Modernising Lenins Russia

Download or read book Modernising Lenin's Russia written by Anthony Heywood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-08-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Anthony Heywood reassesses Bolshevik attitudes towards economic modernization and foreign economic relations during the early Soviet period. Based on hitherto unused Russian and Western archives, he examines an extraordinary decision made in March 1920 to import vast quantities of railway equipment. The book argues that under War Communism and the NEP railway modernization was vital to a strategy of rapid economic modernization, and provides the first detailed case study of the government's import policy. Following the histories of the principal contracts, it analyses Soviet foreign trade as a means to tackle domestic economic challenges. This book provides readers with a new perspective on Soviet economic development, and reveals the scale of Bolshevik business dealings with the capitalist West immediately after the Revolution.

Download or read book The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917 written by Grinnell College. Rosenfield Program in Public Affairs, International Relations, and Human Rights and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-09-25 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of Bolshevik relations with the Russian working population.

Download or read book Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia written by Sarah Rosemary Davies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-02 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1934 and 1941 Stalin unleashed what came to be known as the 'Great Terror' against millions of Soviet citizens. The same period also saw the 'Great Retreat', the repudiation of many of the aspirations of the Russian Revolution. The response of ordinary Russians to the extraordinary events of this time has been obscure. Sarah Davies's study uses NKVD and party reports, letters and other evidence to show that, despite propaganda and repression, dissonant public opinion was not extinguished. The people continued to criticise Stalin and the Soviet regime, and complain about particular policies. The book examines many themes, including attitudes towards social and economic policy, the terror, and the leader cult, shedding light on a hugely important part of Russia's social, political, and cultural history.

Download or read book Engineer of Revolutionary Russia written by Anthony Heywood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first substantial study in any language of one of revolutionary Russia's most distinguished and controversial engineers - Iurii Vladimirovich Lomonosov (1876-1952). Not only does it provide an outline of his remarkable life and career, it also explores the relationship between science, technology and transport that developed in late tsarist and early Soviet Russia. Lomonosov's importance extends well beyond his scientific and engineering achievements thanks to the rich variety and public prominence of his professional and political activities. His generation - Lenin's generation - was inevitably at the forefront of Russian life from the 1910s to the 1930s, and Lomonosov took his place there as one of the country's best known and ultimately notorious engineers. As well as an innovative engineer who campaigned to enhance the role of science, he played a major role in shaping and administering the Russian railways, and undertook several diplomatic and scientific missions to the West during the early years of the Revolution. Falling from political favour during an assignment in Germany (1923-1927), he achieved notoriety in Russia as a 'non-returner' by apparently declining to return home. Thereby escaping probable arrest and execution, he began a new life abroad (1927-1952) which included a research post at the California Institute of Technology in 1929-1930, collaborative projects with the famous physicist P.L. Kapitsa in Cambridge, a long-time association with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, and work for the British War Office during the Second World War. From Marxist revolutionary to American academic, this study reveals Lomonosov's extraordinary life. Drawing on a wide variety of official Russian sources, as well as Lomonosov's own diaries and memoirs, a vivid portrait of his life is presented, offering a better understanding of how science, technology and politics interacted in early-twentieth-century Russia.

Download or read book Russia in Revolution written by Stephen Anthony Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

Download or read book No Less Than Mystic written by John Medhurst and published by Repeater. This book was released on 2017-08-17 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in the centenary year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, No Less Than Mystic is a fresh and iconoclastic history of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for a generation uninterested in Cold War ideologies and stereotypes. Although it offers a full and complete history of Leninism, 1917, the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, the book devotes more time than usual to the policies and actions of the socialist alternatives to Bolshevism – to the Menshevik Internationalists, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Jewish Bundists and the anarchists. It prioritises Factory Committees, local Soviets, the Womens’ Zhenotdel movement, Proletkult and the Kronstadt sailors as much as the statements and actions of Lenin and Trotsky. Using the neglected writings and memoirs of Mensheviks like Julius Martov, SRs like Victor Chernov, Bolshevik oppositionists like Alexandra Kollontai and anarchists like Nestor Makhno, it traces a revolution gone wrong and suggests how it might have produced a more libertarian, emancipatory socialism than that created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The book broadly covers the period from 1903 (the formation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) to 1921 (the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion) and explains why the Bolshevik Revolution degenerated so quickly into its apparent opposite, and continually examines the Leninist experiment through the lens of a 21st century, de-centralised, ecological, anti-productivist and feminist socialism. Throughout its narrative it interweaves and draws parallels with contemporary anti-capitalist struggles such as those of the Zapatistas, the Kurds, the Argentinean “Recovered Factories”, Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Intersectional feminists, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. We do not need another standard history of the Russian Revolution. This is not one.

Download or read book Unlearning Marx written by Steve Paxton and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theories of Karl Marx and the practical existence of the Soviet Union are inseparable in the public imagination, but for all the wrong reasons. This book provides detailed analyses of both Marx’s theory of history and the course of Russian and Soviet development and delivers a new and insightful approach to the relationship between the two. Most analyses of the Soviet Union, from any perspective, focus on trying to explain the failure to establish socialism, giving too much weight to the political pronouncements of the regime. But, for Marx, this approach to historical explanation is back-to-front, it's the political tail wagging the economic dog. When we move our focus from the stated aims of building socialism, and look at what actually happened in Russia from emancipation in the 1860s, through the Soviet era to the 1990s, we can clearly see the patterns which Marx identified as the essential features of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. As such, the Soviet experiment forms an important part of Russia’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and provides an excellent example of the underlying forces at play in the course of historical development. Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike, and not only shed new light on Marxism's relationship with the Soviet Union, but on his ongoing relationship with our world.