Soviet Politics
Soviet Politics

Author: Richard Sakwa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1134909969

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Soviet Politics in Perspective is a new edition of Richard Sakwas successful textbook Soviet Politics: an introduction. Thoroughly revised and updated it builds on the previous editions comprehensive and accessible exploration of the Soviet system, from its rise in 1919 to its collapse in 1991. The book is divided into five parts, which focus on key aspects of Soviet politics. They are: * historical perspectives, beginning with the Tsarist regime on the eve of Revolution, the rise and development of Stalinism, through to the decline of the regime under Brezhnev and his successors and Gorbachev's attempts to revive the system * institutions of Government, such as the Communist Party, security apparatus, the military, the justice system, local government and participation * theoretical approaches to Soviet politics, including class and gender politics, the role of ideology and the shift from dissent to pluralism * key policy areas: the command economy and reform; nationality politics; and foreign and defence policy * an evaluation of Soviet rule, and reasons for its collapse. Providing key texts and bibliographies, this book offers the complete history and politics of the Soviet period in a single volume. It will be indispensable to students of Soviet and post-Soviet politics as well as the interested general reader.

Know Your Enemy
Know Your Enemy

Author: David C. Engerman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-11-20

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0199717230

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As World War II ended, few Americans in government or universities knew much about the Soviet Union. As David Engerman shows in this book, a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise known as Soviet Studies to fill in this dangerous gap in American knowledge. This group brought together some of the nation's best minds from the left, right, and center, colorful and controversial individuals ranging from George Kennan to Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski, not to mention historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together they created the knowledge that helped fight the Cold War and define Cold War thought. Soviet Studies became a vibrant intellectual enterprise, studying not just the Soviet threat, but Soviet society and culture at a time when many said that these were contradictions in terms, as well as Russian history and literature. And this broad network, Engerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the ivory tower in ways that still matter today.

Beyond Soviet Studies
Beyond Soviet Studies

Author: Daniel Orlovsky

Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Published: 1995-02

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780943875699

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They offer constructive criticisms of the field and set out research questions for an uncertain future.

Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-91
Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-91

Author: Jerry F. Hough

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 1997-05-01

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780815791492

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Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-91 presents a strikingly new view of the Gorbachev era and the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Written by one of America's most distinguished specialists on the former Soviet Union, this is the first comprehensive overview of the Gorbachev period and describes it as a real revolution, not mere "reform." According to Hough, despite Mikhail Gorbachev's talk of a regulated market, he never understood that a market must be created on a solid institutional and legal base. He was determined to use democratization to free himself from party control, but he saw democracy as a way of achieving near- universal consensus, not a mechanism for forcing through difficult choices. The many memoirs that have become available in the last few years, including those of Gorbachev himself, show that Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov and the "bureaucrats" in his government actually were the serious economic reformers in the leadership. Gorbachev opposed the key transitional steps at every stage and was far closer to the assumptions of shock therapy than he or his opponents ever recognized. Hough explains that Gorbachev was not alone in thinking that the destruction of old institutions was enough to unleash a market. Westerners also talked of leaping a chasm in a single jump as if democratic and market institutions existed pre-created on the other side. But, precisely because Gorbachev (and later Boris Yeltsin) was encouraged in all his worst mistakes by Western advice, his failure has crucial implications for Western thinking about the process of democratization and marketization. This unprecedented book explores those implications in depth. Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Book for 1998

Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom
Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom

Author: William A. Clark

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1315486636

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This study of official corruption and the politics of anti-corruption campaigns offers a comprehensive empirical, comparative and theoretical analysis of this phenomenon as both system and symptom. It highlights the structure, impact and function of political elite corruption from 1965-1990.

The Khrushchev Era 1953-1964
The Khrushchev Era 1953-1964

Author: Martin McCauley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1317889223

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History and politics students alike will welcome this new Seminar Study which analyses the Khrushchev era -- a critical period of Soviet and world history. It was Khrushchev who, in 1957, finally filled the political vacuum left by the death of Stalin in 1953. He was an erratic, impulsive, inspirational and innovative leader who addressed the fundamental problems of the country - and yet he was, Martin McCauley argues, "a brilliant failure''. In this study the author explores all aspects of the Khrushchev era: including reforms in agriculture, economic policy, crises in Eastern Europe, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, de-Stalinisation and Khrushchev's attempts to reform the Communist Party.

Soldiers and the Soviet State
Soldiers and the Soviet State

Author: Timothy J. Colton

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 140086142X

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How much power does the Soviet military exert on the politics of the Kremlin? This is one of the most controversial questions in the study of the Soviet Union, here addressed by eight top Western specialists on Soviet politics and security policy. While the authors assert that the civil-military relationship has been less turbulent than often believed, they also point out that Gorbachev's reforms threaten the system of buffers that have until now shielded the military-industrial world from disruption and change. Introduced by Timothy Colton's essay, "Perspectives on Civil-Military Relations," the volume discusses civil-military relations in relation to political change (Bruce Parrott), the KGB (Amy Knight), resource stringency and civil-military resource allocation (Robert Campbell), the defense industry (Julian Cooper), response to technological challenge (Thane Gustafson), social change (Ellen Jones), and consequences of external expansion (Bruce D. Porter). Gustafson has written a concluding chapter, "Toward a Crisis in Civil-Military Relations?" Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What Happened to the Soviet Union?
What Happened to the Soviet Union?

Author: Christopher I. Xenakis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2002-09-30

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0313077452

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Xenakis examines the responses of Soviet experts in American academia—primarily political scientists, but also economists and defense scholars who specialized in the USSR—to the unfolding evidence of Soviet reform during the 1970s and 1980s and to its ultimate collapse. He concludes that American Sovietologists and other political scientists were more responsive to the Cold War consensus—to the needs of the State Department, Defense, and CIA policy makers and to the official Washington line of the moment—than to the changing face of the Soviet Union. As Xenakis makes clear, many of the Cold War ideas and attitudes shared by Sovietologists—the notion that the USSR was an evil empire; the idea that Soviet society was irredeemably xenophobic and indolent; that the Soviet political and economic system could not be fixed or reformed; and the view that the best way for Washington to deal with Moscow's influence was to contain the USSR through arms races, global, and proxy wars—were reminiscent of the policies and arguments of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, not to the facts on the ground in the 1970s and 1980s. An important work for scholars, students, and researchers involved with Soviet and Russian studies, international political and military affairs, intellectual history, and the relationship between academia and the government.

Executive Power and Soviet Politics
Executive Power and Soviet Politics

Author: Eugene Huskey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1315486563

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Ever since the behavioral revolution reached Communist studies more than 2 decades ago, Western scholarship has tended to ignore the powerful and unwieldy institutional structure of the Soviet government. Today, suddenly, it is clear that the dramatic political and legislative reforms of the Gorbachev years will remain incomplete as long as the issues of state bureaucratic power and executive prerogative are unresolved. This volume, brings together original studies of the Soviet executive under Gorbachev by specialists including Barbara Chotiner, Stephen Fortescue, Brnda Horrigan, Ellen Jones, Wayne Limberg, T.H. Rigby and Louise Shelley. Among the topics covered are the major economic, national security and law enforcement ministries, the presidency, the cabinet and questions of presidential-ministerial, presidential-presidential, legislative-executive and party-state relations.