The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 - Hardcover

Malia, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029197953 ISBN 13: 9780029197950

Publisher: Free Press, 1994

Synopsis

Traces the development of communism in the former Soviet Union from Lenin to the advent of Gorbachev, arguing that communism's failure was not the result of faulty execution but of the idea that society could be improved using force.

About this title

Review:

If the Bolshevik revolution shook the world, the 74-year reign of socialists in the former Soviet Union certainly changed it. Now that the rule is over--at least for the moment--historians are beginning the process of placing the experience into its political, social and global contexts. Martin Malia, a former history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has contributed mightily to that process with this comprehensive look at the entire period of socialist rule, from its origins to the roots of its collapse. He leaves no conceptual stone unturned, providing lively insights to ideas and ideologies while offering a complete summary of the complex history.

From Booklist:

Analyzing Western Sovietology as much as critiquing the Communist regime, Malia surveys the artificial support lent to the "ideocratic partocracy" that was the Soviet Union. He takes aim at the concepts--both Leninists' political justifications and academic apologias--undergirding the forced creation of the classless society. As its tortured, now completed history proves, the Soviet Union never lacked academic explicators of the supposed deformations of its planned form. After World War II, the expanding social sciences came up with alternative models of Soviet development in order to refute the influential totalitarian one; among these were modernization theories, bureaucratic and interest group politics, and Marxist sociology. Among historians, admiring biographies such as Stephen Cohen's of Bukharin and Isaac Deutscher's of Trotsky implied that, to invigorate itself, Communism need only get back to the humane basics of the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. Malia rejects such views as he reviews Sovietism's course, its Marxist foundation, the quandary its leaders faced when the proletarian revolution failed (initially) to spread abroad, and the zigzag reforms this failure necessitated, of which the NEP was merely the first attempt, Gorbachevism the futility-filled last. A trenchant summary that leaves no conceptual issue untouched. Gilbert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0029197953
• ISBN 13: 9780029197950
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 575