Christopher J . Ward
Dr. Christopher J. Ward serves as Professor of History at Clayton State University in metropolitan Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004. In 2010, Ward was named editor-in-chief of the journal The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review. Ward received his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002. He is the author of a number of publications, most notably Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism, which was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2009 and was reissued in paperback in 2010. He is also the co-author of Russia: A Historical Introduction from Kievan Rus' to the Present, which is currently in its eighth edition. In addition, Ward’s articles have appeared in the scholarly journals Global Crime (United Kingdom), Acta Slavica Iaponica (Japan), Problemy slavianovedeniia (Russia), and Canadian Slavonic Papers. Most recently, a chapter of his appeared in Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by William Jay Risch (Lexington Books, 2014).
Supervisors: Donald J. Raleigh
Supervisors: Donald J. Raleigh
less
InterestsView All (33)
Uploads
SPSR Editor's Notes by Christopher J . Ward
be considered.
Please contact Christopher J. Ward, Editor-in-Chief, at cward@clayton.edu for more information.
But BAM's story is not merely tragic. As Christopher Ward's book Brezhnev's Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism demonstrates, the tale of BAM is also a window into the complexities of the Brezhnev era. Historians commonly view this period as one of "zastoi," or stagnation. The BAM project, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. As Ward shows, we find a lot of things in the BAM initiative that are not captured by the "zastoi" interpretation, for example: a nascent Soviet environmental movement at loggerheads with the ecological destructiveness of Soviet Prometheanism; a flood of young volunteers driven by enthusiasm, opportunity, and a desire for freedom in the more libertine Soviet Far East; and, finally, a lot of crime, corruption, and sex (together with futile attempts to regulate and punish all of them). Ward's study of BAM suggests that the Soviet Union under Brezhnev wasn't so much stagnating as it was running about without any real idea of where it was going.