This book presents a side of Russian life that is largely unknown to the West--the world of popular culture. By surveying detective and science fiction, popular songs, jokes, box office movie hits, the stage, radio and television, Richard Stites introduces the people and cultural products that are household words to the Soviet people. He demonstrates how popular culture has over the past century had more impact on the lives of Russian people and reveals more about their lives than the works of giants of high culture. Richard Stites, Professor of History at Georgetown University, is the author...

This is the first book to analyze the relationship between the Soviet state and society from the October Revolution of 1917 to the revolution under Stalin of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Professor Lewis Siegelbaum explores the evolution of the ruling Communist Party and its New Economic Policy and the changing fortunes of industrial workers, peasants, and the scientific and cultural intelligentsia. He demonstrates how these different actors sought to appropriate the promise of the 1917 Revolution for their own purposes, highlights the compromises they made, and explains why in the late...

Although the history of centrally planned economies has been widely studied, the development of socialist thinking on the subject has remained largely uncharted. In this pathbreaking work, Pekka Sutela presents a detailed analysis of recent and contemporary Soviet economic thought. Dr. Sutela traces the competing currents in the Marxist tradition of socialist economies from the Revolution to the present day. In particular he shows how the Gorbachev economic reform program of 1987 rose from the work of Nobel Prize economist L. V. Kantorovich and his followers, and explains why this program...

Although the history of centrally planned economies has been widely studied, the development of socialist thinking on the subject has remained largely uncharted. In this pathbreaking work, Pekka Sutela presents a detailed analysis of recent and contemporary Soviet economic thought. Dr. Sutela traces the competing currents in the Marxist tradition of socialist economies from the Revolution to the present day. In particular he shows how the Gorbachev economic reform program of 1987 rose from the work of Nobel Prize economist L. V. Kantorovich and his followers, and explains why this program...

This book is a study of Soviet ties with Northeast Asia-- China, Japan, and North and South Korea--in the 1980s. It develops the concept of learning in Soviet foreign policy by examining the internal and external factors that ultimately led Gorbachev and other reformers to reject the fundamental premises upon which the Soviet system was based. The author examines the economic, political, ideological and military aspects of changing Soviet relations with the region, and argues that radical reform was due less to the pressures of the Cold War, than to factors internal to the Soviet Union.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of fifteen independent states on its former territory is one of the most momentous developments of the twentieth century. In From Union to Commonwealth, five leading international scholars--Leokadia Drobizheva and Galina Starovoiteva from Russia, and Gail Lapidus, Ronald Suny and Victor Zaslavsky from North America--team up to examine the forces that lay behind the rise of national movements which challenged, then destroyed, the stability and territorial integrity of the former Soviet state. Writing from their different disciplinary...

Dramatic and confusing changes in what used to be the Soviet Union have transformed the world in which we live. This fourth edition of Stephen White's best-selling introductory text has been revised throughout and examines the full cycle of this period of revolutionary change from its Brezhnevite origins to the first turbulent years of Yeltsin's troubled presidency. After Gorbachev will continue to provide an unrivaled guide to the processes of transition, upheaval and collapse that now characterize Russia and the post-Soviet republics.

This book examines the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization on the strength of relationships within the family and between generations. Dr. Janssens' quantitative approach, based on Dutch population registers, reveals a new perspective: although family life did go through some changes, early industrialization did not lead to the destruction of nineteenth-century family life, as the traditionally dominant view contended. This innovative study also illuminates wider social issues--the nature of hierarchies, class structure and household organization.

This book was the first comprehensive study of Soviet environmental issues.

This book examines the Soviet presence and purposes in Latin America.