The various economic arguments of the Bolshevik leaders in the 1920s, Bukharin, the post-war debates, the reform economists of the 1960s and modern reassessments are surveyed. The central theme of the book is how state control impaired the economy and the development of a free society.

A Soviet theater troupe dares to put on Shakespeare's King Lear, but shortly before the performance, the actor playing the title role falls ill. The prop manager, a lumbering, largely silent bear of a man — completely inappropriate for the part, according to common perception — finds himself literally thrust into the spotlight. His performance becomes the talk of Moscow, and he falls under the direct scrutiny of Joseph Stalin, who controls whether the show will proceed and the actors will live to give another performance. An audacious winter's tale, The Green Lantern is an exploration of Shakespeare, the Soviet Union, and what it is to "perform," by one of the great American writers.

"Theodore Draper is one of the two or three most cogent and thoughtful social historians in the United States today. Everything he writes merits close attention." -Irving Howe "Theodore Draper is a historian of today's world in a class by himself-formidably equipped with learning and experience, fearless in attacking the naivet of the left and the cruelty of the right." -Alfred Kazin Theodore Draper is one of America's most trenchant and informed critics. A Present of Things Past gathers together ten of his most recent and most powerful selected essays, in which Draper, with his customary acuity and wit, tackles a host of issues that define America's political culture. A Present of Things Past is concerned with a reexamination of the Second World War in both its military and its political aspects; the trajectory of American conservatism as it manifested itself during the Reagan years; the rise of Gorbachev and the history of "reform" in the Soviet Union; the revisionist debate over the origins and history of American communism; and the persistent mystery of a man named Max Eitingon, who was, depending on one's reading of the sources, either an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis or an agent of the Soviet secret police, or both. In "American Hubris," Draper illuminates the assumptions that have guided American foreign policy in the postwar period, and concludes that our costly misadventures-in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and elsewhere-cannot be considered a string of aberrations. They were, he argues, a consequence of the Truman Doctrine. In "Reagan's Junta," Draper observes: "This is supposed to have been the era of the imperial presidency. It has turned out to be the era of presidencies that have tried to make themselves imperial-and failed." Throughout these compelling essays, Draper demonstrates the uses and abuses to which history has been put by ideologues of both the left and the right. He finds unacceptable, for example, the practice of many journalists of fictionalizing their sources. The New York Times has called Draper "one of the clearer-eyed observers of the issues that torment us." A Present of Things Past enhances that reputation. Theodore Draper is the author of numerous books, including Present History: On Nuclear War, Dtente & Other Controversies and American Communism. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. "Is especially recommended for students of political science, the Cold War era, and twentieth century American history as a powerful, thought-provoking view of the people and events that shaped nations, and through nations the world."-- Library Bookwatch

Legendary director Sergei Eisenstein has unquestionably emerged as cinema's most influential theorist and author of some of the most important aesthetic writings of the twentieth century. For the first time in one volume, The Eisenstein Reader presents in concise, chronological form his most significant work--including his famous theories of montage and articles on subjects as diverse as sound, film language, and Russian history. The selections range from early writings on his great silent masterpieces The Strike, October and The Battleship Potemkin, to later works, hatched in the increasingly hostile and paranoid environment of Stalin's Soviet Union. Drawn from the acclaimed four-volume Selected Works, this collection, which includes a new introduction and explanatory notes by Richard Taylor as well as many illustrations, further illuminates the startling originality, diversity, and power of the greatest and most flamboyant of all Russian filmmakers.

In this volume, scholars from the United States, Israel and Eastern Europe examine the history of the Holocaust on Soviet territory and its treatment in Soviet politics and literature from 1945 to 1991. Of special interest to researchers will be chapters on some of the major research sources for historical study, including census materials, memorial books, archives and recently released documents.

" . . . a chronicle of man's bestiality to man, and therefore the few exceptional instances of courage and humanity shine forth with particular brightness." —The Russian Review "Essential reading for any holocaust course." —Religious Studies Review Bitter Legacy collects scholarship from America, Israel, Russia, Germany, and the Ukraine on the perpetration of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and its lasting consequences from the postwar period through post-Soviet times. Newly accessible wartime archives in the former Soviet Union provide chilling details of what happened, of collaboration with the Nazis, and of rescue efforts, too.

In this autobiographical novel, the author moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.

Discusses social and political conditions bearing on antisemitism and philosemitism in France, Russia, and the American South as background for the Dreyfus Affair, the Beilis ritual murder trial, and the trial and lynching of Leo Frank. Declares that comparison helps to understand each of these affairs. Antisemitism is based on realities enhanced by fantasy: in the 19th century it increased because of the growth in the number and influence of Jews, as well as domestic and international political conditions. In all three trials, official antisemitism played little part either in directing suspicion at the particular defendants or in the prosecution: in all three, there was circumstantial evidence that at first seemed credible. Public debate, however, turned on antisemitism and philosemitism. also describes massive Jewish defense efforts, especially in the USA, in connection with all three trials.

In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian, wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's widely debated idea of containing rather than militarily confronting the Soviet Union. A month later, to Lukacs's surprise, he received a personal reply from Kennan.So began an exchange of letters that would continue for more than fifty years. Lukacs would go on to become one of America's most distinguished and prolific diplomatic historians, while Kennan, who would retire from public life to begin a new career as Pulitzer Prize-winning author, would become revered as the man whose strategy of containment led to a peaceful end to the Cold War. Their letters, collected here for the first time, capture the writing and thinking of two of the country's most important voices on America's role and place in world affairs. From the division of Europe into East and West after World War II to its unification as the Soviet Union disintegrated, and from the war in Vietnam to the threat of nuclear annihilation and the fate of democracy in America and the world, this book provides an insider's tour of the issues and pivotal events that defined the Cold War.The correspondence also charts the growth and development of an intellectual and personal friendship that was intense, devoted, and honest. As Kennan later wrote Lukacs in letter, "perceptive, understanding, and constructive criticism is . . . as I see it, in itself a form of creative philosophical thought." It is a belief to which both men subscribed and that they both practiced.Presented with an introduction by Lukacs, the letters in Through the History of the Cold War reveal new dimensions to Kennan's thinking about America and its future, and illuminate the political-and spiritual-philosophies that the two authors shared as they wrote about a world transformed by war and by the clash of ideologies that defined the twentieth century.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

From Library Journal This volume contains essays and reviews about various aspects of Soviet life. Laqueur begins by concentrating on the current glasnost era under Gorbachev, which is a time of daily excitement as compared to the grim years of stagnation which preceded it. Laqueur recently published a far more detailed study of the subject in The Long Road to Freedom (LJ 4/1/89). Other essays include a discussion of Western historiography of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia (little here for the profession to be proud of); a 25-year-old piece on Stalin's historical reputation which stands up well; a piece on emigre politics between the wars; and reviews of spy novels of East and West. This has some interesting bits, but it is for larger collections only.- R.H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, OntarioCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description In this, the third volume of collected essays by one of the most eminent students of East and West Europe, Walter Laqueur reveals a particularly deft touch at weaving the cultural and the political into a seamless whole. His familiarity with Soviet life and the Russian language gives him a unique insider's position in examining the Soviet Union and its remarkable changes in the decade of the 1980s. In chapters on glasnost and its limits to the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the reader is given a careful perspective on continuities as well as discontinuities in Soviet politics. And in studies of Nikolai Skoblin, Julian Semynov-with whom his western counterpart, John Le Carre is compared in a fine coupling-we are given a sense of the darker side of things Soviet.Soviet Realities reveals Laqueur's appreciation of the painful dialectic inherent in the grand sweet of Soviet life: underneath the faþade of an imposed monolith are the continuing struggles between Left and Right, reformers and renegades, terrorists and legalists. And in his opening chapter, the author links these disparate strands together in a modest and self-critical appraisal. This is a volume deserving of an audience far beyond "Kremlinologists" or specialists in foreign affairs. In its sense of the Soviet whole, it will be of interest to all citizens concerned with the present and future of Soviet-American relations. Review “Laqueur's essays are thoughtfully and insightfully written.” —J. S. Zacek, Choice About the Author Walter Laqueur was director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and served as chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington until 2000. He was founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications. Laqueur taught at Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis University, and Tel Aviv University.

Exploring Soviet and Russian history, politics, and foreign policy, The Uses of History brings together the classic essays of renowned scholar Alexander Dallin. The author provides insightful analysis and nuanced interpretations of such key-and controversial-issues as the domestic sources of Soviet foreign policy, Stalin's leadership in World War II, Russian-American relations in the Reagan era, the causes of the collapse of the USSR, and the disappointments of Russia's post-Soviet evolution. With his incisive assessment of the biases and blunders in American interpretations, Dallin rejects single-factor explanations for Soviet and Russian domestic and foreign policies, instead examining the complex interplay of internal and external conditions, institutions, mindsets, and the role of individual leaders. All readers interested in Soviet and post-Soviet history will find this collection a stimulating and deeply knowledgeable resource.

Is there a sharp dividing line that separates Europe into "East" and "West"? This volume brings together prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, France, Poland, and Russia to examine the evolution of the concept of Europe in the two centuries between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Inspired by the ideas of Martin Malia, the contributors take a flexible view of the "cultural gradient"-the emergence, interaction, and reception of ideas across Europe. The essays address three dimensions of the gradient-the history of ideas, regimes and political practices, and the contemporary political and intellectual scene. In exploring the movement of ideas throughout Europe, The Cultural Gradient brings a new historical perspective to the field of European studies.

The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself. Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet Detroits," emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable "roadlessness." In the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs, movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than car-crazy America. Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox practices that the state was helpless to combat. Deeply researched and engagingly told, this masterful and entertaining biography of the Soviet automobile provides a new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most iconic--and important--technologies and a novel approach to understanding the history of the Soviet Union itself.

This is an account of how the KGB first compromised, then controlled, the MI6 intelligence network in the Baltic States. Between 1944 and 1955 MI6 thought it had established a major spy network inside the Soviet Union, but the book offers evidence of how the KGB had in fact organized a massive sting operation; of how, for more than a decade, British agents were dropped by boat on the Soviet coast, and many of them lost their lives; and of how, once the betrayal was revealed, MI6 officers abandoned their agents in Russia, hoping that the bungle could be explained away by Kim Philby's treachery. The book's evidence is based on newly-declassified information from Washington, Bonn and Stockholm, access to KGB files and officers, and more than 200 interviews. The author's other books include "Maxwell: the Outsider".

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION

Explores the formative years of the Soviet Union under communism, ranging from the Bolshevik takeover in 1918 to the 1924 death of Lenin, and examines the impact of Bolshevik leaders and period events on the USSR