Dr. Bolton demonstrates that the supposed rivalry between Marxist-inspired movements and capitalism has always been an illusion. He shows that the ultimate goal of capitalism is to create a worldwide collectivist society of consumers, and Marxism is merely one means of attaining this. He traces this idea back to Plato, through the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the French Revolution, and Communism.
Controversially this book argues that the ruling party-state elite in the USSR itself moved to dismantle the old system. Topics discussed include: * the beginnings of economic decline in 1975 * Gorbachev's efforts to democratize and decentralize * the complex political battle through which the coalition favouring capitalism took power * the flaws in economic policies intended to rapidly build capitalism * the surprising resurgence of Communism. Research includes interviews with over 50 former Soviet government and Communist party leaders, policy advisors, new private businessmen, trade union leaders and intellectuals.
Forfatteren er lektor i sociologi ved California State College, Sonoma. Hun har udviklet en teori om sociale betingelser, som fremmer revolutionære handlinger af officerer i tredie verdenlande.
The arduous path from the colourful diversity of the Holy Roman Empire to the Prussian-dominated German nation-state, Bismarck's German Empire of 1871, led through revolutions, wars and economic upheavals, but also through the cultural splendour of German Classicism and Romanticism. Hagen Schulze takes a fresh look at late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German history, explaining it as the interaction of revolutionary forces from below and from above, of economics, politics, and culture. None of the results were predetermined, and yet their outcome was of momentous significance for all of Europe, if not the world.
The fall of the Soviet communist regime in 1991 offers a challenging contrast to other instances of democratic transition and change in the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1991 revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below as occurred in Czechoslovakia nor a negotiated transition to democracy like those in Poland, Hungary, or Latin America. It was not primarily the result of social modernization, the rise of a new middle class, or of national liberation movements in the non-Russian union republics. Instead, as Gordon Hahn argues, the Russian transformation was a bureaucrat-led, state-based revolution managed by a group of Communist Party functionaries who won control over the Russian Republic (RSFSR) in the mid-1990s.Hahn describes how opportunistic Party and state officials, led by Boris Yeltsin, defected from the Gorbachev camp and proceeded in 1990-91 to dismantle the institutions that bound state and party. These revolutionaries from above seized control of political, economic, natural and human resources, and then separated the party apparatus from state institutions on Russian Republic territory. With the failed August 1991 hard-line coup, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and decreed that all Union state organs, including the KGB and military were under RSFSR control. In Hahn's account, this mode of revolutionary change from above explains the troubled development of democracy in Russia and the former Soviet republics.Hahn shows how limited mobilization of the masses stunted the development of civil societies and the formation of political parties and trade unions with real grass roots. The result is a weak society unable to nudge the state to concentrate on institutional reforms society needs for the development of a free polity and economy. Russia's Revolution from Above goes far in correcting the historical record and reconceptualizing the Soviet transformation. It should be read by historians, economists, political scientists, and Russia area scholars.
In June 1940, as Nazi troops marched into Paris, the Soviet Red Army marched into Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; seven weeks later, the USSR Supreme Soviet ratified the Soviet takeover of these states. For half a century, Soviet historians insisted that the three republics had voluntarily requested incorporation into the Soviet Union. Now it has become possible to examine the events of that tumultuous time more carefully. Alfred Erich Senn, the author of books on the formation of the Lithuanian state in 1918-1920 and on the reestablishment of that independence in 1988-1991, has produced a fascinating account of the Soviet takeover, juxtaposing a picture of the disintegration and collapse of the old regime with the Soviets’ imposition of a new order. Discussing the historiography and the living memory of the events, he uses the image of a “shell game” that focused attention on the work of a supposedly “non-communist” government while in the hothouse conditions of military occupation Moscow undermined the state’s independent institutions and introduced a revolution from above.
Conventional readings of the history of Soviet art and architecture show modernist utopian aspirations as all but prohibited by 1932 under Stalin's totalitarianism. Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes challenges that view. Radically redefining the historiography of the period, it reveals how the relationship between the Party and practicing architects was much more complex and contradictory than previously believed, and shows, in contrast to the conventional scholarly narrative, how the architectural avant-garde was able to persist at a time when it is widely considered to have been driven underground. In doing so, this book provides an essential perspective on how to analyse, evaluate, and “re-imagine” the history of modernist expression in its cultural context. It offers a new understanding of ways in which 20th century social revolutions and their totalitarian sequels inflected the discourse of both modernity and modernism. The book relies on close analyses of archival documents and architectural works. Many of the documents have been rarely – if ever – discussed in English before, while the architectural projects include iconic works such as the Palace of Soviets and the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris 1937 World Exposition, as well as remarkable works that until now have been neglected by architectural historians inside and outside Russia. In a fascinating final chapter, it also reveals for the first time the details of Frank Lloyd Wright's triumphant welcome at the First Congress of Soviet Architects in Moscow in 1937, at the height of Stalin's Terror.
A major reinterpretation of the Salvador Allende era in Chile, Weavers of Revolution is also a compelling drama of human triumph and tragedy that exemplifies "the new narrative history" at its authentic best.
North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions. Armstrong's account is based on long-classified documents captured by U.S. forces during the Korean War. This enormous archive of over 1.6 million pages provides unprecedented insight into the making of the Pyongyang regime and fuels the author's argument that the North Korean state is likely to remain viable for some years to come.
