Interesting and insightful analysis into the nature and dynamics and history of the Soviet Union. The primary argument that runs throughout the book is that the Soviet government was not a monolithic, unchanging, all-powerful totalitarian state, but one that changed dramatically at different points, and which often was responding (often impotently) to societal changes, rather than imposing its own will on Soviet/Russian society. This may seem like an obvious point, but as the author points out, this is in fact often lost in traditional narratives of the USSR that are overly influenced by the propaganda wars of the Cold War. 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. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes. 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. Lewin also seeks to engage purely with the history of the Soviet Union, and regularly castigates partisan historians on both sides - though he reserves a particular portion of his epilogue for excoriating the notion of "anti-communist history" as an ideology masquerading as genuine scholarship.

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. Ok, a little: Russian archive and a massive wealth of administrative data and statistics based deep dives into the intricacies of Stalin's paranoid and murderous bureaucracy of the 1930s and 40s; Khrushchev's de-Stalinization and state and party apparatus governance reform processes post 1953, the establishment and rise of the KGB under Andropov, dissidents and political opening in the 70s and 80s, Gorbachev and, well, the rest is history. The inefficient (from a capitalist perspective) elements of the system were an important part of the social safety blanket for the wider population. The de-facto welfarist elements of the productive system were therefore held firmly in place by the most conservative elements of the apparatus. These conservatives were often themselves former Stalinists who were happy to accept ossification as the price of stability and social peace. When the next wave of political reform finally came with perestroika in the mid 1980s, it lifted the lid not on the potential for violent revolution, but on the dead air a moribund social contract.

This was true above all of Marxism. Marxism was precisely a system of thought that could be applied to Stalin’s USSR in a critical manner, but it was precisely this type of Marxism that was suppressed. In its place was put an empty phraseology that failed, over time, to command allegiance or respect. In Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (London 1975), Lewin outlined how, in the post-Stalin period, Soviet scholarship was beginning to develop a critique of Stalinism and to offer alternatives. The scholars of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s turned to the alternatives to Stalin of the 1920s and early 1930s. 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 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. During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 1936 and 1938 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Cold War

Some reread Marx, concluding that all would have been well if Lenin had not been so selective about the great man's message. Many others conclude that the attempt to build Marxist socialism in Europe's least industrialised society was doomed from the start. A few think that Lenin was to blame for what he did to the Bolshevik party before the revolution: forging it into a conspiracy whose natural style of government could only be dictatorship. 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. Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Soviet student life

With the benefit of hindsight and new archival sources, he strips the Stalin and subsequent Khrushchev–Brezhnev eras down to their defining nature. Much more than just an acute, resonant echo of the past. Foreign Affairs 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 But far the most popular answer has always been a name rather than an analysis. Stalin is what went wrong. If only Lenin had not died in 1924, he would have steered the Soviet Union towards something like a socialist democracy - a one-party state, certainly, but one where free opinions competed and only a handful of genuine counter-revolutionary terrorists would have to be put behind barbed wire. A detailed examination of the relics of ordinary communist life. Perfect for dipping into."—Fred Studemann, Financial Times