With one exception, the thirteen essays assembled in this volume
originated in a 1975 conference on "Stalinism and Communist
Political Culture." The distinguished contributors included
historians, economists, philosophers, political scientists, and a
literary historian from Australian, North American, and British
universities, as well as Yugoslavia and the USSR. Their papers fall
into four groups: interpretive approaches; the Russian context of
Stalinism; Eastern Europe; and the Marxist origins of Stalinism.
Stephen F. Cohen (Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1973)
provides an overview of Soviet studies since the 1940s which
demonstrates the unlikelihood of a volume such as this in the past,
when the field was dominated by a view of Stalinism as the logical
continuation of the Bolshevik Revolution, not as a specific
phenomenon. That this consensus has collapsed is largely due to the
work of the scholars represented here. The contributions of Robert
Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary, 1973), Moshe Lewin (Russian
Peasants and Soviet Power, 1968), and Roy Medvedev (Let History
Judge, 1971) constitute extensions of their previous work, and
serve as accessible introductions while offering much of interest
to scholars. Lewin's "Social Background of Stalinism" - one of two
standouts on the Soviet context - stresses the uprootedness of
Soviet society following the Revolution, Civil War, and
collectivization which created a vacuum allowing the state to
become the agent of radical change. Its complement is Robert
Sharlet's piece on the ambiguous, unstable relationship between
legality and terror in the Stalinist system. Wlodzemierz Brus and
H. Gordon Skilling add timely studies of Stalinism in Poland and
Czechoslovakia, respectively, which point out the mix of
traditional and imposed institutions underlying political
instability in the "People's Democracies." Taken together, the
contributions do not produce a new single concept of Stalinism to
replace the earlier interpretation; rather, the diversity of
approaches and conceptualizations attests to the field's current
vitality. A unique and impressive collection. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the years since Stalin's death, his profound influence upon the
historical development of Communism has remained elusive and in
need of interpretation. Stalinism, as his system has become known,
is a phenomenon which embraced all facets of political and social
life. While its effect upon the Soviet Union and other nations
today is far less than it was while Stalin lived, it is by no means
dead. In this landmark volume some of the world's foremost scholars
of the subject, in a concerted group inquiry, present their
interpretations of Stalinism and its influence on all areas of
comparative Communist studies from history and politics to
economics, sociology, and literary scholarship. The studies
contained in this volume are an outgrowth of a conference on
Stalinism held in Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the American
Council of Learned Societies. In his major contribution to this
book, Leszek Kolakowski calls Stalinism "a unified state organism
facing atom-like individuals." This extraordinary volume, augmented
by a revealing new introduction by the editor, Robert C. Tucker,
can be seen as amplifying that remark nearly a half century after
the death of Joseph Stalin himself. Contributors to this work are:
Wlodzimierz Brus, Katerina Clark, Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander
Erlich, Leszek Kolakowski, Moshe Lewin, Robert H. McNeal, Mihailo
Markovic, Roy A. Medvedev, T. H. Rigby, Robert Sharlet, and H.
Gordon Skilling. Robert C. Tucker's principle work on Stalin has
been described by George F. Kennan as "the most significant single
contribution made to date, anywhere, to the history of Soviet
power."
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