The Soviet Century

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Schlögel – assisted by his excellent translator, Rodney Livingstone – is an eloquent writer and a captivating travel guide around this Soviet “lost world”."—Stephen Lovell, Times Literary Supplement If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. U.S. President John F. Kennedy responded to Gagarin’s feat by making the bold claim that the U.S. would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The U.S. succeeded—on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. Mikhail Gorbachev C. He focuses a lot on the Party- who were its cadres, how were they recruited, to what extent they were veterans of the Revolution and the Civil War, when the terror turned on it. His sympathies are with the Old Bolsheviks, the idealists. They began to be pushed aside in the initial Five-Year Plans, and then were decimated in the terror of the late 1930s. He is sensitive to the erosion of the Bolshevik culture of intraparty debate, but not to the erosion of debate beyond the limits of the Party. The Soviet Union was not only a political system with a debatable beginning and an end, but a form of life with its own history, maturity, decline and fall. With its practices, values and routines, it shaped the citizens of the nation for many generations to come. Daily life 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.After reading it I feel like things might have gone quite differently had it not been for Stalin as an individual. For example there seem to have been several people who led various things after his time, where they seem to have been energetic and brave reformers, and what they achieved was to un-Stalinize things. So if those same people had inherited a less horrific situation then they probably could have achieved a lot more with the same energy. 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. In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War. Lewin retains much of his earlier historical analysis. Stalin and Stalinism, constructed during 1928–39, represented a sharp break with Lenin and Bolshevism of the period up to 1924. Lenin’s final period of active politics, 1921–23, was an honest attempt by a flexible and honest communist to come to terms with the realities of a gradual transition to building socialism. It was also a crucial and wide-ranging battle between Lenin and Stalin for the future direction of policy. In opposition to Lenin’s model, Stalin sought to control the party and state to implement a dictatorial forced pattern of modernisation. Lenin’s death and the incompetent politics of the old Bolsheviks enabled Stalin to win power and crush Bolshevism. 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.

I was pretty surprised that there's no citation of this speech since all of the writings and speeches of Stalin are published somewhere. If it's a quote from an archive, I would still expect a citation. But this quote also stands out because Lewin extrapolates a lot of Stalin's character traits from it. It's mentioned over and over again so I decided to try and find it myself. By the fortune of me speaking in Russian, I've tried to google something akin to "speech Stalin Sverdlov Party University 1924". As it turns out, it's not a speech, but a series of lectures called "Foundations of Leninism", that Stalin gave at the aforementioned university in 1924. These lectures do not contain the said quote. If it's a thing from memoirs, why not mention who wrote the memoir or whatever the source might be? How should the reader verify that the quote even exists if it's ungooglable and basically impossible to verify? His focus is not on the foreign relations or domestic crises of Soviet rule but on outward appearances: the look, the smell, the sounds of everyday life. Based on decades of research and an intimate knowledge of history and culture, ‘The Soviet Century’ is a fascinating chronicle of a not-so-distant era."—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal 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.This isn't a book for beginners. There's an assumption that the reader has a certain level of knowledge about the Soviet Union, which I do not possess, so it was heavy going for me but very much worth the effort. 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. 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 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.

In The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin traces this history in all its complexity, drawing widely upon archive material previously unavailable. Highlighting key factors such as demography, economics, culture and political repression, Lewin guides us through the inner workings of a system which is still barely understood. In the process he overturns widely held beliefs about the USSR's leaders, the State-Party system and the Soviet bureaucracy, the "tentacled octopus"; which held the real power. Andropov was well aware of the weaknesses corroding the Soviet Union from within; he hatched ambitious reform plans, including real elections to party posts. Lewin excitedly claims that this implied replacing the existing party with a new one which, 'still in power but planning reforms, could have served to steer the country during the difficult transition to a new model'.

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WOW! This was one heavy, dense book on Soviet economics, which is not for the casual reader. It started out as more of a historical account of how Bolshevik-ism transformed into the Soviet system that was well known during the middle part of the 20th Century. However, it seemed too often to get lost in the weeds of specificity. Increasingly, the system which had turned a vast rural, semi-feudal empire into a modern industrial powerhouse transformed itself into a great engine of wastefulness, buying its citizens off with the promise of an easy, quiet life in exchange for their tacit consent. ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’ became the defining feature of the stagnation which set in during 1970s. Utilising cutting edge research and analysis, Moshe Lewin reveals that the Soviet leadership were often completely aware of the problems that beset them, but, having discarded the tools of mass coercion, were completely incapable of responding effectively. As the great machine of the planned economy began to wind down in the second half of the 20th century, the people operating it were unable to do anything other than manage its decline. The Soviet Union possessed vast reserves of resources in areas with no surplus labour to exploit them, while at the same time maintained huge levels of overstaffing and in areas with massive labour surpluses, leading to plummeting productivity. Khrushchev’s tenure spanned the tensest years of the Cold War. He instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 by installing nuclear weapons just 90 miles from Florida’s coast in Cuba. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.

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. The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. La estructura del libro es un verdadero desastre. Sin paliativos. Arranca con el ascenso de Stalin (circa 1923) y dedica una buena cantidad de páginas a ello. Del Imperio Ruso, la Revolución y Lenin apenas se dice nada (si quiere saber algo sustancial sobre todo esto tendrá que esperarse a la página 300 del libro). A mitad de libro hay una sección de "biografías"... Me dio la impresión de que el autor había cogido artículos suyos y los había ensamblado en forma de libro, resultando todo ello en un extraño collage. The ensuing “ Space Race” heated up further in 1961 when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. In a work of remarkable range and quality, Karl Schlögel explores the everyday life and material culture of the Soviet Union in ways that show the communist experiment in a compellingly fresh light. One of the most innovative books on Soviet history to appear since the state’s collapse in 1991."—Tony Barber, Financial TimesAn impressively evocative look at material life in the USSR, from gulags and the planned economy to Red Moscow perfume and the Soviet toilet — a “lost civilisation” of utopian fantasy and unbridled terror."— Financial Times The author dug deep in the secret archives, once available after the cold war, disregarding the bureaucracy propaganda and the imperialist slander. Then divided the book in three parts: 1) the USSR from the '30s to Stalin's celebrated death, 2) from the post war and 50's to the collapse of the soviet state and, 3) a wide vision of the Soviet society as a whole. Repeating points that were made in Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Lewin outlines the excellent analyses of the failings of the Soviet system produced by Soviet academics from the 1950s onwards. The opportunities for a root-and-branch overhaul of the Soviet economy were however missed. This was partly due to the entrenched interests of the bureaucracy, whose privileges were bound up with the maintenance of the state’s management of the economy. It was also a consequence of the atrophy of the CPSU. This was, Lewin argues, a non-political party. It had no genuine role to play in policy formation and execution. It had no debates, no elections and no alternative platforms. It was moribund. But an independent political force was essential if the bureaucracy was to be defeated. Trotsky was thus quite right to call for a political revolution against the bureaucracy before a genuine social revolution could take place. It was also the reason why, although Lewin does not make this point explicitly, that Gorbachev had to link economic and political reform. At times it is dense with statistical read-outs that would have been better communicated with charts or graphs with accompanying commentary. Additionally, I found the writing style to be overly complex, parenthetical, and oddly self-referential. Stalin’s victory was thus not inevitable, but it is explicable. It was, in Lewin’s words, ‘not a direct outgrowth of Bolshevism but rather an autonomous and parallel phenomenon and, at the same time, its gravedigger’. ( The Making of the Soviet System, London 1985, p.9) Thus gone were the traditions of debate and discussion in which even Lenin had to struggle to convince comrades through argument. Factionalism was normal and healthy in Lenin’s Bolshevism, it was always perceived as a threat and sabotage in Stalin’s Bolshevism. Lewin does not equate Stalinism solely with Stalin’s personality. There were, he makes clear, broader factors at play: ‘Economic, social, and cultural phenomena have to be introduced into the analysis, even if the object of study is a powerful and arbitrary destructive despot.’ ( The Making of the Soviet System, p.288) At the same time, Lewin was well aware of the personal element: ‘Stalin was less burdened with either theoretical or moral scruples … he was a master-builder of bureaucratic structures, and this it was that determined his conceptions and his methods.’ ( Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, p.517)