The Soviet Century

Historian Lewin has spent much of his career studying the Soviet Union. In this work, newly available material from the Soviet archives and recent work by Russian scholars are treated as privileged sources for his reexamination of a number of important questions of Soviet historiography, including political maneuvering between Stalin and Lenin over the legal status of the non-Russian republics, the dynamics of urbanization, the impact of collectivization, the KGB's response to political opposition, and the nature of the bureaucracy. Although he doesn't say so explicitly, it often seems that he assumes at least a basic familiarity with the contours of Soviet history and the debates surrounding it on the part of his readership. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR