Soviet Historians and Perestroika: The First Phase

Soviet Historians and Perestroika: The First Phase

Author: Donald J. Raleigh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1315491796

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The Soviet historical profession is in ferment. For decades it was relegated to the task of obfuscating the past, gilding the status quo and papering over the "blank spots" in Soviet history - events that defied even the most brazen attempts at falsification. Today it is engaged in an often painful process of self-examination. Initially rather timid, the internal discussion was soon propelled by external events - the scuttling of history textbooks, official disclosures of formerly "classified" facts and the explosion of candour in the depictions of the past in memoirs, journalistic writing and fiction. This volume gives voice to the lead actors in the "first phase" of this process - the senior historians, their journalistic "challengers" and those charged with responsiblity for the institutions of research, training and publication in the field of history.


When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics

When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics

Author: Jon Jacobson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0520915674

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The dissolution of the Soviet Union has aroused much interest in the USSR's role in world politics during its 74-year history and in how the international relations of the twentieth century were shaped by the Soviet Union. Jon Jacobson examines Soviet foreign relations during the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan, focusing on the problems confronting the Bolsheviks as they sought to promote national security and economic development. He demonstrates the central importance of foreign relations to the political imagination of Soviet leaders, both in their plans for industrialization and in the struggle for supremacy among Lenin's successors. Jacobson adopts a post-Cold War interpretative stance, incorporating glasnost and perestroika-era revelations. He also considers Soviet relations with both Europe and Asia from a global perspective, integrating the two modes of early Soviet foreign relations—revolution and diplomacy—into a coherent discussion. Most significantly, he synthesizes the wealth of information that became available to scholars since the 1960s. The result is a stimulating work of international history that interfaces with the sophisticated existing body of scholarship on early Soviet history.


Stuck on Communism

Stuck on Communism

Author: Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1501747398

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This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century—from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up through the implosion of the Soviet Union and beyond. Siegelbaum recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery in the tumult of student rebellion at Columbia University during the Vietnam War, graduate study at Oxford, and Moscow at the height of détente. His story takes the reader into the Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and the newly independent Uzbekistan. An intellectual autobiography that is also a biography of the field of Anglophone Soviet history, Stuck on Communism is a guide for how to lead a life on the Left that integrates political and professional commitments. Siegelbaum reveals the attractiveness of Communism as an object of study and its continued relevance decades after its disappearance from the landscape of its origin. Through the journey of a book that is in the end a romance, Siegelbaum discovers the truth in the notion that no matter what historians take as their subject, they are always writing about themselves.


The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History

The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History

Author: Alan Forrest

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1317413873

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The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History engages with some of the most recent trends in French revolutionary scholarship by considering the Revolution in its global context. Across seventeen chapters an international team of contributors examine the impact of the Revolution not only on its European neighbours but on Latin America, North America and Africa, assess how far events there impacted on the Revolution in France, and suggest something of the Revolution’s enduring legacy in the modern world. The Companion views the French Revolution through a deliberately wide lens. The first section deals with its global repercussions from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and includes a discussion of major insurrections such as those in Haiti and Venezuela. Three chapters then dissect the often complex and entangled relations with other revolutionary movements, in seventeenth-century Britain, the American colonies and Meiji Japan. The focus then switches to international involvement in the events of 1789 and the circulation of ideas, people, goods and capital. In a final section contributors throw light on how the Revolution was and is still remembered across the globe, with chapters on Russia, China and Australasia. An introduction by the editors places the Revolution in its political, historical and historiographical context. The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History is a timely and important contribution to scholarship of the French Revolution.


Masterpieces of History

Masterpieces of History

Author: Svetlana Savranskaya

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2010-05-20

Total Pages: 783

ISBN-13: 6155211884

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Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers' role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev's senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand; and high-level CIA analyses, this volume offers a rare insider's look at the historic, world-transforming events that culminated in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. Most of these records have never been published before.


Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution

Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution

Author: R. W. Davies

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-30

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1349200603

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Since Gorbachev took office in 1985, every aspect of the Soviet past has been under scrutiny. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens are eagerly absorbing and debating the vast outpouring of novels, books and articles, and films and TV programmes, about their past. Much new information has appeared, often sensational, about how the Stalin regime worked and what it meant for top politicians, generals, intellectuals and ordinary citizens. Stalinists, Russian nationalists, democratic socialists and others are locked in bitter debate. Was the victory of Stalinism inevitable? Was there an alternative road to socialism? Even Lenin and his policies are now questioned. The Politburo itself is deeply divided about how far the debate should go and what conclusions should be drawn from it. The reconsideration about the past is part of the discussion about the way forward for Soviet society: how big should be the role of the market? How much freedom and democracy?


Writing History in the Soviet Union

Writing History in the Soviet Union

Author: Arup Banerji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-18

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1351381989

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The history of the Soviet Union has been charted in several studies over the decades. These depictions while combining accuracy, elegance, readability and imaginativeness, have failed to draw attention to the political and academic environment within which these histories were composed. Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work is aimed at understanding this environment. The book seeks to identify the significant hallmarks of the production of Soviet history by Soviet as well as Western historians. It traces how the Russian Revolution of 1917 triggered a shift in official policy towards historians and the publication of history textbooks for schools. In 1985, the Soviet past was again summoned for polemical revision as part and parcel of an attitude of openness (glasnost') and in this, literary figures joined their energies to those of historians. The Communist regime sought to equate the history of the country with that of the Communist Party itself in 1938 and 1962 and this imposed a blanket of conformity on history writing in the Soviet Union. The book also surveys the rich abundance of writing the Russian Revolution generated as well as the divergent approaches to the history of the period. The conditions for research in Soviet archives are described as an aspect of official monitoring of history writing. Another instance of this is the manner by which history textbooks have, through the years, been withdrawn from schools and others officially nursed into circulation. This intervention, occasioned in the present circumstance by statements by President Putin himself, in the manner in which history is taught in Russian schools, continues to this day. In other words, over the years, the regime has always worked to make the past work. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka


A Concise History of Revolution

A Concise History of Revolution

Author: Mehran Kamrava

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-09-26

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1108485952

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From rebellion to revolution -- Social movements and revolution -- Revolutionary states -- Revolutionary polities.