By Stephen F. Cohen
ISBN-10: 0231520425
ISBN-13: 9780231520423
With conflicts back dividing Russia and the U.S., the necessity for balanced, obtainable scholarship that advantages from new fabrics and significant views is vital. In seven lucid, groundbreaking essays, Stephen F. Cohen questions many traditional assumptions concerning the process Soviet background, the autumn of communism, and the impact of Russia's regulations at domestic and abroad.
Written for experts and normal readers, Cohen's essays are framed via a chronological narrative that makes a speciality of key turning issues and misplaced possible choices. starting with Stalin's preeminent challenger and sufferer, Nikolai Bukharin, and the unforeseen go back of thousands of survivors of Stalin's terror below Nikita Khrushchev, Cohen indicates how their tragic fates formed the latter-day Soviet Union. Turning to newer occasions, he examines the political fates of the Soviet system's maximum reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his prime conservative rival, Yegor Ligachev. via those figures, Cohen increases much more provocative matters, together with his argument that the Soviet Union was once able to reform and that its breakup used to be now not inevitable. such a lot urgently, in concluding chapters Cohen argues that Washington was once the 1st to squander the chance for a essentially new U.S.-Russian dating after the chilly struggle, and he offers a appreciably new procedure for attaining an important partnership with today's Russia.
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Extra resources for Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War
Sample text
A very high proportion of the 38,000 people killed by the German Gestapo in Czechoslovakia were intellectuals. Only a third of the 12,000 prewar members of the Yugoslav Communist Party survived; the leadership that emerged from the partisan struggle to rule the country was strongly peasant in origin, and this may help account for the salvationist left radicalism of the early postwar years. For the Polish intelligentsia the war was simply a hecatomb. About 200,000 people, a quarter of the prewar population of Warsaw, were killed in the 1944 uprising, and a very high proportion of these fatalities were young intellectuals.
First, by dismissing the importance of class distinctions and emphasizing ethnicity and language, nationalism symbolically abolished the isolation of the elite from the masses and its feeling of powerlessness regarding the problems of the peasantry. It glorified the peasant masses without requiring that anything much be done for them. Second, the existence of national minorities provided an obvious focus for majority nationalism. Ruling elites, having just emerged from a nation- Independence and Destruction, 1918-1941 23 al struggle for independence, understood conflicts between majority and minority populations in the same binary terms they had learned in the struggle against the foreign empires, and promoted the identity of state and (majority) nation with clear consciences.
Because Russia was a foreign threat, Soviet communism's appeal within fiercely nationalist Eastern Europe was limited largely to the national minorities: Ukrainians and White Russians in Poland, Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, and Jews everywhere. As economic depression worsened ethnic tension, minorities sympathetic to socialism looked increasingly like Soviet Russian fifth columns. 10 Second, the Soviet Union in this period was sinking into the horror of collectivization. What the peasant countries saw there was not the advance of industry under the First Five-Year Plan but the abolition of private land ownership and the physical destruction of millions of peasants by famine or by the police.
Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War by Stephen F. Cohen
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