Download or read book The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia written by Elizabeth White and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Socialist Revolutionary party, which had been the largest and most popular party in Russia in 1917, did not after the October Revolution just disappear into the "dustbin of history", as Trotsky hoped, but – led by its leadership in exile in the 1920s and 1930s – continued to observe and comment on developments in Russia. In emigration, the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party often put forward policy proposals on a wide range of topics: policies which, based on a shrewd understanding of the real situation in Russia, offered realistic alternatives to the policies being pursued by the Marxist Bolshevik regime. This book fills a gap in examining one of the most significant Russian political parties, and is based on extensive original analysis of SR party materials, shows how it operated; how it formulated and disseminated its ideas; what these ideas were, and how the party's ideas developed in response to changing circumstances in Russia and Europe more widely. Far from being the agrarian Slavophile romantics as they are often portrayed, this book shows the SRs were energetic European modernisers who contributed vigorously to the leading debates of their day; it also shows how the SR vision of a populist, socialist regime failed to materialise as state control, dictatorship and the collectivisation of agriculture took hold.
Download or read book The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia written by Elizabeth White and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia written by Elizabeth White and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of the Socialist Revolutionary party, which had been the largest and most popular party in Russia in 1917, and shows how, after the October revolution, rather than disappearing, led by its leadership in exile, it continued to observe and comment on developments in Russia.
Download or read book Captives of Revolution written by Scott B. Smith and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917. Heirs to the legacy of the People's Will movement, the SRs were unabashed proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution. In 1922, the SR leaders became the first fellow socialists to be condemned by the Bolsheviks as "counter-revolutionaries" in the prototypical Soviet show trial. In Captives of the Revolution, Scott B. Smith presents both a convincing account of the defeat of the SRs and a deeper analysis of the significance of the political dynamics of the Civil War for subsequent Soviet history. Once the SRs decided to openly fight the Bolsheviks in 1918, they faced a series of nearly impossible political dilemmas. At the same time, the Bolsheviks fatally undermined the revolutionary credentials of the SRs by successfully appropriating the rhetoric of class struggle, painting a simplistic picture of Reds versus Whites in the Civil War, a rhetorical dominance that they converted into victory over the SRs and any left-wing alternative to Bolshevik dictatorship. In this narrative, the SRs became a bona fide threat to national security and enemies of the people—a characterization that proved so successful that it became an archetype to be used repeatedly by the Soviet leadership against any political opponents, even those from within the Bolshevik party itself. In this groundbreaking study, Smith reveals a more complex and nuanced picture of the postrevolutionary struggle for power in Russia than we have ever seen before and demonstrates that the Civil War—and in particular the struggle with the SRs—was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.
Download or read book Lenin on the Train written by Catherine Merridale and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gripping, meticulously researched account of Lenin's fateful rail journey from Zurich to Petrograd, where he ignited the Russian Revolution and forever changed the world. In April 1917, as the Russian Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution Vladimir Lenin was far away, exiled in Zurich. When the news reached him, Lenin immediately resolved to return to Petrograd and lead the revolt. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries. Germany saw an opportunity to further destabilize Russia by allowing Lenin and his small group of revolutionaries to return. Now, drawing on a dazzling array of sources and never-before-seen archival material, renowned historian Catherine Merridale provides a riveting, nuanced account of this enormously consequential journey--the train ride that changed the world--as well as the underground conspiracy and subterfuge that went into making it happen. Writing with the same insight and formidable intelligence that distinguished her earlier works, she brings to life a world of counter-espionage and intrigue, wartime desperation, illicit finance, and misguided utopianism. This was the moment when the Russian Revolution became Soviet, the genesis of a system of tyranny and faith that changed the course of Russia's history forever and transformed the international political climate"--
Download or read book Stalin s Terror of 1937 1938 written by Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin and published by Mehring Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin's paranoia and had no overriding political logic. Through a meticulous examination of original sources, including archival documents only made available for research in the 1990s, Professor Vadim Rogovin argues that the ferocity of the mass repression was directly proportional to the intensity of resistance to Stalin within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly the opposition inspired by and associated with the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Far from Trotsky being a politically isolated figure, as both Stalinist and anti-communist historians have claimed, there was substantial sympathy for his criticism of the Stalin regime in the ranks and even in the leadership of the CPSU, and support for his demands for inner-party democracy, greater social equality and an international orientation to the Bolshevik goal of world revolution. It was this political fact, as Rogovin demonstrates, that accounts for the purge reaching so deeply into the party apparatus, the military, the Komsomol youth movement, and the broader layers of the population. Rogovin bases his analysis on scrupulous research, quoting from newly translated or unpublished documents, including memoirs, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and trial transcripts. He documents the reaction of different social layers to the purges, including workers, peasants, non-party intellectuals and the CPSU rank-and-file. This book includes rarely published photographs of the prison camps, documenting the lives of those labeled by Stalin;enemies of the people. Chronologically, this volume takes up where its predecessor, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror , left off, with the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee that followed the purging of the Soviet military command and the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals. It analyzes such critical events as the Bukharin-Rykov trial, last of the infamous show trials; the massacre of Trotskyists in the Vorkuta slave-labor camp; and the assassination by Stalinist agents of Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, and other oppositionists outside the Soviet Union. It concludes with an examination of how the purges transformed the CPSU and Soviet society as a whole.
Download or read book Life and Death of Leon Trotsky written by Victor Serge and published by . This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Leon Trotsky by two of his close friends and collaborators
Download or read book Trotsky in New York 1917 written by Kenneth D. Ackerman and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as co–leader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the Twentieth Century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York City. Between January and March 1917, Trotsky found refuge in the United States. America had kept itself out of the European Great War, leaving New York the freest city on earth. During his time there—just over ten weeks—Trotsky immersed himself in the local scene. He settled his family in the Bronx, edited a radical left wing tabloid in Greenwich Village, sampled the lifestyle, and plunged headlong into local politics. His clashes with leading New York socialists over the question of US entry into World War I would reshape the American left for the next fifty years.
Download or read book The Socialist Alternative written by Herbert W. Vilakazi and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Show Trial Under Lenin written by M. Jansen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Russia will conquer all the millions of problems that stand in its way, on one condition: as long as the cause of the political education of the broad masses of the people continually advances. We have nothing to be afraid of, if our people fully learns to distinguish who are its friends and who are its enemies. The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries must and shall be a great step forward in the cause of the political instruction of the very broadest masses in town and country. (Grigorii Zinov'ev, Pravda and Krasnaia gazeta, 20 June 1922) For my part, I considered this trial to be unnecessary: the Socialist Revolu tionaries had been beaten and represented no visible danger at all. (Charles Rappoport, Ma vie, Paris 1926-1927, Vol. 2, p. 80) The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917 by staging a coup d'etat, and then established a dictatorship. The new rulers sup pressed all armed resistance in a bloody civil war, after which they made every effort to uproot and exterminate even peaceful political opposition of all kinds. Even now it is impossible in the Soviet Union to subject these developments to critical historical study. The political opponents of the Soviet regime of the time are still regarded by official Soviet his toriography as counter-revolutionaries and the measures taken against them are seen as completely justified.
Download or read book The Alternative in Eastern Europe written by Rudolf Bahro and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary Marxist writer provides analyses of socialist theory, modern political struggle, and socialist societies in Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia written by Dan Healey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-10-15 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism the Formative Years 1918 1928 written by Peter J. Boettke and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a narrative of one of the more interesting utopian experiments in comparative political and economic history: the first decade of the Soviet experience with socialism (1918-1928). Though historical and textual analysis, the book’s goal is to render this experience intelligible, to get at the meaning of the Soviet experience with socialism for comparative political economy today. The book examines the texts of Lenin, Bukharin, and other revolutionaries, as well as the interpretations of contemporary historians of the revolution and the writings of more recent interpreters of Soviet political and economic history. Arguing that the first three years of the Bolshevik regime (1918-1921) constitute an attempt to carry out the Marxian ideal of comprehensive central planning, and that the disastrous results, which all commentators agree occurred, were the inevitable outcome of this Marxian ideal coming into conflict with the economic reality of the coordination problem that all economic systems face, the book draws clear conclusions and elucidates the air of mystery that often surrounds the subject. Offering a radical challenge to contemporary comparative political economy at the level of high theory, applied research, and public policy, this book is appropriate for students and scholars interested in Marxism, economic history, political economy, and Austrian economics.
Download or read book Reconstructing Lenin written by Tamás Krausz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and “actually-existing” socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical context and how it shaped his theoretical and political contributions. Reconstructing Lenin, four decades in the making and now available in English for the first time, is an attempt to do just that. Tamás Krausz, an esteemed Hungarian scholar writing in the tradition of György Lukács, Ferenc Tokei, and István Mészáros, makes a major contribution to a growing field of contemporary Lenin studies. This rich and penetrating account reveals Lenin busy at the work of revolution, his thought shaped by immediate political events but never straying far from a coherent theoretical perspective. Krausz balances detailed descriptions of Lenin’s time and place with lucid explications of his intellectual development, covering a range of topics like war and revolution, dictatorship and democracy, socialism and utopianism.Reconstructing Lenin will change the way you look at a man and a movement; it will also introduce the English-speaking world to a profound radical scholar.
Download or read book Bolshevik Party in Conflict written by Ronald I. Kowalski and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-06-18 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the part played by the left Communists following the Russian revolution, the largest opposition to state socialism until the 1990s. The author feels that the leftist's vision offered no viable model for the construction of a democratic socialist society.
Download or read book Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885 1937 written by Barbara Allen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik, Barbara Allen recounts the political formation and positions of Russian Communist and trade unionist, Alexander Shlyapnikov. As leader of the Workers’ Opposition (1919–21), Shlyapnikov called for trade unions to realise workers’ mastery over the economy. Despite defeat, he continued to advocate distinct views on the Soviet socialist project that provide a counterpoint to Stalin’s vision. Arrested during the Great Terror, he refused to confess to charges he thought illogical and unsupported by evidence. Unlike the standard historical and literary depiction of the Old Bolshevik, Shlyapnikov contested Stalin's and the NKVD's construct of the ideal party member. Allen conducted extensive research in archives of the Soviet Communist party and secret police. Listen to SRB Podcast's episode on Alexander Shlyapnikov: An Old Working Class Bolshevik featuring Barbara Allen.
Download or read book Year One of the Russian Revolution written by Victor Serge and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eyewitness account of the world-changing uprising—from the author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary. “A truly remarkable individual . . . an heroic work” (Richard Allday of Counterfire). Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge’s account of the first year of the Russian Revolution—through all of its achievements and challenges—captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to Soviet democracy and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge’s attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia. Praise for Victor Serge “Serge is one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.” —Susan Sontag, MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Award “His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation . . . His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them.” —Partisan Review “I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth.” —John Berger, Booker Prize–winning author “The novels, poems, memoirs and other writings of Victor Serge are among the finest works of literature inspired by the October Revolution that brought the working class to power in Russia in 1917.” —Scott McLemee, writer of the weekly “Intellectual Affairs” column for Inside Higher Ed
