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2005 marks the centenary of Russia’s ‘first revolution’ - an unplanned, spontaneous rejection of Tsarist rule that was a response to the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 9th January 1905. A wave of strikes, urban uprisings, peasant revolts, national revolutions and mutinies swept across the Russian Empire, and it proved a crucial turning point in the demise of the autocracy and the rise of a revolutionary socialism that would shape Russia, Europe and the international system for the rest of the twentieth century. The centenary of the Revolution has prompted scholars to review and reassess our understanding of what happened in 1905. Recent opportunities to access archives throughout the former Soviet Union are yielding new provincial perspectives, as well as fresh insights into the roles of national and religious minorities, and the parts played by individuals, social groups, political parties and institutions. This text brings together some of the best of this new research and reassessment, and includes thirteen chapters written by leading historians from around the world, together with an introduction from Abraham Ascher.
The British system has been radically transformed in recent decades, far more than most of us realise. As acclaimed political scientist and bestselling author Anthony King shows, this transformation lies at the heart of British politics today. Imagining - or pretending - that the British political system and Britain's place in the world have not greatly changed, our political leaders consistently promise more than they can perform. Political and economic power is now widely dispersed both inside and outside the UK, but Westminster politicians still talk the language of Attlee and Churchill. How exactly has the British system changed? Where does power now lie? In Who Governs Britain?, King offers the first assessment in many years of Britain's governing arrangements as a whole, providing much needed context for the 2015 general election.
Amidst the vast literature on the parties and politics of revolutionary Russia and its near constant appropriation for presentist purposes over the years, States of Anxiety assesses the effects of the great scarcities and enormous losses that Russia experienced between 1914 and 1921, a period of dramatic civil conflicts and Russia's "long World War." Scarcities meant not only the deficits of necessary goods like food, but also their accompanying anxieties and fears. Using archival documents and materials of the period almost exclusively, this study explores how the tsarist, democratic liberal, democratic socialist, and Bolshevik regimes all addressed the forms and effects of scarcity and los...
In this book Anthony Heywood reassesses Bolshevik attitudes towards economic modernization and foreign economic relations during the early Soviet period. Based on hitherto unused Russian and Western archives, he examines an extraordinary decision made in March 1920 to import vast quantities of railway equipment. The book argues that under War Communism and the NEP railway modernization was vital to a strategy of rapid economic modernization, and provides the first detailed case study of the government's import policy. Following the histories of the principal contracts, it analyses Soviet foreign trade as a means to tackle domestic economic challenges. This book provides readers with a new perspective on Soviet economic development, and reveals the scale of Bolshevik business dealings with the capitalist West immediately after the Revolution.
The fifth edition of this seminal textbook by best-selling author Andrew Heywood continues to lead the way in providing a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to politics. Renowned for its engaging and accessible style, this book helps students to understand the discipline's foundational concepts and theories and use these to make sense of its key subfields, from elections and voting to security and global governance. Systematically revised and updated throughout, it also uses a range of tried-and-tested pedagogical features to draw links between different standpoints and help make contemporary institutions, events and developments come to life. Drawing on a wide range of internation...
Raising the Red Flag explores the origins of the British Marxist movement from the creation of the Social Democratic Federation to the foundation of the Communist Party. It tells a story of rising class struggle, the founding of the Labour Party, the fight against World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the explosive year of 1919. The book also uses new archival sources to re-examine Marxist organisations such as the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and Sylvia Parkhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation. Above all, this is the story of men and women who fought to liberate the working class from capitalism through socialist revolution.
Conventional histories portray the development of railway infrastructures as a tool to build empires and nation states. Recent scholarship however, has stressed the importance of a transnational perspective beyond an exclusive focus on the nation state. The new perspective enriches both the history of modern Europe and European integration. Constructing Iron Europe demonstrates how during the interwar years key players saw railroads as instruments for building a transnational European community. Based on new archival research, Anastasiadou not only sheds light on patterns of internationalization of railways, but also explores the co-construction of the national and the European in the case of the Greek railways in the Interbellum period. Foundation for the History of Technology & Amsterdam University Press Technology and European History Series (TEHS)
This groundbreaking comparative study rediscovers the socialists of Russia’s borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics and the Russian Revolution. Researched in eight languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy challenges long-held assumptions by scholars and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change.