A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world. For the 150 years that Hong Kong was a British colony, people, money and technology flowed freely, while Hong Kong residents enjoyed freedoms that simply did not exist in mainland China. When the territory was handed over to China in 1997, the Communist Party promised that Hong Kong would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. Now, at the halfway mark, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted and activists have been jailed en masse following the decree of a sweeping national security law by Beijing. As China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower's control. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation first-hand and has unrivalled access to the full range of the city's society, from student protestors to billionaire businessmen and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

This is a new single volume history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, examining the party from its foundation in 1920 to its demise in the early 1990s. Drawing on original research and a reading of specialist texts, the authors analyze the rise and fall of the party and evaluate its role on the left of British politics. While sympathetic to the ideals and commitment of many British communist activists, the book is sharply critical of much of the actual practice of the party.

In this second volume of his Lenin trilogy, Robert Service builds on the approach established in the first. He emphasises the extraordinary circumstances in Russia and the world enabling Lenin to come to power in 1917. He also details ways whereby Lenin led a turbulent Bolshevik party and adjusted its policies so as to gain authority in the soviets. Lenin the crafty and pragmatic politican as well as the utopian and merciless class warrior are portrayed.

Analysing the politics of the 2012 London Olympics, Stephen Wagg examines the framing of London's bid to host the Games, arguments about the Games' likely impact and the establishment of 'Fortress London' to protect the Games. The book asks who won, and who lost out, in this important event as well as exploring its media coverage and legacy.

This book highlights the role of Romani musical presence in Central and Eastern Europe, especially from Krakow in the Communist period, and argues that music can and should be treated as one of the main points of relation between Roma and non-Roma. It discusses Romani performers and the complexity of their situation as conditioned by the political situations starkly affected by the Communist regime, and then by its fall. Against this backdrop, the book engages with musician Stefan Dymiter (known as Corroro) as the leader of his own street band: unwelcome in the public space by the authorities, merely tolerated by others, but admired by many passers-by and respected by his peer Romain musicians and international music stars. It emphasizes the role of Romani musicians in Krakow in shaping the soundscape of the city while also demonstrating their collective and individual strategies to adapt to the new circumstances in terms of the preferred performative techniques, repertoire, and overall lifestyle.

This book examines the political career of Hua Guofeng, Mao's successor as paramount leader in 1976. Hua emerged seemingly out of nowhere following an unexceptional career as a young revolutionary in Shanxi and a provincial official in Hunan. It was in Hunan that Hua became well-known to Mao and Hua's loyalty to Mao while he was there, just when Mao needed it most, helped to facilitate Hua's later ascent to power. On emerging as paramount leader, Hua moved quickly to arrest his opponents, the Gang of Four. As head of party, state and military, Hua looked well set to remain in power indefinitely. Just over two years later Hua had been eclipsed by Deng Xiaoping, a more politically shrewd, progressive and charismatic figure, with a political legacy that far outweighed Hua's modest beginnings. If Hua's rise to power was remarkable, then this fall was even more so.

This volume bases a clear and unbiased account of Communist philosophy on the Marxian Materialist Concept of History and Marxian Theory of Value. The spear-head of Marxism is its doctrine of class-struggle and from this Laski sets out on in his exposition of the Communist attitude. Although first published in 1927, the intervening years have in no way detracted from the intrinsic value of this enlightening study, regarded by many as the essential textbook for the understanding of this subject.

Collins traces Communist strategy in the so-called Cold War from its ideological roots, through its successes, to the system's collapse. He demonstrates that Communist ideology made the Cold War inevitable, shaped Communist strategy and the resultant structure and purpose of Communist states, and assured that Soviet and other Communist states and party strategies would be subsets of a larger Communist world strategy. Collins challenges American perception and conduct of the Cold War as essentially a conflict between Great Powers in a bipolar world, demonstrating that it was in fact a real war, with its objective to create a Communist world. He illuminates the central role of internal strategy conflicts in fractionating the Communist world, and the direct linkage between the failure of Communist world strategy and the system's collapse. This is a major synthesis that will be of interest to scholars and researchers of international Communism and security issues as well as lay readers.

Using examples of democratic changes in former Communist states, Wejnert provides a dual-level conceptual framework that concentrates on objectification of the fundamental and unique roles of various mechanisms and components of transition. The first of these two levels is an integrative framework of the diverse social processes of transition. Here, the essays included examine the effects of global and domestic factors, and diffusion on the articulation of transition from communism. The second level is a similarly integrative framework of the interrelation of three distinct social entities of economy, polity, and culture as recorded at a time-point when the polity-economy-culture components of the transition are inserted into the processes of social change.

This collection brings together Eastern European, Russian, and American scholars as well as prominent political figures from democratically elected East European governments. Included are Jan Kavan, Vice-Prime Minister of the Czech Republic and Grzegorz Kolodko of Poland, the designer of the post-communist therapy economic plan. The theoretical and pratically oriented papers are enriched by the broad perspective of the book, making it particularly useful to scholars, students, and researchers of Eastern Europe and Russia.

What were Socialist Spaces? The Eastern Bloc produced distinctive spaces, some of which were fashioned from ideological templates, such as the monumental parade grounds and Red Squares where communist leaders could receive tributes, or new factory cities with towering chimneys and glittering palaces of culture. But what of the grimy toilet in the communal apartment or the forlorn ruins left after the Second World War?This book explores the representation, meanings and uses of space in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1991. The essays - written from different disciplinary perspectives - investigate the extent to which actual spaces conformed to the dominant political order in the region. Should, for instance, the creation of private spaces, such as the Russian dacha and the Czech chata, be understood as acts of appropriation in which lives were fashioned against the collective or, alternatively, as 'gifts' given by the State in return for quiescence? Whilst monuments and public spaces were designed to relay official ideology, one of the most notable features of the events that marked the end of the Bloc was the way that they became sites of dissent. Examining the myriad ways in which space was used and conceived within socialist society, this book makes an essential contribution to Eastern European and Soviet Studies and provides significant new angles on the factors that underpinned socialism's eventual downfall.

Pham Xuan An was a Communist agent whose espionage adventures - under the cover story of a celebrated war correspondent in the Western Media -- were as brilliant for Hanoi as they were shattering for Washington during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War. He has been dubbed "the perfect spy" and affectionately referred to by some as "the spy who loved us". Not quite. Journalist and Southeast Asian specialist Luke Hunt prises this story open. He knew and interviewed An for many years, along with many friends and colleagues in journalism who knew him best in war, on the journalistic beat and amid the collapse of South Vietnam.

Drawing on secret and therefore candid coded telegraphs exchanged between Communist Party leaders around the world and their overseers at the Communist International (Comintern) headquarters in Moscow, this book uncovers key aspects of the history of the Comintern and its significant role in the Stalinist ruling system during the years 1933 to 1943. New information on aspects of the People's Front in France, civil wars in Spain and China, World War II, and the extent of the Comintern's cooperation with Soviet intelligence is brought to light through these archival records, never examined before.

Central Asia is a fascinating region yet remote and unfamiliar to many people. This new study provides an introduction to the politics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan, Turkestan, and Uzbekistan. The early chapters introduce the readers to the history of Russian and Soviet involvement in the region up until the collapse of communism, whilst the bulk of the book focuses on the politics of independence. The search for national identity in each region and the influence of Islam are discussed and attention is paid to political, economic and international developments. A central theme of the book is the importance of informal politics associated with national, regional and tribal networks in shaping the evolution of the five states.

The purpose of this translated volume Tadeusz Kowalik's book is to examine Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to economic theory. The essential subject-matter is the dependence of capital accumulation on effective demand, the dependence of economic growth on specific capitalist barriers to growth.

Historical Materialism and Social Evolution brings together a collection of essays which investigate the relationship between Marxist thought and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Each of the contributors emphasize the idea that the distinctive character of progressive social thought is derived from creative ideas drawn from the study of natural evolutionary processes.

What was known about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his career was strictly limited by the secretive Soviet government. Little more information was available after he was ousted and became a "non-person" in the USSR in 1964. This pathbreaking book draws for the first time on a wealth of newly released materials -- documents from secret former Soviet archives, memoirs of long-silent witnesses, the full memoirs of the premier himself -- to assemble the best-informed analysis of the Khrushchev years ever completed. The contributors to this volume include Russian, Ukrainian, American, and British scholars; a former key foreign policy aide to Khrushchev; the executive secretary of a Russian commission investigating Soviet-era repressions and rehabilitations; and Khrushchev's own son Sergei.

The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev's struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev's years in Ukraine where he grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in mass repressions of the 1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is Russia itself reformable?

This collection investigates the state of play in studies informed by Marxism. It includes an essay on state theory by Bob Jessop, a discussion of fundamental socialist values using analytical Marxism by Alan Carling, an introduction to Fromm's humanist Marxism by Lawrence Wilde, and pieces on Marxism and ecology, Marxism and feminism, the debate between Marxists and post Marxists, the democratic Marxism of Hal Draper, the confrontation between Marxism and Liberalism, and Marxism's place in the history of political thought.

Neal Riemer presents, analyzes, and criticizes Marx's guiding values, his social scientific criticism of the existing 19th century order, his theory of revolutionary action, and his views of the future of economics, politics, society, and culture.

Conflict and Change in the Russian Industrial Enterprise focuses on the new kinds of conflict that arise in the transition to a market economy. Following an editorial introduction, two chapters develop theories from new empirical research into patterns of conflict and forms of trade unionism in Russian enterprises in the transition period. These are followed by a detailed case study of the development of an independent trade union in one large industrial enterprise, and a chapter which explores changes in the status hierarchy of the industrial enterprise. Two chapters then address the much-neglected issue of gender differentiation in the work place and both chapters question the supposed passivity of Russian women workers. The two final chapters address the issue of conflict and change in the external relations of enterprises through case studies of the process of bankruptcy and of conflict between insiders and outsiders.

The Revolutions of 1989 were a surprise to Kremlinologists because their models of change overestimated the staying power of ruling communist elites; at the same time civil society was able to form alternative political cultures which undermined the legitimacy of the socialist order. The Revolutions were the result of a prolonged systemic crisis of communism, combined with the unwillingness of Gorbachev to use force to maintain the Eastern European rulers in power. Civil society lost its fear of the repressive apparatus of the communist system as the ruling elites became increasingly disunited as to how to best respond to the crisis. After the Revolutions, other surprises were in store as the transition unfolded and the process of democratic consolidation encountered unanticipated obstacles.

Weiner details these issues in one of the most up-to-date examinations of change in East Europe. After reviewing the history of the region and the imposition of communism, he analyzes the collapse of communism and the efforts to create stable alternatives country-by-country. In addition, he examines models of change and the foreign policies of the region. An indispensable guide to the area that will be of value to political scientists and others concerned with contemporary Eastern Europe.

The Soviet elite has undergone two major transformations in the twentieth century: Stalin's purges and replacement of old elite by Soviet trained proletarian modernizing managers; and, under Gorbachev, the current displacement of the modernizing managers by politicians. This book is an analytical study of the Soviet political elite as a body, from 1917 to 1990. Focusing on the changing structure of the elite, it is based partly on Kenneth C. Farmer's database consisting of biographical and career data on over 1500 high-level leaders. Farmer also synthesizes the work of four classical theorists--Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber, and Alexis de Tocqueville--with more contemporary theorists. The book's unique features include its scope, the central database (the largest on which any work has been published), and its creative theoretical approach.

Farmer concludes that the dismantling of the personnel selection system with competitive elections deprives the elite of the ability to reproduce itself. New voluntary associations make possible the emergence of genuine strategic elites. In examining the ramifications of this new system, this book is one of the first studies to apply a structural-anthropological theoretical framework to the phenomenon of Soviet elites. Scholars in the Soviet studies field will find this unique theoretical approach refreshing and thought provoking.

The Real Situation in Russia, first published in 1928, contains three of Trotsky's harshest rebuttals of Stalin's takeover of the Russian Revolution following the death of Lenin. The first part contains a defence of the 'Opposition Platform' against the Stalinist denunciation; the second details Trotsky's view of the precise nature of the Stalinist program, as well as its disastrous consequences for Russia; and the third demonstrates the unashamed falsification of the history by Stalin with regard to the beginning of the Revolution. Including a sympathetic, but nonetheless astute, introduction to Trotsky's argument by the translator, The Real Situation in Russia will prove to be of value to all students of twentieth-century Marxism, and in particular to those interested in the Russian Revolution - not only its origins and early development, but also, perhaps, the reasons for its ultimate failure.