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The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Politburo (1992) is the definitive history and political analysis of this institution. Extensive use of new Soviet sources permitted the authors to provide a comprehensive analysis of the way in which the Politburo operated and a sociological examination of its membership. The history of the Politburo is presented in a lucid and rigorous account that charts its development from creation by Lenin in 1919 to sidetracking by Gorbachev in 1990: an organization that, as the authors state, ‘subjected the whole of the USSR to its ruthless dictatorship, but itself bowed time and again to the leader of its own making’.
This book, based on extensive original research in previously unexplored sources, including the party archives, provides a great deal of new information on the disintegration of the Soviet communist party, in 1991 and the preceding years. It argues that, contrary to prevailing views, the party was reformable in late Soviet times, but that attempts to reform it failed: reforms succeeded in preventing the party interfering in the state body, and thereby abolished the party's traditional administrative functions, but without creating an alternative power centre, and without transforming the party from a vanguard party into a parliamentary party. It demonstrates that the party, having ceased to ...
The Prague Spring of 1968 was among the most important episodes in post-war European politics. In this book Kieran Williams analyses the attempt at reform socialism under Alexander Dubcek using materials and sources which have become available in the wake of the 1989 revolution. Drawing on declassified documents from party archives, the author readdresses important questions surrounding the Prague Spring: Why did liberalization occur? What was it intended to achieve? Why did the Soviet Union intervene with force? What was the political outcome of the invasion? What part did the reformers play in ending the experiment in reform socialism? What was the role of the security police under Dubcek? The book will provide new information for specialists as well as introductory analysis and narrative for students of East European politics and history and Soviet foreign policy.
Employing 286 scholars, this two volume encyclopedia contains entries on post-World War II European political history and groups, significant events and persons, the economy, religion, education, the arts, women's issues, writers, and more.
These studies cover a range of topics - market reforms, social justice, ecology, nationalism, new political parties and more - that are at the centre of the revolutionary changes under way in the former Soviet bloc. The breadth of this book's subject matter is complemented by the variety of methods and approaches that it features: historical interpretation, linguist analysis, statistical analysis and political sociology. The result is a genuinely inter disciplinary treatment of this important topic.
Writings of travelers have shaped ideas about an evolving China, while preconceived ideas about China also shaped the way they saw the country. A Century of Travels in China explores the impressions of these writers on various themes, from Chinese cities and landscapes to the work of Europeans abroad. From the time of the first Opium War to the declaration of the People's Republic, China's history has been one of extraordinary change and stubborn continuities. At the same time, the country has beguiled, scared and puzzled people in the West. The Victorian public admired and imitated Chinese fashions, in furniture and design, gardens and clothing, while maintaining a generally negative idea o...
2014 Best International Book Award, Mormon History Association For the first century of their church’s existence, Mormon observers of international events studied and cheered global revolutions as a religious exercise. As believers in divine-human co-agency, many prominent Mormons saw global revolutions as providential precursors to the imminent establishment of the terrestrial kingdom of God. French Revolutionary symbolism, socialist critiques of industrialism, American Indian nationalism, and Wilsonian internationalism all became the raw materials of Mormon millennial theologies which were sometimes barely distinguishable from secular utopianism. Many Mormon thinkers accepted secular rev...
The Communist Party’s attitude toward art in this period was, in general, epiphenomenal of its economic policy. A resolution of 1925 voiced the party’s refusal to sanction anyone’s literary faction. This reflected the New Economic Policy (NEP) of a limited free-market economy. The period of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) saw a more or less voluntary return to a more committed artistic posture, and during the second Five-Year Plan (1932–1936), this commitment was crystallized in the formation of a Writers’ Union. The first congress of this union in 1934, featuring speeches by Maxim Gorky and Bukharin, officially adopted socialist realism, as defined primarily by Andrei Zhdan...
Poststructuralist Marxism, or post-Marxism, is a theoretical viewpoint that elaborates and revises the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Unlike traditional Marxism, which emphasizes the priority of class struggle and the common humanity of oppressed groups, post-Marxism reveals the sexual, racial, class, and ethnic divisions of modern Western society. This book surveys the different versions of post-Marxist theory: the economic theory of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, the historical methodology of Michel Foucault, the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the feminism of Judith Butler, the materialist philosophy of Pierre Macherey, and the cultural studies of Tony Bennett and John Frow. Providing a coherent framework for these otherwise quite divergent theorists, Philip Goldstein outlines the history of Marxist philosophical or theoretical views and explains how they all count as post-Marxist.