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Russia and the long transition from capitalism to socialism
\"Out of early twentieth-century Russia came the world's first significant effort to build a modern revolutionary society. According to Marxist economist Samir Amin, the great upheaval that once produced the Soviet Union has also produced a movement away from capitalism--a long transition that continues even today. In seven concise, provocative chapters, Amin deftly examines the trajectory of Russian capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possible future of Russia--and, by extension, the future of socialism itself\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
Out of early twentieth-century Russia came the world's first
significant effort to build a modern revolutionary society.
According to Marxist economist Samir Amin, the great upheaval that
once produced the Soviet Union has also produced a movement away
from capitalism - a long transition that continues even today. In
seven concise, provocative chapters, Amin deftly examines the
trajectory of Russian capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the possible future of Russia - and,
by extension, the future of socialism itself.
Amin manages to combine an analysis of class struggle with
geopolitics - each crucial to understanding Russia's singular and
complex political history. He first looks at the development (or
lack thereof) of Russian capitalism. He sees Russia's geopolitical
isolation as the reason its capitalist empire developed so
differently from Western Europe, and the reason for Russia's
perceived \"backwardness.\" Yet Russia's unique capitalism proved to
be the rich soil in which the Bolsheviks were able to take power,
and Amin covers the rise and fall of the revolutionary Soviet
system. Finally, in a powerful chapter on Ukraine and the rise of
global fascism, Amin lays out the conditions necessary for Russia
to recreate itself, and perhaps again move down the long road to
socialism. Samir Amin's great achievement in this book is not only
to explain Russia's historical tragedies and triumphs, but also to
temper our hopes for a quick end to an increasingly insufferable
capitalism.
This book offers a cornucopia of food for thought, as well as an
enlightening means to transcend reductionist arguments about
\"revolution\" so common on the left. Samir Amin's book - and the
actions that could spring from it - are more necessary than ever,
if the world is to avoid the barbarism toward which capitalism is
hurling humanity.
eBook
The Socialist Sixties
The 1960s have reemerged in scholarly and popular culture as a protean moment of cultural revolution and social transformation. In this volume socialist societies in the Second World (the Soviet Union, East European countries, and Cuba) are the springboard for exploring global interconnections and cultural cross-pollination between communist and capitalist countries and within the communist world. Themes explored include flows of people and media; the emergence of a flourishing youth culture; sharing of songs, films, and personal experiences through tourism and international festivals; and the rise of a socialist consumer culture and an esthetics of modernity. Challenging traditional categories of analysis and periodization, this book brings the sixties problematic to Soviet studies while introducing the socialist experience into scholarly conversations traditionally dominated by First World perspectives.
eBook
Moscow, the fourth Rome : Stalinism, cosmopolitanism, and the evolution of Soviet culture, 1931-1941
In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the \"Third Rome.\" By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world.
Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today—transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin.
Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.
eBook
Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics
Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics analyses the way in which Soviet symbolism and ritual changed from the regime's birth in 1917 to its fall in 1991. Graeme Gill focuses on the symbolism in party policy and leaders' speeches, artwork and political posters, and urban redevelopment, and on ritual in the political system. He shows how this symbolism and ritual were worked into a dominant metanarrative which underpinned Soviet political development. Gill also shows how, in each of these spheres, the images changed both over the life of the regime and during particular stages: the Leninist era metanarrative differed from that of the Stalin period, which differed from that of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, which was, in turn, changed significantly under Gorbachev. In charting this development, the book lays bare the dynamics of the Soviet regime and a major reason for its fall.
eBook
The Russian Revolution, 1917–1945
This book offers a fresh analysis of the Russian Revolution from a global perspective. It stresses the historical role of Soviet Communism in the modernization of the country, the defeat of Nazism, and the rise of American power and world leadership.
For students and scholars of the Russian Revolution, there are pivotal questions that merit careful, comprehensive consideration: why did the Tsarist regime unravel in revolution? Why did the Bolsheviks come to power rather than some other party? How did Stalin—rather than a more popular and respected leader—win the mantle of Lenin and gain leadership of the ruling party? How should Stalin's regime be judged by subsequent generations of Russians, and in the context of world history?
In Russian Revolution, 1917-1945, author Anthony D'Agostino discusses all these questions. His suggestions for further reading range over decades of writing on Soviet subjects and cite classics, revisionist works, curiosities, and studies done during and since the Gorbachev years. The book explores topics including the modernization of the Tsarist Russian state, World War I, the revolutionary project of Soviet Communism, the nationalist transformation of Soviet Communism under international pressures, the \"Big Drive\" to modernize Russia by force, and the external threat of fascism.
eBook