Although the twentieth century is now best remembered for two world wars, in the future it may be at least equally well-known for its profusion of little wars against great opponents. The trend began long before mujahideen took up arms against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. From China and Vietnam to Palestine, Algeria, and Ireland, Daniel Moran explores the nationalist insurgencies that have characterized much of recent warfare.
This is the first major study of revolutionary Kronstadt to span the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. It focuses attention on Kronstadt’s forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918, when Soviet power and democracy flourished there. Professor Getzler argues that the Kronstadters’ ‘Third Revolution’ of March 1921 was a desperate attempt at a restoration of that Soviet democracy which they believed had been taken from them by Bolshevik ‘commissarocracy’. Pointing to continuity in personnel, ideology and institutions linking the 191718 Kronstadt experiment in Soviet democracy with the March 1921 uprising, the author sees that continuity reflected in the Kronstadt tragedy’s central figure, the long-haired, dreamy-eyed student Anatolii Lamanov. Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917 and chief editor of its Izvestiia, Lamanov became the ideologist of the 1921 uprising and was soon after executed as a ‘counter-revolutionary’.
Here is the whole sweep of the Soviet experiment and experience, as told by its last steward. Drawing on his own experience as well as rich archival material, Gorbachev ponders Russia’s past, present, and future place in the world — including the October Revolution, the Cold War, and key figures such as Lenin, Stalin, and Yeltsin.
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken–casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.
In the clash of ideologies represented by the Cold War, even the heavens were not immune to militarization. Satellites and space programs became critical elements among the national security objectives of both the United States and the Soviet Union.
