The Soviet Experiment: Russia, The USSR, and the Successor States

Product DescriptionThe West has always had difficulty understanding the Soviet Union. For decades, analyses of America's Cold War foe were clouded by ideological passions and a shear dearth of information. Then came the flood of dramatic revelations under glasnost, followed by the sudden, shocking collapse ofthe Communist empire. Today, with the stunning secrets of newly opened archives and the excitement of political revolution still fresh in our minds, and we can look back at this remarkable nation and see it whole, see Soviet history as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In The SovietExperiment, Ronald Grigor Suny does just that, in a landmark work that gives us the fullest account yet of the most remarkable story of our century.With a clear-eyed mastery of the historical issues and literature, Suny combines gripping detail with insightful analysis in a narrative that propels the reader from the last tsar of the Russian empire to the first president of the Russian republic. He focuses in particular on fourrevolutions, each identified with a single individual: the tumultuous year of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik takeover of the tsarist empire; the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin refashioned the economy, the society, and the state; Mikhail Gorbachev's ambitious, and catastrophic, attempt atsweeping reform and revitalization; and the breakup of the Soviet Union led by Boris Yeltsin. Never have we had a more complete, nuanced, and crystal-clear examination of the complex themes running through Soviet history. Suny confidently moves from party debates and personal rivalries, tocenturies-old ethnic tensions, to vast economic and social developments. He unravels tangled issues with ease, explaining "deeply contradictory" policies toward the various Soviet nationalities; Moscow's ambivalence over its own New Economic Policy of the 1920s; and the attempts at reform thatfollowed Stalin's death. Suny's treatment of the Soviet break-up warrants particular attention, as he details precisely how Gorbachev's program unleashed forces that had built up during the previous decades--particularly the nationalism that had been shaped, ironically, by the Soviet structure ofethnically defined republics. Along the way, he offers a fresh telling of familiar as well as little-known events--capturing, for example, the movement of the crowds on the streets of St. Petersburg in the February revolution; Stalin's collapse into a near-catatonic state after Hitler'smuch-predicted invasion; or Yeltsin's political maneuvering and public grandstanding as he pushed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and then faced down his rivals.The Soviet Experiment provides a rich, multilayered, seamlessly woven account of one of the great forces of modern history. With dispassionate insight and human detail, Suny has constructed a masterful work.From Library JournalSuny (political science, Univ. of Chicago; Looking Toward Ararat, Indiana Univ., 1993) is a highly regarded scholar of the late Soviet Union. His present work, a textbook survey of that country's "turbulent tale," charts the "traumatic and painful transformations" of Russia from decrepit tsarist autocracy to post-Soviet chaos, corruption, and uncertainty. Suny's tone is judicious, and his judgment that the Soviet experiment's great achievement of "rough modernization of a backward, agrarian society," which produced nonetheless an incompletely modernized society for the 1980s and 1990s, is well supported. He is particularly good on World War II, its cost, and its impact. Each chapter has suggestions for further readings, with a chronology of dates at the end. This is and should remain a valuable reference text. Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, OntarioCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.About the AuthorAbout the Author:Ronald Grigor Suny is currently Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He was previously Alex Manoogian P
Author: Suny, Ronald Grigor

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0195081048

ISBN-13: 9780195081046