The Soviet Century
Verso, 2005 - 416 sider
The USSR may no longer exist, but its history remains highly relevant—perhaps today more so than ever. Yet it is a history which for a long time proved impossible to write, not simply due to the lack of accessible documentation, but also because it lay at the heart of an ideological confrontation which obscured the reality of the Soviet regime.
In The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin traces this history in all its complexity, drawing widely upon archive material previously unavailable. 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 the 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.
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STALIN KNOWS WHERE HE WANTS TO GET TO AND IS GETTING THERE
AUTONOMIZATION VERSUS FEDERATION 19223
CADRES INTO HERETICS
THE PARTY AND ITS APPARATY
SOCIAL FLUX AND SYSTEMIC PARANOIA
THE IMPACT OF COLLECTIVIZATION
BETWEEN LEGALITY AND BACCHANALIA
HOW DID STALIN RULE?
THE ADMINISTRATORS BRUISED BUT THRIVING
KOSYGIN AND ANDROPOV
LENINS TIME AND WORLDS
BACKWARDNESS AND RELAPSE
MODERNITY WITH A TWIST
URBANIZATION SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
LABOUR FORCE AND DEMOGRAPHY A CONUNDRUM
THE PURGES AND THEIR RATIONALE
THE SCALE OF THE PURGES
THE CAMPS AND THE INDUSTRIAL EMPIRE OF THE NKVD
AN AGRARIAN DESPOTISM?
E PUR SI MUOVE
THE KGB AND THE POLITICAL OPPOSITION
THE AVALANCHE OF URBANIZATION
activity administrative agencies Andropov apparatchiks became birth rates Bolsheviks Brezhnev bureaucratic cadres camps cent Central Committee changes chekists Commissariat complex Council of Ministers country's countryside crimes criminal critical cultural democratic documents economic employees enterprises especially fact factors figures force general-secretary Gosplan Gossnab Gulag head ideological industrial institutions internal Khrushchev kolkhoz Kosygin kulaks labour leaders leadership Lenin Mensheviks Mikoyan military million ministries Molotov Moscow NKVD nomenklatura officials organization Orgburo party apparatus party members party's peasants phenomenon Politburo Politburo members political population position prisoners problem production Prosecutor purges reality reform regime regime's regions repression republics responsible revolution revolutionary role roubles rural Russia sector sentences shadow economy situation social socialist Soviet system Soviet Union Stalin Stalinist supply Supreme Soviet task term towns Trotsky Tsarist urban USSR whole workers