Ideology in a Socialist State describes the changes in the ideology of Poland's rulers from the October events of 1956 to the lifting of martial law in 1983. Ideology has been one of the most debated and equivocal concepts in social science, yet this is one of the first attempts to examine it in a systematic, longitudinal and empirical way. Dr Taras analyses how central principles of Marxism-Leninism (the leading role of the party, party influence on trade unions, the church, culture and science) were interpreted by Poland's political leaders. Ideological change, he suggests, represents the...

Latin America Through Soviet Eyes provides an original and comprehensive assessment of changing Soviet perceptions of politics in Latin America during the Brezhnev years. Using a wealth of Russian, Spanish and English language sources, Dr. Prizel surveys the views of Soviet academics and journalists as well as those of politicians on three main areas. He explores the changing Soviet perceptions of Latin America's domestic politics including the Church, the military and national liberation movements. The author examines the role of Latin America in global politics and the way in which the...

Michael Kennedy develops a theoretical conception of Soviet-type societies by analyzing Solidarity's significance on three levels. First, he explains the background to and nature of the conflict between Solidarity and the authorities by examining the relation between the distribution of power and movement strategies. Second, he considers the implications of Solidarity's struggle for the theory of the Soviet-type system's reproduction and transformation by offering a critique and synthesis of relevant theories of class and civil society. Third, he examines the internal constitution of...

In this book Dr Woodall analyses the political implications of the pursuit of industrial growth for the authority of the Polish United Workers' Party. She argues that political constraints on the available options for economic reform have encouraged a policy of merger of industrial enterprises into large corporate' units since 1958. Although they are only a shadow of their Western counterparts, these socialist corporations' nevertheless pose considerable problems for the role of a Marxist-Leninist party in industry. While this does not manifest itself in the emergence of a clearly...

The economic background to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 has not received the attention it deserves. This book helps to redress this imbalance by analysing in depth the web of foreign interests direct foreign investment, foreign long-term loans and the activities of international cartels in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. After the First World War Central and Southeast Europe became one of the major regions of the world to which capital from France, Great Britain and the United States was exported. Czechoslovakia played a central part in this development:...

This study represents attempts dating from 1967, by nine experts on Communist economics, to forecast the performance of individual Communist countries.

This full-length study of the relations between Church and state in communist regime is set in the only communist country where free research into the subject has ever been possible; it gains additional interest and topicality from the identification of religion and nationalism in a multi-national state. The author writes objectively about the still controversial events of the war and the period immediately after, when the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were confronted by a vicious communist power, determined to impose unity on the country and break the power of the churches. She describes...

This book first published in 1982 considers the problems of efficiently managing large enterprises which are common to both the West and to the Soviet Union. The growth in management science in the West has been paralleled in the Soviet Union in the years since Khrushchev's fall. Professor Conyngham provides a comprehensive discussion of the efforts in the Soviet Union to develop techniques of scientific management that are consistent with the requirements of communist ideology and a planned economy. The opening chapter outlines the reforms of Soviet industrial management during the...

The Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party gained an overall majority in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. The SRs derived the bulk of their electoral support from the peasantry, and the gulf between the predominantly urban Bolshevik party and the rural masses was to create immense problems for the Soviet government in the 1920s, culminating in the horrors of forced collectivization. The SRs offered an alternative vision of the Russian peasant's path to socialism. They were closer to the peasantry than any other revolutionary...

This book studies in detail the reform regime of Alexander Dubcek from the assumption of power in the Party by reform-minded communists in January 1968 until Gustav Husik replaced Dubcek as First Secretary. The reform regime survived only eight months of genuine rule but it persisted for a further eight months after the Soviet invasion in an agonizing struggle for survival. One of the most impressive but little-known developments in the era of reform rule was the attempt by the Czechoslovaks to perpetuate the 'Prague Spring', to salvage something of the programme for reform, and maintain...