The Soviet Century

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If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and neighboring China and food shortages across the USSR eroded Khrushchev’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Communist party leadership. Members of his own political party removed Khrushchev from office in 1964. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Program

Section two does crucial work in seperating the Stalin era from the post-Stalin era that shows some development including the dismantling of the Gulag prison system, increased leniency of the criminal code, reduction of overall prisoner numbers, and other hopeful shifts that are tempered by debates from the liberal and conservative elements of society. The final section likewise covers various shifts through the whole system and covers their positive and negative elements that contributes to an overall more robust understanding of the USSR outside of straw man representations. Here reliance on new materials – archives, memoirs, autobiographies or documentary publications – is an objective in itself Empecemos por el principio. No cabe duda de que el autor sabe de qué está hablando. Es un experto en el tema, ha buceado en las fuentes originales y, además, intenta en todo momento ser neutral. Como bien dice, nuestra visión de la Unión Soviética está viciada en buena parte por la propaganda pro/anti soviética. Es perfectamente compatible criticar los horrendos crímenes del estalinismo y, al mismo tiempo, dar cuenta de que el régimen se volvió bastante más humano de Kruchev en adelante.A. By starting in the mid-1920s, he mostly bypasses the “origins of Stalinism” debates, i.e. questions on the continuities or disjuncture between the character the 1917 Revolution and the early years of the regime that emerged, and what came later. B. Lewin is no apologist for Stalinism. He reports the body count, the level of imprisonments and exile, the arbitrary application of state power, without flinching. Following the surrender of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, the uncomfortable wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain began to crumble.

As I have shown in my recent book, Cold War Liberation, the cadres who staffed these institutions remained critical to Soviet international allies in Africa. This urban metamorphosis was essential to showcasing the Socialist experiment to foreign visitors. Right from the start, journalists, diplomats, intellectuals, anti-colonial activists and professionals came to experience, challenge and participate in the creation of the new state. The symbolic centre of the Soviet universe This book, however, presumes an extensive pre-existing knowledge of the history of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War. Lewin sheds light on so many hitherto unknown aspects of the history, he simply doesn't bother to repeat such things as are already fairly common knowledge from a historians perspective - a problem if you are not a historian! A reader looking for a colourful ‘big picture’ description of the Soviet project may well find this book a boring, baffling history of Russian bureaucracy. The most intriguing and exciting elements of The Soviet Century will only be apparent to people with an already good knowledge of the Soviet century. The last section was the most interesting, as it was a general high-level discussion of the overall "meaning" of the Soviet Union, which included interesting arguments such as the idea that the USSR was a "no-party state", where the communist party was totally toothless and irrelevant, and where even the leaders of the state were unable to really control the vast bureaucratic machine that ran day-to-day life. This becomes clearer if we refer to one of his later declarations to ‘future cadres’, students at the Sverdlov Party University. Here he basically explained that ‘for us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or if they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres’.In a period known as the Red Terror, Bolshevik secret police—known as Cheka—carried out a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime and against Russia’s upper classes. If you have a solid grip on Soviet history, then this would be an illuminating read. Lewin, a long-time scholar of Soviet history, presumes that the reader has this prior knowledge going in. I think I might have digested it better had my knowledge of the Soviet Union's history been more expansive, but I nonetheless remain fascinated by a number of gems in the book, from insightful portraits into individual administrators to the in-depth descriptions of the Soviet Union's labor shortages and its administrative bumbling. Throughout the book, the reader is enlighten on several crucial aspects on how Stalin betrayed Lenin while destroying the Bolshevik Party, and dismounting its accomplishments to accommodate both the party and the state to his own personal goals; which relied on eliminating any kind of connection between the revolutionary cadres that seized power in 1917, both physically -trough slandering, smearing, framing and forced confessions to the ultimate bloodshed of Lenin's comrades- and incorporating new waves of cadres that had nothing to do with the revolution, that were careerists and useful scapegoats at the same time; on top of this, falsifying history to make room for his cult. Why, then, a lot of characterizations of Stalin are not sourced? Why is Stalin attributed a quote that potentially doesn't exist? It's baffling to me that citations are that weak in a source that is recommended by academics. There are loads of instances where Lewin says something like "Historians seem agreed" and "In a very gloomy letter" and "In a handwritten note" without attribution of the source. Also missing from The Soviet Century is any information at all on one of the most significant elements of the system’s history, i.e. its impact on the outside world and international relations. Of the revolutionary Comintern era in the time of European revolution, to the role the Soviet Union played in the anti-colonial revolutions of the 60s and 70s, we learn nothing. This is a history of the Soviet Union as it might have been seen through the eyes of an apparatchik in some Moscow ministry, not through the eyes of the outside world.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.

Daily life

Probably no other Western historian of the USSR combines Moshe Lewin’s personal experience of living with Russians from Stalin’s day—as a young wartime soldier—to the post-communist era, with so profound a familiarity with the archives and the literature of the Soviet era. His reflections on the ‘Soviet Century’ are an important contribution to emancipating Soviet history from the ideological heritage of the last century and should be essential reading for all who wish to understand it. Eric Hobsbawm Amid confusion and resistance to collectivization in the countryside, agricultural productivity dropped. This led to devastating food shortages. The Five-Year Plans were not really plans in any meaningful sense. Stalin had no conception of the likely results of his policies. Once underway, he reacted rather than led, proceeding in fits and starts. The planners were constantly taken by surprise and had to reissue targets and prices on a continual basis. The Soviet economy was out of control, in a condition of extreme disequilibrium, suffering from shortages, semi-completed projects, hidden inflation, poor quality, and low labour productivity. The consequences for the Soviet Union were severe and long-term. This was so not only in relation to the restoration of the economy. There was also a vast administrative structure, a privileged bureaucracy that stood above and to a large extent against society. Not surprisingly the political élite sought to repress freedom of expression and any signs of critical, democratic activity. Lewin is now able to revisit his earlier works, theories and conceptions, with the historian’s benefit of hindsight, as well as access to more primary materials and contemporary Russian scholarship than previously possible. It is, to begin with, a challenging title: The Soviet Century??? But this is not an epitaph for the twentieth century, but a cry to understand better one of its most important aspects that ‘remains an ill-understood system’. (p.viii)

D. The question which he wrestles with at length, of whether the state was controlled by the party or the party became a tool of the managerial strata of the institutions owned by the state (which is to say, all institutions of any significance in the entire country) seems to have an urgency for Lewin that he cannot convince the reader (at least this reader) merit such urgency. In 1949, the U.S., Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO). The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies. At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991. Sources: Political revolution in Poland in 1989 sparked other, mostly peaceful revolutions across Eastern European states and led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. By the end of 1989, the USSR had come apart at the seams. During the interwar period, Moscow transformed from a largely commercial town of winding, narrow streets, dotted with churches and merchant villas, into a model socialist capital. The city was to boast new infrastructure, open public spaces for the workers and apartment buildings for the Soviet elite. By 1957, with the construction of the last of Stalinist skyscrapers – known as the Seven Sisters – the city’s new skyline was complete.