One hundred years after the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union remains the most extraordinary, yet tragic, attempt to create a society beyond capitalism. Yet its history was one that for a long time proved impossible to write. In The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin follows this history in all its complexity, guiding us through the inner workings of a system which is still barely understood. In the process he overturns widely held beliefs about the USSR's leaders, the State-Party system and the powerful Soviet bureaucracy. Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917 to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

This volume is the product of an international conference held in the autumn of 1988, around the time Nikolai Bukharin was officially rehabilitated - a benchmark in the history of glasnost and the process of legitimating perestroika. Conference participants from 19 countries, including the USSR and China, took occasion to reconsider the record and legacy of Bukharin as revolutionary, economist and political theorist. They offer a many-sided but critical re-examination of Bolshevism's "internal alternative" to Stalin and Stalinism.

An internationally distinguished team of historians of Nazism and Stalinism provide a summary of the most up-to-date research and offer new perspectives on issues linking the two most terrible dictatorships of modernity. Three selected themes are explored: the leadership cults of Hitler and Stalin; the "war machines" engaged in the deadly clash of 1941 to 1945; and the ways in which interpretations of the past have shifted in Germany and Russia since the demise of the dictatorships.

The internationally distinguished contributors to this landmark volume represent a variety of approaches to the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. These far-reaching essays provide the raw materials towards a comparative analysis and offer the means to deepen and extend research in the field. The first section highlights similarities and differences in the leadership cults at the heart of the dictatorships. The second section moves to the 'war machines' engaged in the titanic clash of the regimes between 1941 and 1945. A final section surveys the shifting interpretations of successor societies as they have faced up to the legacy of the past. Combined, the essays presented here offer unique perspectives on the most violent and inhumane epoch in modern European history.

The collectivization of the peasants in the USSR constituted a social upheaval of a totally unprecedented nature. It was one of the most remarkable events of the present century and it has a history as long as that of Soviet power itself. The idea of a collectivized agriculture, much favoured by the leadership after the revolution, had been left in abeyance during the NEP period. Interest in the idea, and in the collective movement, revived at the time of the grain crisis at the beginning of 1928. It was during this crisis that collectivization of the peasantry and the creation of a powerful kolkhoz and sovkhoz sector began to be taken seriously as a means of solving, at one and the same time, both the formidable problem of grain and the whole accursed problem of relations between the Soviet authorities and the peasants.

The "Gorbachev phenomenon" is seen as the product of complex developments during the last seventy years - developments that changed the Soviet Union from a primarily agrarian society into an urban, industrial one. Here, for the first time, a noted authority on Soviet society identifies the crucial historical events and social forces that explain Glasnost and political and economic life in the Soviet Union today.