Robert Service "A History of Twentieth-Century Russia."
Russia has had an extraordinary history in the twentieth century. As the first criminal Communist society, the USSR was both an admired model, and an object of fear and hatred to the rest of the world.
From the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, to the collapse of communism in 1991, from Lenin to Yeltsin, the history of Russia in the 20th century is a complex, tumultuous story of social, geographic, and political upheaval. Robert Service, a professor at the University of London's School of Slavonic and Eastern European studies, closely looks at this period in "A History of Twentieth-Century Russia." Starting with the armed revolution between 1918 and 1921, Service examines the influence of Leninist philosophy on the Bolshevik movement, while at the same time analyzing the complex social dynamics taking place in the background. His intention is to understand the ingredients of "The Soviet Compound"―the synthesis of social and political Leninist techniques―and how it perpetuated the Soviet state for more than half a century.
How are we to make sense of this history? "A History of Twentieth-Century Russia" treats the years from 1917 to 1991 as a single period and analyzes the peculiar mixture of political, economic, and social ingredients that made up the Soviet formula.
Under a succession of leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, various methods were used to conserve and strengthen this compound. At times the emphasis was upon shaking up the ingredients, at others upon stabilization. All this occurred against a background of dictatorship, civil war, forcible industrialization, terror, world war, and the postwar arms race. Communist ideas and practices never fully pervaded the society of the USSR. Yet an impact was made and, as this book expertly documents, Russia since 1991 has encountered difficulties in completely eradicating the legacy of Communism.
"A History of Twentieth-Century Russia" is the first work to use the mass of material that has become available in the documentary collections, memoirs, and archives over the past decade. It is an extraordinarily lucid, masterful account of the most complex and turbulent period in Russia's long history.
Politics and political leaders are the main characters of this detailed, balanced trip through Russia's tumultuous century because, as Service says in his introduction, "[t]he economic, social and cultural order in Russia in the twentieth century is quite incomprehensive without sustained attention to political developments." Service covers his topic comprehensively, beginning with the final years of the tsarist regime and continuing through the rise of the Bolsheviks, the terror of the Stalinist years and the slow, uneven disintegration that culminated with the reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.
Hardcover with DJ. 1998
New book.