How did the Soviet Union compare economically with its allies and adversaries before and during World War II? Was Soviet economic survival under massive German attack to be expected? What was the cost of the war in rubles, lives and foregone postwar economic well-being? In this book Mark Harrison answers these questions, providing a comprehensive analysis of the hitherto secret Soviet statistical record.

Chris Ward uses a wide range of sources to examine key aspects of life on the shop floor of the Russian cotton mill. He reveals the existence of a complex world of work that grew out of the interaction between the experience of the industrialization in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia and the mechanization of the cotton industry in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. The book provides for the first time a realistic understanding of the relationship among worker, management and technology in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

Why did the Polish underground Home Army call for what proved to be a suicidal uprising? Why did they decide that their poorly armed troops should alone liberate Warsaw shortly before the Soviet entry into the capital? Why were the approaching Russians not informed? Why did the Red Army fail to take Warsaw in the first days of August 1944 as both Stalin and Bor-Kornorowski had anticipated? Dr Ciechanowski examines in detail the political, diplomatic, ideological and military background of the Rising and the events and decisions which immediately preceded it. He traces in turn: the main...

This is the first major study of revolutionary Kronstadt to span the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. It focuses attention on Kronstadt's forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918, when Soviet power and democracy flourished there. Professor Getzler argues that the Kronstadters' 'Third Revolution' of March 1921 was a desperate attempt at a restoration of that Soviet democracy which they believed had been taken from them by Bolshevik 'commissarocracy'. Pointing to continuity in personnel, ideology and institutions linking the 1917 18 Kronstadt experiment in...

The control of office has long been regarded as the key to understanding power and policy in the Soviet system. What, however, accounts for this control of office? Numerous conventional studies have addressed this question by focusing on the individuals who make up the Soviet elite at one time or another. This book adopts a different perspective by treating the personnel system itself as a set of power relations that govern the mobility of the individuals within it. Using the Belorussian Republic as the site of the investigation, the author analyzes the movements of individuals as sequences...

The emergence of East Germany as one of Europe's most vocal advocates of East-West detente in the 1980s represented a remarkable political transformation. Prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, East Germany had been amongst the most intransigent proponents of the Cold War, largely because of the perceived threat to the domestic authority of its own leadership. Renewed exposure, however, prompted that leadership to regard good relations with the West as integral rather than inimical to its own pursuit of legitimacy. Of interest not only to scholars of communist politics but to all...

This book traces the evolution of Soviet thinking about South Asia and the Third World from 1970 to the present, and examines how Soviet policy objectives changed during that period. The author offers a unique view of Soviet policy toward a region of particularly unstable states, and addresses all the political, military and economic issues involved, the regional constraints and policy opportunities that influenced the policy process in Moscow, and the relationship between Soviet perceptions and policy objectives.

Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika is a comprehensive analysis of the role of labor policy in the development and ultimate collapse of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Filtzer argues that initially perestroika was designed to modernize the Soviet economy while keeping the existing political and property relations of society intact, requiring a thorough restructuring of the labor process within Soviet industry. He contends that the collapse of the USSR has brought the solution to this problem no nearer, and that post-Soviet capitalism is rooted in...

This book is about the political, social and economic changes in Czechoslovakia in the years 1945 1948. In 1945 the 'national revolution' established the Communist Party as the dominant force within a coalition government. The leading Communists then evolved the idea of a specific Czechoslovak road to socialism that could bypass the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. By analysing in detail the revolutionary events and the society that emerged from them, the book demonstrates that there was a real possibility of developing a distinct model of socialism containing a plurality of parties and a...

This book first published in 1978 provides a broad and comprehensive view of the Soviet book publishing industry.