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This book examines the historical contrasts between East and West and elucidates the Russian enigma. It springs from the thesis that Russia's national character and its international relations can be understood only in light of the traumas and triumphs, privation and privileges that the country weathered under the tsars and the Soviets.
From Paris to Peking, from Saigon to Washington, the pillars of the postwar world tottered on the brink of collapse in 1968. This book is the first global analysis of that universal upheaval, from the Tet offensive and the abdication of Lyndon Johnson to the "cultural revolution" in China and the convention and riots in Mayor Daley's Chicago.
Distinguished historian of the Soviet period Robert V. Daniels offers a penetrating survey of the evolution of the Soviet system and its ideology. In a tightly woven series of analyses written during his career-long inquiry into the Soviet Union, Daniels explores the Soviet experience from Karl Marx to Boris Yeltsin and shows how key ideological notions were altered as Soviet history unfolded. The book exposes a long history of American misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, leading up to the "grand surprise" of its collapse in 1991. Daniels's perspective is always original, and his assessments, some worked out years ago, are strikingly prescient in the light of post-1991 archival revelations. Soviet Communism evolved and decayed over the decades, Daniels argues, through a prolonged revolutionary process, combined with the challenges of modernization and the personal struggles between ideologues and power-grabbers.
Daniels strives to put perestroika in its long-term historical perspective by placing it in a broad theory of revolutionary process, within the context of Leninism, Stalinism and Brezshnevism.
The End of the Communist Revolution puts Perestroika firmly in its long-term historical perspective as the final stage of a long revolutionary process, and within the context of Leninism, Stalinism and Breshnevism. Daniels puts forward a new interpretation of the striking events in the later half of the twentieth-century which led to the downfall of Gorbachev and Communism in the late Soviet Union. Embracing the whole Soviet experience since 1917, he argues that Gorbachev's reforms did not constitute a new revolution, but a `moderate revolutionary revival' with a return to the decentralist, anti-imperial principles that inspired the original moderate phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Emphasizing continuity with the past, Daniels questions conventional solutions about future political and economic alternatives in the region. By stressing the way that reform unfolded, not just in the Breshnev era, but in the long historical background, Daniels provides an original and integrated interpretation of Soviet history.
This book presents a narrative of one of the more interesting utopian experiments in comparative political and economic history: the first decade of the Soviet experience with socialism (1918-1928). Though historical and textual analysis, the book’s goal is to render this experience intelligible, to get at the meaning of the Soviet experience with socialism for comparative political economy today. The book examines the texts of Lenin, Bukharin, and other revolutionaries, as well as the interpretations of contemporary historians of the revolution and the writings of more recent interpreters of Soviet political and economic history. Arguing that the first three years of the Bolshevik regime ...
Over the five years following the Russian revolution of 1917 there occurred a brilliant outburst of theory and criticism among Russian intellectuals struggling to comprehend their country's vast social upheaval. Much of their intense speculation focused on issues that are still hotly debated: Was this socialism? Why had the revolution happened in Russia? What did Bolshevik power mean for Russia and the Western world? This compelling study recovers these early responses to 1917 and analyzes the specific ideological context out of which they emerged. Jane Burbank explores the ideas and experiences of diverse prominent intellectuals, ranging from the monarchists on the right to the Mensheviks, Socialist revolutionaries, and Anarchists on the left. Following these thinkers through the turbulent years of civil war and rebuilding of state power, Burbank shows how revolution both revitalized their political culture and exposed the fragile basis of its existence.
State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.
Tracking the degeneration of the Russian Revolution Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism. Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.
Comprehensive account of the great revolutions that swept over Europe and America.