The field of biopolitics encompasses issues from health and hygiene, birth rates, fertility and sexuality, life expectancy and demography to eugenics and racial regimes. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive view on these issues for Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The cataclysms of imperial collapse, World War(s) and the Holocaust but also the rise of state socialism after 1945 provided extraordinary and distinct conditions for the governing of life and death. The volume collects the latest research and empirical studies from the region to showcase the diversity of biopolitical regimes in their regional and global context - from hunger relief for Hungarian children after the First World War to abortion legislation in communist Poland. It underlines the similarities as well, demonstrating how biopolitical strategies in this area often revolved around the notion of an endangered nation; and how ideological schemes and post-imperial experiences in Eastern Europe further complicate a 'western' understanding of democratic participatory and authoritarian repressive biopolitics. The new geographical focus invites scholars and students of social and human sciences to reconsider established perspectives on the history of population management and the history of Europe.

This book analyses the institution and concept of dictatorship from a legal, historical and theoretical perspective, examining the different types of dictatorship, their relationship to the law, as well as the analytical value of the concept in contemporary world. In particular, it seeks to codify the main theories and conceptions of 'dictatorship', with the goal of unearthing their contradictions. The book's main premise is that the concept of dictatorship and the different types of the dictatorial form have to be assessed and can only be understood in their historical context. On this basis, the elaborations on dictatorship of such diverse thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cortes, Karl Marx, Ernst Fraenkel, Franz Neumann, Nicos Poulantzas, and V. I. Lenin, are discussed in their historical context: 'classical and Caesaristic dictatorship' in ancient Rome, 'dictatorship' in revolutionary France of 1789 and counterrevolutionary France of 1848, 'fascist dictatorship' in Nazi Germany, and 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in Russia of 1917. The book contributes to the theory of dictatorship as it outlines the contradictions of the different typologies of the dictatorial form and seeks to explain them on the basis of the concept of 'class dictatorship'. The book's original claim is that the dictatorial form, as a modality of class rule that relies predominantly on violence and repression, has been essential to the reproduction of bourgeois rule and, consequently, of capitalist social relations. This function has given rise to different types and conceptualisations of dictatorship depending on the level of capitalist development. This book is addressed to anyone with an interest in law, political theory, political history and sociology. It can serve as core text for courses that seek to introduce students to the institution or theory of dictatorship. It may also serve as a reference text for post-graduate programs in law and politics, because of its interdisciplinary and critical approach.

- Will be accessible to any college level and the general reader - Spans the fields of Sexuality history, Gender History and Political Science - Author has personal and academic expertise in the area

'a vivid startling biography ...drawing on a wealth of untapped material from Moscow archives ...This reassessment makes a cogent case for Khrushchev's regime as a harbinger of Gorbachev's perestroika' - Publishers Weekly;Khrushchev: a Political Life traces the rise and fall of the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Drawing on newly available archival materials and a wealth of recently published Russian and Ukrainian sources, this standard biography provides much new information on Khrushchev's life and career. Khrushchev's ultimate failure to realise his vision of the Soviet future is linked to the unrealistic optimism of that vision as well as to the contradictions inherent in Khrushchev's views and policies.

Disputes over hazardous waste sites usually are resolved by giving greater weight to expert opinion over public "not-in-my-back-yard" reactions. Challenging the assumption that policy experts are better able to discern the general welfare, Gregory E. McAvoy here proposes that citizen opinion and democratic dissent occupy a vital, constructive place in environmental policymaking.

McAvoy explores the issues of citizen rationality, the tension between democracy and technocracy, and the link between public opinion and policy in the case of an unsuccessful attempt to site a hazardous waste facility in Minnesota. He shows how the site was defeated by citizens who had reasonable doubts over the need for the facility.

Offering a comprehensive look at the policymaking process, McAvoy examines the motivations of public officials, the resources they have for shaping opinion, the influence of interest groups, and the evolution of waste reduction programs in Minnesota and other states. Integrating archival material, interviews, and quantitative survey data, he argues that NIMBY movements can bring miscalculations to light and provide an essential check on policy experts' often partisan views.

This book will be of value to those who work or study in the fields of hazardous waste policy, facility siting, environmental policy, public policy, public administration, and political science.

An analysis of the proceedings of the 37th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Setting the Congress in its context, and focusing on the issues of political reform, economic restructuring, the nationalities question and foreign policy, this book explores the struggle for power between radicals, reformers and conservatives in the USSR. It highlights the Party's changing role in the Soviet political system and its changing relationship with the military and the KGB. It examines the ongoing reappraisal of the Soviet past, particularly the Stalin era, and its significance for the rethinking of Soviet socialism, the democratization of the society and the dismantling of the command-administrative economy. The Congress, forecast by some as heralding the demise of the CPSU as a ruling party, examines the debates raging within the Party and the wider society concerning the future of the USSR and the fate of perestroika.

This book explores the impact of railroads on 19thcentury Russian peasant collectivism. The mutual-insurance mechanism in a precarious agricultural environment, provided bya structured communal-village system predicated on the reputation and authorityof community norms,is exposed to rationalist exchange-occasioning an institutional adaptation process:the individualization of property rights in land. Spatial-mobility technology animated market integration, specialization, literacy,and human-capital acquisition among peasant wage workers who commuted from their villages.Temporarily rising transaction costs forced the Tsar to concede household property rights in land in the so-called Stolypin reform of 1906.This challenge to the imperial patrimony, powered by the railroads, steered late imperial Russia toward constitutional governance.The spatial-mobility technology gave peasants access to centers of agglomeration of knowledge, changedcognitive perceptions of distance, and reduced the uncertainty and opportunity costs of travel. The empirical findings in this monograph corroborate the conclusion that the railroads occasioned a cultural revolution in late imperial Russia and made Stalin unnecessary for the modernization of the Euro-asian giant. This book highlights the profound effect that the development of the railroads had on Russian economic and political institutions and practices. It will be of indispensable valueto students and researchers interested in transitional economics and economic history.

The relationship between ideas and politics in inter-war Russia has long been controversial, and historians have been sharply divided over the influence of Marxism on Stalinist politics. This study presents a reassessment of Bolshevik ideology, and of the ways in which it interacted with other political forces during the period. By analysing the political discourse of the Bolshevik leadership, it shows how differing interpretations of Marxism-Leninism informed contrasting political and economic strategies. In particular, it traces the emergence of a strategy of mobilization, which was closely associated with leftist trends within Bolshevism. In exploring these ideas and strategies, the study sheds new light on inter-war Bolshevik politics, and in particular on the origins of Stalin s Great Terror of 1936-8.

Since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, two of the most significant but at the same time least understood areas of that revolution's cultural impact have been philosophy and religion. The impact has of course been massive, not only in the Soviet Union but, after the second World War, in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe as well. Yet the consequences of Communism for philosophy and religion throughout the Soviet orbit are far from having the simplicity suggested by the stereotypes of a single, monolithic 'Marxism' and a consistent, crushing assault on the Church and on re ligious faith. Unquestionably Marxism is the ruling philosophy throughout Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, 'Marxism-Leninism' or 'dialectical ma terialism' is the official and the only tolerated philosophy, and most of the other countries of Eastern Europe follow the Soviet lead in philosophy as in other fields. But in the latter countries Marxism was imposed only after W orId War II, and its deVelopment has not always copied the Soviet model. Original thinkers in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary have thought their own way through the writings of Marx and his followers, and have arrived at Marxist positions which are consider ably at variance with the Soviet interpretations - and often with each other. Moreover in recent years the Soviet philosophers themselves have been unable to ignore the theoretical questions raised by the other East of Marxism in the West."

The British, Irish, Russian, American, German, and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.

This provocative book addresses the ideological and political crisis of the Western left, comparing it with the problems facing leftist politics in Russia and other countries. The author presents a radical critique of the current state of the Western left which puts discourse above class interest and politics of diversity above politics of social change. The trajectory away from class politics towards feminism, minority rights and the coalition of coalitions led to the destruction of the basic strategic pillars of the movement. Some elements of this broad progressive agenda became mainstream, but in fact this made the crisis of the left even deeper and contributed to the disintegration of the left's identity. The author demonstrates that a simple return to 'the good old times' of classical socialist politics of the industrial age is not possible, suggesting that class politics must be redefined and reinvented through the experience of new radical populism. This book speaks directly to the way the identity politics/class politics divide has been framed within the English-speaking world. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of political science and political sociology, international relations, security studies and global studies, as well as socialist activists.

During the years 1947-1952 the Cold War, the anti- communist foreign policy of the U.S. government, and the reassertion by the American Communist party of its allegiance to the Soviet Union, the international communist movement, and a literal Marxist-Leninist ideology gradually gave rise to an anti-communist hysteria and to the repression and persecution of American Communists. Author Peter L. Steinberg shows that both the Truman Administration and the Communist Party were in part responsible for the McCarthy era that followed. Both were reacting to the ideologiical warfare conducted by J. Edgar Hoover. Using his allies in government, Hoover took advantage of the Cold War atmosphere to demand demonstrable action against communists. The Truman Administration responded with a loyalty program that seemed to legitimze the American people's worst fears, leading to demands for further action. The Communist Party's decision to "go underground" played into the hands of its enemies. Steinberg sees the attack on American communists as a necessary prelude to the demand for patriotic conformity and as a factor contributing to the development of an internal political police.

This book analyzes the events that impacted the structure and competitive processes of the two dominant Cypriot political factions while under the watchful eye of British rule. Based on new archival research, Alecou addresses the social and political environment in which the Cypriot Communists and Nationalists fought each other while at the same time had to fight the British Empire. The differences between communists and nationalists brought the two sides to a frontal collision in the wake of the events of the Greek civil war. The class conflict within Cypriot society would at some point inevitably lead, in one way or another, to a clash between the two factions. The civil war in Greece constituted another field of conflict between Left and Right, accelerating the formation of a bipolar party system in which the vertical division of the Greek community in Cyprus eventually expressed itself.

The book aims to build a political theory of interest politics by adopting an interest-analyzing approach of Marxism to explore the dual characteristics of social interests. Based on the logical start-point, the book unveils the foundations, nature, and characteristics of social-political life such as political power and political right. Then, a systematic research is conducted from perspectives of political behavior, political system, and political culture, following the two logical thread lines as political power and right. Finally, the book sees the analysis of social and political development in accordance with the inter-function of political power and political rights caused by the changes and development of social interests. It is a must-read book for readers interested in the political theory and political development in China.

A theme that emerges from the papers on systemic transition selected from the IEA 1992 Congress in Moscow is the contemporary battle of post-communist countries with time. Most chapters deal with newly-democratised governments which are switching from command to market both quickly and on a scale never previously attempted. Others re-examine the transition to capitalism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries from rural England to the Caucasian oilfields.

Reveals the ideal of a sustainable ecosocialist world in Marx's writings Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world's most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a "Promethean." According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance--a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright. Kohei Saito's Karl Marx's Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx's ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx's central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks--published only recently and still being translated--Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. "It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx's] critique of political economy," Saito writes, "if one ignores its ecological dimension." Saito's book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes--crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx's Ecosocialism shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx's critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world.

This is a collection of essays (with contributors from Britain, Continental Europe and the USA) dealing with the character and aftermath of Stalinism in the USSR. The focus is on the interwar years and on the methodological problems of studying this period, but the volume highlights also the links between Stalinism and the Tsarist past, and the ways in which Stalinism, in its very formation, prepared the ground for its own demise. In this way it contributes to a historical understanding of the current upheavals in the Soviet Union.

This book investigates a central chapter in the history of 20th century intellectualism: the commitment to the communist ideal and the Soviet Union. Focusing on Argentina, whose communist party was among the most important in Latin America, Petra engages with the current literature on Western communism in order to conduct an exhaustive study of the intellectuals, cultural organizations, publications, and debates within Argentine communism in the decades following World War II. Based on rigorous archival research from diverse sources, Petra's book distances itself from existing teleological visions and institutional approaches to the communist world, offering instead a complex framework in which multiple contexts, scales, and actors frame the larger problem: the intellectual commitment to a political project that brooked no dissent. Intellectuals and Communist Culture also addresses the emergence of Peronism, a crucial movement in Argentine political life to this very day, thus offering an important chapter on Latin American political and intellectual history and an invaluable contribution to the global history of the international communist movement.