The Soviet century
By: Moshe Lewin ; edited by Gregory Elliott.
Contributors: Elliott, Gregory.
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2005
Place of publication: London; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 416
Subjects: Soviet Union -- History
Description: "In The Soviet Century Moshe Lewin traces the USSR's history in all its complexity, drawing widely upon previously unavailable archive material. Highlighting key factors such as demography, economics, culture and political repression, Lewin guides us through the inner workings of a system which is still barely understood. In the process, he overturns widely held beliefs about the USSR's leaders, the state - party system and the Soviet bureaucracy - the 'tentacled octopus' which held real power."

"Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century takes in all the continuities and ruptures that led, via a complex route, from the founding revolution of October 1917 to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship and the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Stalin knows where he wants to get to and is getting there; title: Autonomization versus federation? (1922-3); title: Cadres into heretics; title: The party and its apparaty; title: Social flux and systemic paranoia; title: The impact of collectivization; title: Between legality and bacchanalia; title: How did Stalin rule?; title: The purges and their rationale; title: The scale of the purges; title: The camps and the industrial empire of the NKVD; title: Endgame; title: An agrarian despotism?; title: E pur, si muove!; title: The KGB and the political opposition; title: The avalanche of urbanization; title: The administrators : bruised but thriving; title: Some leaders; title: Kosygin and Andropov; title: Lenin's time and worlds; title: Backwardness and relapse; title: Modernity with a twist; title: Urbanization : successes and failures; title: Labour force and demography : a conundrum; title: The bureaucratic maze; title: Telling the light from the shade?; title: What was the Soviet system?