Communism - Books - Science - addstol - Chomikuj.pl, Strona 37

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Steven Best - The Politics of Historical Vision, M arx, Foucault, Habermas (1995).jpg

Providing an important contribution to current controversies regarding history, social theory,politics, and the Foucault\n-\Habermas debates, this work offers a detailed comparison of the transformative uses of history in Foucault and Habermas, using Marx as a modernist contrast. The book clearly illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of each thinker's theory for the productive analysis of history and society, relating the work of each to current debates over modern and postmodern theory.

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Steven Best - The Politics of Historical Vision, M arx, Foucault, Habermas (1995).pdf

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Stuart Sim - Post-Marxism, An Intellectual History (2001).jpg

This book traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right. It examines the history of the development of the Marxist tradition as well as considering the school's future prospects.

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Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Nora Seligman Favorov - Master of the House, Stalin and His Inner Circle (2008).jpg

Based on meticulous research in previously unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this compelling book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his notorious dictatorship. Oleg V. Khlevniuk focuses on the top organ in Soviet Russia’s political hierarchy of the 1930s—the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party—and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that weakened its collective leadership and enabled Stalin’s rise.

Khlevniuk’s unparalleled research challenges existing theories of the workings of the Politburo and uncovers many new findings regarding the nature of alliances among Politburo members, Sergei Kirov’s murder, the implementation of the Great Terror, and much more. The author analyzes Stalin’s mechanisms of generating and retaining power and presents a new understanding, unmatched in texture and depth, of the highest tiers of the Communist Party in a crucial era of Soviet history.

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Robert Strayer - Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse (1998).jpg

Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event of the recent past - as a case study, this text engages students in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation and explanation. In exploring the question posed by the title, the author introduces and applies such organizing concepts as great power conflict, imperial decline, revolution, ethnic conflict, colonialism, economic development, totalitarian ideology, and transition to democracy in a most accessible way. Questions and controversies, and extracts from documentary and literary sources, anchor the text at key points. This book is intended for use in history and political science courses on the Soviet Union or more generally on the 20th century.

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Robert Strayer - Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse (1998).pdf

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Robert Bideleux, Ian Jeffri - A History of Eastern Europe, Crisis and Change (2007).jpg

This welcome second edition of A History of Eastern Europe provides comprehensive coverage of a complex past, from antiquity to the present day.
This new edition provides a thematic historical survey of the formative processes of political, social and economic change which have played paramount roles in shaping the evolution and development of the region. Subjects covered include:
* Eastern Europe in ancient, medieval and early modern times
* the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire
* the impact of the region's powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours
* rival concepts of 'Central' and 'Eastern' Europe
* the experience and consequences of the two World Wars
* varieties of fascism in Eastern Europe
* the impact of Communism from the 1940s to the 1980s
* post-Communist democratization and marketization
* the eastward enlargement of the EU.
Including two new chronologies – one for the Balkans and one for East-Central Europe – and a glossary of key terms and concepts, A History of Eastern Europe is the ideal companion for all students of Eastern Europe.

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Jr., Ralph A. Thaxton - Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China, Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine a nd the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Vi llage (2008).jpg

Communism - Books - Jr., Ralph A. Thaxton - Catastrophe and Contention...gins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village 2008.jpg

This book documents how China's rural people remember the great famine of Maoist rule, which proved to be the worst famine in modern world history. Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., sheds new light on how China's socialist rulers drove rural dwellers to hunger and starvation, on how powerless villagers formed resistance to the corruption and coercion of collectivization, and on how their hidden and contentious acts, both individual and concerted, allowed them to survive and escape the predatory grip of leaders and networks in the thrall of Mao's authoritarian plan for a full-throttle realization of communism - a plan that engendered an unprecedented disaster for rural families. Based on his study of a rural village's memories of the famine, Thaxton argues that these memories persisted long after the events of the famine and shaped rural resistance to the socialist state, both before and after the post-Mao era of reform.

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Jr., Ralph A. Thaxton - Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China, Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine a nd the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Vi llage (2008).pdf

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Pierre F. Landry - Decentralized Authoritarianism in China, The Communist Party's Control of Local E lites in the Post-Mao Era (2008).jpg

Communism - Books - Pierre F. Landry - Decentralized Authoritarianism ...s Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era 2008.jpg

China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime’s imperative to control them politically. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an unusually decentralized authoritarian regime. Using unique data collected at the municipal, county, and village level, Landry examines in detail how the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. His research shows that the CCP’s personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China’s enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.

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Jacques Bidet - Exploring Marx's Capital, Philosop hical, Economic and Political Dimensions (2002).jpg

This book, originally published in French under the title Que faire du Capital?, offers a new interpretation of Marx's great work. It shows how the novelty and lasting interest of Marx's theory arises from the fact that, as against the project of a `pure' economics, it is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an economic and a political aspect, neither of these being separable from the other. Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of Marx's work in the spirit of the history of science, exploring it as a process of theoretical development. Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of Capital as if they were complementary and mutually illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the next it is possible to see these being eliminated and restructured. This labour, moreover, was never fully completed. The author thus re-assesses Marx's entire system in its set of constitutive categories: value, market, labour-power, classes, working class, exploitation, production, fetishism, ideology. He seeks to pin down the difficulties that these encountered, and the analytical and critical value they still have today. Bidet attaches the greatest importance to Marx's order of exposition, which assigns each concept its place in the overall system, and makes the validity of the construction depend on the pertinence of its initial presuppositions. This is particularly the case with the relationship between market mechanism and capitalism - and thus also between the market and socialism.

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Jacques Bidet - Exploring Marx's Capital, Philosop hical, Economic and Political Dimensions (2002).pdf

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Steven Merritt Miner - Stalin's Holy War, Religion , Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (2 003).jpg

Histories of the USSR during World War II generally portray the Kremlin's restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church as an attempt by an ideologically bankrupt regime to appeal to Russian nationalism in order to counter the mortal threat of Nazism. Here, Steven Merritt Miner argues that this version of events, while not wholly untrue, is incomplete. Using newly opened Soviet-era archives as well as neglected British and American sources, he examines the complex and profound role of religion, especially Russian Orthodoxy, in the policies of Stalin's government during World War II. Miner demonstrates that Stalin decided to restore the Church to prominence not primarily as a means to stoke the fires of Russian nationalism but as a tool for restoring Soviet power to areas that the Red Army recovered from German occupation. The Kremlin also harnessed the Church for propaganda campaigns aimed at convincing the Western Allies that the USSR, far from being a source of religious repression, was a bastion of religious freedom. In his conclusion, Miner explores how Stalin's religious policy helped shape the postwar history of the USSR.

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Steven Merritt Miner - Stalin's Holy War, Religion , Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (2 003).pdf

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Paul R. Gregory, Norman Naimark - The Lost Politbu ro Transcripts, From Collective Rule to Stalin's D ictatorship (2008).jpg

Communism - Books - Paul R. Gregory, Norman Naimark - The Lost Politbu... From Collective Rule to Stalins Dictatorship 2008.jpg

In this groundbreaking book, prominent Western and Russian scholars examine the “lost” transcripts of the Soviet Politburo, a set of verbatim accounts of meetings that took place from the 1920s to 1938 but remained hidden in secret archives until the late 1990s. Never intended for publication or wide
distribution, these records (known as stenograms in Russia) reveal the actual process of decision making at the highest levels of the Soviet communist party. The transcripts also provide new, first-hand records of the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship.
The contributors to the volume explore the power struggles among the Politburo members, their methods of discourse and propaganda, and their economic policies. Taken as a whole, the essays shed light on early Soviet history and on the individuals who supported or opposed Stalin’s consolidation of power.

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Paul R. Gregory, Norman Naimark - The Lost Politbu ro Transcripts, From Collective Rule to Stalin's D ictatorship (2008).pdf

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Fiona Hill, Clifford G. Gaddy - The Siberian Curse , How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Co ld (2003).jpg

Communism - Books - Fiona Hill, Clifford G. Gaddy - The Siberian Curse...ommunist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold 2003.jpg

Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union’s collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia’s geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia’s greatest assets—its gigantic size and Siberia’s natural resources—are now the source of one of its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them—not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia’s prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly—it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia’s future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past by shrinking Siberia’s cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative. Russia cannot afford to keep the cities left by communist planners out in the cold.

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Fiona Hill, Clifford G. Gaddy - The Siberian Curse , How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Co ld (2003).pdf

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Steven J. Zaloga, Lelend S. Ness - Companion to th e Red Army 1939-1945 (2009).jpg

Stalin’s Red Army entered World War II as a relatively untried fighting force. In 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, it joined battle with Hitler’s army, the most powerful in history. After a desperate war of attrition over four years, the Red Army beat the Nazis into defeat on the Eastern Front and won lasting fame and glory in 1945 by eclipsing the military might of the Third Reich. This book begins with a review of the historical background of the Red Army in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939, and follows with a discussion of the major themes in the development of Soviet forces during the "Great Patriotic War" that ensued in 1941. The Red Army’s organizational structures are examined, from high command down to divisional level and below; Soviet combat arms and weaponry are also described in detail.

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Steven J. Zaloga, Lelend S. Ness - Companion to th e Red Army 1939-1945 (2009).pdf

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Lars Iyer - Blanchot's Communism, Art, Philosophy and the Political (2004).jpg

Iyer argues for the transformative potential for philosophy and political practice of the thought of Maurice Blanchot. The book traces Blanchot's complex negotiations of the thought of Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and Levinas, which allowed him to develop his distinctive account of the work of art and his account of the opening to the Other. Iyer also examines the significance of Blanchot's interventions in French political life, in particular, his participation in the events of May 1968.

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Lars Iyer - Blanchot's Communism, Art, Philosophy and the Political (2004).pdf

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Dennis J. Dunn - Caught between Roosevelt and Stal in, America's Ambassadors to Moscow (1997).jpg

On November 16, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov signed an agreement establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two days later Roosevelt named the first of five ambassadors he would place in Moscow between 1933 and 1945. The story of these ambassadors and their relationship with Roosevelt and Stalin is one of intense drama and lasting importance. More than fifty years after his death, Roosevelt's foreign policy, especially regarding the Soviet Union, remains a subject of intense debate. Dennis Dunn explains for the first time the apparent confusion and contradiction in Roosevelt's policy -- one moment publicizing the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter and the next moment giving tacit approval to Stalin's control of parts of Eastern Europe and northeast Asia. Dunn argues that "Rooseveltism", the president's belief that the Soviet Union and the United States were both developing into modern social democracies, blinded him to the true nature of Stalin's brutal dictatorship despite repeated warnings from the American ambassadors in Moscow.

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Dennis J. Dunn - Caught between Roosevelt and Stal in, America's Ambassadors to Moscow (1997).pdf

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Mr. J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov - The Road to Te rror, Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsh eviks, 1932-1939 (1999).jpg

Communism - Books - Mr. J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov - The Road to Te...Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 1999.jpg

This documentary collection, continuing Yale's pioneering Annals of Communism series, tackles questions surrounding the paroxysm of the purges in 1937^-38. One thing Stalin had was a long memory, and the hitherto mysterious Riutin Platform (the contents here at last seeing the light) must have rankled him. The platform was a 1932 call by Bolshevik veterans to remove him. The course culminating in the extirpation of all opposition was complex, and the authors' commentary underscores that a politics of sorts continued up to the point when full-blown terror was unleashed, a politics that pitted the central apparatus of Stalin and his associates in Moscow against the regional party bosses. The authors track one such Stalinist's fate in detail, as they do that of Bukharin, Stalin's opponent in the 1920s. The 200 documents here will astonish anyone familiar with the era, yet it is a specialized tome whose public library appeal could be checked against the circulation stats for the indubitably popular Who Killed Kirov? by Amy Knight. IGilbert Taylor

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Dr Getty's study of the Terror is among the most groundbreaking and insightful of the last decade. I believe it is the best book on the Terror yet written. What began as a moderate attempt to clean up the Party in 1933 through controled means turned into violent chaos in mid-1937. The Yezhov years are covered deeply with a great reliance on archives avalible. For the first time the documents themselves can be viewed by the reader. Getty clearly defines the periods of the Terror according to their severity. In 1933 people were purged from the Party but it only ment dismissal and a chance for readdmition. In 1936 things began to get bloody but it was still controled by the elites. The explosion of 1937 with the liquidation of top Soviet Marshals signaled the coming of a full blown bloodbath. This period lasted from the last half of 1937 to the first half of 1938. This was largely directed by the NKVD under Yezhov but Getty stresses Yezhov was ordered by Stalin and the Politburo to conduct arrest and executions of party elites in both the Center and provinces along with mass shootings of social marginals. The Terror was horrible yet more conservative numbers of deaths are given. Elites were the primary victims. Getty's statistics appear to be correct. Millions were not executed but social trama of the Terror was horrid. This work shreds Robert Conquest to pieces...

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Mr. J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov - The Road to Te rror, Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsh eviks, 1932-1939 (1999).pdf

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Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov - Stalin's Loyal Execut ioner, People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (2002).jpg

Communism - Books - Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov - Stalins Loyal Executi...r, Peoples Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 2002.jpg

During the Great Terror (1937 to 1938), at least 1.5 million Soviet citizens were arrested for alleged crimes against the state. Some 700,000 of them were shot. A dozen years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, still-classified Soviet archives reveal for the first time the scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin. This book illuminates the ongoing debate generated by our compelling need to understand how such horrors could unfold in modern history. The gruesome facts in this story focus on one man. Nikolai Ezhov rose from obscurity to become Stalin's ruthless functionary in total charge of the era's massive purges. For fifteen months, Ezhov was a hero in the Politbureau. Less than three and a half years after his appointment, he was dead, his name obliterated from government files. In 1998, the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court ruled that justice had been served by the secret trial and execution of Nikolai Ezhov, "enemy of the people." Using Ezhov's own papers meticulously documenting his loyalty to Stalin, the book reveals the full human tragedy encompassed in Ezhov's meteoric and bloody career. The following questions rivet our attention to an unprecedented era of bureaucratic madness.
# Was Ezhov operating outside the scope of Stalin's authority or "just following orders"?
# How were Stalin's "national operations" implemented?
# How, in 1938, did Ezhov suddenly lose favor with Stalin?
# What police actions were the aftermath of Ezhov's brief reign of terror?
# How did Soviet national policies shift after l938?

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Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov - Stalin's Loyal Execut ioner, People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (2002).pdf

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Yoram Gorlizki, Oleg Khlevniuk - Cold Peace, Stali n and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (2004).jpg

Following his country's victory over Nazi Germany, Joseph Stalin was widely hailed as a great wartime leader and international statesman. Unchallenged on the domestic front, he headed one of the most powerful nations in the world. Yet, in the period from the end of World War II until his death, Stalin remained a man possessed by his fears. In order to reinforce his despotic rule in the face of old age and uncertain health, he habitually humiliated and terrorized members of his inner circle. He had their telephones bugged and even forced his deputy, Viacheslav Molotov, to betray his own spouse as a token of his allegiance.
Often dismissed as paranoid and irrational, Stalin's behavior followed a clear political logic, contend Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk. Stalin's consistent and overriding goal after the war was to consolidate the Soviet Union's status as a superpower and, in the face of growing decrepitude, to maintain his own hold as leader of that power. To that end, he fashioned a system of leadership that was at once patrimonial-repressive and quite modern. While maintaining informal relations based on personal loyalty at the apex of the system, in the postwar period Stalin also vested authority in committees, elevated younger specialists, and initiated key institutional innovations with lasting consequences.
Close scrutiny of Stalin's relationships with his most intimate colleagues also shows how, in the teeth of periodic persecution, Stalin's deputies cultivated informal norms and mutual understandings which provided the foundations for collective rule after his death. Based on newly released archival documents, including personal correspondence, drafts of Central Committee paperwork, new memoirs, and interviews with former functionaries and the families of Politburo members, this book will appeal to all those interested in Soviet history, political history, and the lives of dictators.

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Gregor Benton, Lin Chun - Was Mao Really a Monster , The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's Ma o, The Unknown Story (2009).jpg

Communism - Books - Gregor Benton, Lin Chun - Was Mao Really a Monster...o Chang and Hallidays Mao, The Unknown Story 2009.jpg

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact.
Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao.
This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.

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