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Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 588
ISBN-13: 9780195340556
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the eras of Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, a multi-layered account of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union chronicles and analyzes the Soviet experiment from the tsar to the first president of the Russian republic. UP.
Author: Ronald Suny
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2020-08-25
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 1788730747
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTracking 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.
Author: Peter G. Filene
Publisher:
Published: 2013-10-01
Total Pages: 397
ISBN-13: 9780674866072
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Dominic Erdozain
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-10-02
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1609092287
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the heart of the Soviet experiment was a belief in the impermanence of the human spirit: souls could be engineered; conscience could be destroyed. The project was, in many ways, chillingly successful. But the ultimate failure of a totalitarian regime to fulfill its ambitions for social and spiritual mastery had roots deeper than the deficiencies of the Soviet leadership or the chaos of a "command" economy. Beneath the rhetoric of scientific communism was a culture of intellectual and cultural dissidence, which may be regarded as the "prehistory of perestroika." This volume explores the contribution of Christian thought and belief to this culture of dissent and survival, showing how religious and secular streams of resistance joined in an unexpected and powerful partnership. The essays in The Dangerous God seek to shed light on the dynamic and subversive capacities of religious faith in a context of brutal oppression, while acknowledging the often-collusive relationship between clerical elites and the Soviet authorities. Against the Marxist notion of the "ideological" function of religion, the authors set the example of people for whom faith was more than an opiate; against an enduring mythology of secularization, they propose the centrality of religious faith in the intellectual, political, and cultural life of the late modern era. This volume will appeal to specialists on religion in Soviet history as well as those interested in the history of religion under totalitarian regimes.
Author: Michael David-Fox
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2012-01-12
Total Pages: 411
ISBN-13: 019979457X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShowcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism, it reinterprets one of the great cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters of the twentieth century.
Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-03-29
Total Pages: 912
ISBN-13: 0691202710
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--
Author: Stephen F. Cohen
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 0195040163
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten in 1985, this book cuts through the Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and later political realities. The author probes Soviet history, society, and politics to explain how the U.S.S.R. remained stable from revolution through the mid-1980s.
Author: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2021-05-25
Total Pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9633864062
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy has communism’s humanist quest for freedom and social justice without exception resulted in the reign of terror and lies? The authors of this collective volume address this urgent question covering the one hundred years since Lenin’s coup brought the first communist regime to power in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 1917. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the varieties of communist fantasies of salvation, and the remaining three consider how communist experiments over many different times and regions attempted to manage economics, politics, as well as society and culture. Although each communist project was adapted to the situation of the country where it operated, the studies in this volume find that because of its ideological nature, communism had a consistent penchant for totalitarianism in all of its manifestations. This book is also concerned with the future. As the world witnesses a new wave of ideological authoritarianism and collectivistic projects, the authors of the nineteen essays suggest lessons from their analyses of communism’s past to help better resist totalitarian projects in the future.
Author: Guinevere Liberty Nell
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0875867499
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book, Guinevere Liberty Nell visits this historical laboratory of social science to study the lessons in basic economics that it teaches. Nell observes that the founders of the Soviet experiment, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, wrote volumes of articles and books on Marxist theory and then proceeded to enact the very policies that they promised. Therefore the Soviet experiment provides an ideal lens through which to view the consequences of various interpretations of economic theories and Marxist theories. However, despite the wealth of information available on the Soviet experiment, few writers have closely analyzed this historical process and what lessons it might offer for market economies. In this book, Nell carefully considers Soviet theory and practice, and draws out the lessons that Soviet planners learned. Each chapter considers one theory; the experience in the Soviet Union of policies based on this theory, and the reforms that planners implemented as the system evolved as well as in response to changes in the local and international conditions; and the lessons for market economies that this experience offers. Nell's lessons capture the dynamic nature of the economy and illustrate insights from the debate between socialists and Austrian economists. They should be useful and informative not only for readers interested in basic economics, but also for economists interested in heterodox approaches to economic modeling and theory, as well as for the citizen interested in rethinking the assumptions underlying mainstream policy debates.
Author: Victoria Smolkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-10-29
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0691197237
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
