodernity, on the one hand, and the lean, decentralized gaiamodernity of the Anthropocene, on the other. Putin's clique has used various strategies – from climate denialism and electoral interference to war and genocide – to resist and subvert modernity. Working on political, cultural and even demographic levels, social mechanisms convert the vicious energy of the oil curse into all-out aggression. Dissecting these mechanisms, Etkind's brief but rigorous analyses of social structuration, cultural dynamics and family models reveal the agency that drives the Russian war against modernity. This short, sharp critique of the Russian regime combines political economy, social history and demography to predict the decolonizing and defederating of Russia.

William Christian Bullitt (1891-1967) was the most cosmopolitan U.S. diplomat of his time. Voted most brilliant in his class at Yale, he wrote novels, plays, essays, and coauthored a controversial biography of President Wilson with Sigmund Freud. A political visionary, his views were often contentious, although he was often proven right by the unfolding of events. Bullitt served the United States through two World Wars and foresaw the collapse of old regimes while becoming a sympathetic expert on both European and Russian socialism. He was a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1918), the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936), and Roosevelt's Ambassador to France (1936-1940). A friend of the Russian people and an early proponent of friendly relations with the new Soviet government under Lenin, his later experience as ambassador to Moscow led him to be among the first to warn of Stalin's aggressive intentions toward the West. Bullitt worked tirelessly to preserve European democracy until policy disagreements with his friend Franklin Roosevelt eventually sidelined him politically. While his famous disciples, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, led American diplomacy toward the USSR in the emerging Cold War, Bullitt became an early advocate of European unity. This multi-faceted biography sheds new light on the fascinating, deeply intellectual life of an important political figure who counted Lenin, Roosevelt, Chiang-Kai-Shek, Charles de Gaulle, and Sigmund Freud among his personal relationships in a life profoundly connected to the history of the twentieth century

This book advances a local, regional, and comparative analysis of the history of the sixty-eighters from Hungary and Romania between 1956 and 1975. The aim of the book is to answer to the following research question: to what extent does 'the long 1968' mark and change protest history? Another axis of my research, equally important, is: how can one genuinely distinguish between a protest, an opposition, and a pastime? Where did radicalisation truly begin, and when was it solely an auto-perception as a dissident? In other words, how can one truly distinguish between a leisure activity like listening to Radio Free Europe or exploring an altered state of consciousness, and an explicit political activity like organising a protest or writing subversive texts? Among other aims, the books's scope is to understand where a leisure activity ends, and a protest starts. By 'practicing counterculture,' did the youth wish to contest the system or simply express themselves? As method, oral history plays a crucial part. On a superficial level, the interviews helped to fill in the archival gap. However, oral testimonies proved to reveal much more than essential factual information. Oral history clarified how political and social events influenced the subjects' memory formation.