Overview

"In the years since Stalin's death, his profound influence upon the historical development of Communism has remained elusive and in need of interpretation. Stalinism, as his system has become known, is a phenomenon which embraced all facets of political and social life. While its effect upon the Soviet Union and other nations today is far less than it was while Stalin lived, it is by no means dead. In this landmark volume some of the world's foremost scholars of the subject, in a concerted group inquiry, present their interpretations of Stalinism and its influence on all areas of comparative Communist studies from history and politics to economics, sociology, and literary scholarship. The studies contained in this volume are an outgrowth of a conference on Stalinism held in Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. In his major contribution to this book, Leszek Kolakowski calls Stalinism ""a unified state organism facing atom-like individuals."" This extraordinary volume, augmented by a revealing new introduction by the editor, Robert C. Tucker, can be seen as amplifying that remark nearly a half century after the death of Joseph Stalin himself. Contributors to this work are: Wlodzimierz Brus, Katerina Clark, Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Erlich, Leszek Kolakowski, Moshe Lewin, Robert H. McNeal, Mihailo Markovic, Roy A. Medvedev, T. H. Rigby, Robert Sharlet, and H. Gordon Skilling. Robert C. Tucker's principle work on Stalin has been described by George F. Kennan as ""the most significant single contribution made to date, anywhere, to the history of Soviet power."""

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9780765804839

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With one exception, the thirteen essays assembled in this volume originated in a 1975 conference on Stalinism and Communist Political Culture. The distinguished contributors included historians, economists, philosophers, political scientists, and a literary historian from Australian, North American, and British universities, as well as Yugoslavia and the USSR. Their papers fall into four groups: interpretive approaches; the Russian context of Stalinism; Eastern Europe; and the Marxist origins of Stalinism. Stephen F. Cohen (Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1973) provides an overview of Soviet studies since the 1940s which demonstrates the unlikelihood of a volume such as this in the past, when the field was dominated by a view of Stalinism as the logical continuation of the Bolshevik Revolution, not as a specific phenomenon. That this consensus has collapsed is largely due to the work of the scholars represented here. The contributions of Robert Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary, 1973), Moshe Lewin (Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 1968), and Roy Medvedev (Let History Judge, 1971) constitute extensions of their previous work, and serve as accessible introductions while offering much of interest to scholars. Lewin's Social Background of Stalinism - one of two standouts on the Soviet context - stresses the uprootedness of Soviet society following the Revolution, Civil War, and collectivization which created a vacuum allowing the state to become the agent of radical change. Its complement is Robert Sharlet's piece on the ambiguous, unstable relationship between legality and terror in the Stalinist system. Wlodzemierz Brus and H. Gordon Skilling add timely studies of Stalinism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, respectively, which point out the mix of traditional and imposed institutions underlying political instability in the People's Democracies. Taken together, the contributions do not produce a new single concept of Stalinism to replace the earlier interpretation; rather, the diversity of approaches and conceptualizations attests to the field's current vitality. A unique and impressive collection. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Robert C. Tucker

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