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Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

The year 1988 marks a special anniversary for Russia. Exactly 1,000 years ago Christianity was officially introduced into Russia from Byzantium. This was accomplished when, in 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev ordered a mass baptism of the Russian people

In this study I revisit the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, in order to gain additional perspective on the relationship between organizational decision making and crisis outcomes. This exercise is an historical “counterfactual” or “what if” excursion, using recently declassified documents and simulated exchange calculations, from which I hope to draw three principal benefits. First, the study may shed some additional light on why Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was willing to take such a dangerous gamble. Second, our counterfactual crisis suggests that the risk of inadvertent war, so much written about in connection with Cuba, 1962, was less important than the risk of a deliberate, but miscalculated, escalation. Third, the balance of command and control vulnerability might have mattered more to crisis‐ridden US leaders than the balance of strategic nuclear forces. If so, it helps to explain the apparent reluctance of US leaders to employ highly coercive forms of nuclear brinkmanship.

President John F. Kennedy navigated through the Cuban missile crisis with the help of his advisers in the so-called ExComm. While ExComm attendance was very stable and its goal, the removal of the missiles, clear, true to the garbage can model the options available were socially constructed and were ambiguously related to the objective they purportedly served. An analysis of the recorded discussions reveals that Kennedy's choice of a blockade required the ExComm to suppress talk about the perils it entailed; his decision not to intercept a Soviet tanker was based less on caution than unsustainable indecision; and when Kennedy squared off against his advisers regarding the best way to respond to Khrushchev's conflicting offers on October 26 and 27, the latter worked to exclude him from the very decision he was about to make. The analysis points to a natural affinity between the garbage can model and ethnomethodological attention to the fine-grained details of deliberative talk.

Given the effective collapse of efforts to introduce the market economy in many former communist countries it is perhaps time to look beyond the recommendations of the pro‐market economics mainstream. This article seeks to clearly explain Dr Kalecki’s theory of growth under socialism and to fully explain his notion of perspective planning. It then considers why such rational planning failed to be implemented under Communism. Finally, after identifying the necessary political/social conditions for successful perspective planning, it contemplates whether Russia, or similar collapsing former communist countries, could actually successfully implement rational perspective planning today.

Gorbachev′s vision of democratic, decentralised and market‐oriented socialism has generated diverse and controversial perceptions in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev′s claim that the USSR is not retreating from socialism but advancing towards it, having dismantled the Stalinist Command model, is assessed.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge Cold War binaries, seeking a more nuanced understanding of popular experience of change in the Soviet Union’s last decades. This was a period of intensive modernization and rapid transformation in Soviet citizens’ everyday material environment, marked by the mass move to newly constructed housing and by changing relations with goods.

To probe popular experience and changing meanings, the paper turns to qualitative, subjective sources, drawing on oral history interviews (Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat, 2004-2007).

The paper finds that qualitative changes took place in Soviet popular consumer culture during the 1960s-1970s, as millions of people made home in new housing amid the widespread media circulation of authoritative images representing a desirable modern lifestyle and modernist aesthetic. Soviet people began to make aesthetic or semiotic distinctions between functionally identical goods and were concerned to find the right furniture to fit a desired lifestyle, aesthetic ideal and sense of self.

The problem is how to conceptualize the trajectory of change in ways that do justice to historical subjects’ experience and narratives, while avoiding uncritically reproducing Cold War binaries or perpetuating the normative status claimed by the postwar West in defining modernity and consumer culture.

The paper challenges dominant Cold War narratives, according to which Soviet popular relations with goods were encompassed by shortage and necessity. It advances understanding of the specific form of modern consumer culture, which, it argues, took shape in the USSR after Stalin.

In this article, we use the film Bridge of Spies – which depicts the case of U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers – and relevant primary sources, particularly Powers' letters from prison, to provide teachers with a case that can engage students with the complexity of the Cold War. Understanding USA–Russia relations is as important today as ever as we watch the tragedy unfold in Ukraine. Using primary sources to reflect on the Cold War can help secondary students understand the historical context of the war in Ukraine as well as how to evaluate and critique sources of information about the war.

The film and personal letters provide insights often not available or obvious when we focus on the political or military history of an event or time period. The Cold War is frequently defined by the rhetoric of the USA and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) governments – but everyday people and citizens had a wider range of views and experiences. The film and letters bring out the humanity of the Cold War.

This article supports secondary teachers in incorporating film and primary sources as teaching tools to study the Cold War while more broadly thinking about these sources as ways to understand the past. The letters used, including those from U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers, help us understand his time in a Soviet prison as well as the behind-the-scenes work to free him as part of a prisoner exchange.

The U-2 Incident and other events of the Cold War provide important context for understanding the Cold War-like tensions between the USA and Russia today. The distrust between these countries has a long history. However, documents like the film and letters discussed here show that there is much more to the bluster of political leaders and the military chess game. There is an important human element to these events and an impact on individuals who are much more than pawns in international diplomacy.

The fundamental idea that we seek to establish in this chapter is that the establishment of regional or local, peace calls forth global peace. In other words, our argument is that local and regional conflicts are partly driven by global factors, especially what is commonly known as international tension. In order to achieve meaningful and sustained peace, there is a reason to believe that it is mandatory to manage and contain international tensions. The main thesis of this chapter is to explain or posit, conflicts as a product of continuing international chasms, splits and differences of political and social ideologies in our modern world. Thus, we argue that conflicts are, to some extent, driven by international tension or global, ideological and geo-political factors. Notwithstanding the global influence, local factors – such as income inequality, income growth or lack of it, political institutions – can and do exacerbate conflicts and a peaceful resolution of conflicts becomes a difficult phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to show how state socialist countries used soft power to improve their image in the West and advocate “the socialist way of life” in the context of the Cold War.

The author argues from a cultural history perspective that underlines transfers and entanglements among the two camps during the Cold War. The study is based on primary and secondary sources such as automotive periodicals and archival material from the German Bundesarchiv.

International fairs turned in the late 1950s into a new “battlefield” of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its allies were celebrating at these meetings, important medial victories, laying the grounds for a state socialist consumer society. For the first time, Western audiences were realizing that irrespective of certain stylistic differences, consumer goods and particularly cars were not that different on the other side of the Iron Curtain. However, ideological bias and manufacturing flaws prevented them from being fully acknowledged by the Western side.

Cold War research mainly focused on bipolar confrontation and the high-level decision-making process. This study is part of a recent trend in historiography to reassess the history of the Cold War, focusing on the multi-layered interactions between the two camps. It also shows that consumption and material well-being were important topics for understanding the dynamics and the flow of ideas through the Iron Curtain.