The Soviet century

The story of the Soviet Union is a complex one, and one that was for a long time inaccessible to western historians due to lack of documentation and ideologically motivated obfuscation, but it is one that Moshe Lewin is uniquely qualified to tell. Now that the smoke has cleared, and with the help of previously unavailable archives, Lewin presents the most comprehensive single-volume history of the USSR to date. Taking us from the earliest days of the revolution through Stalin's brutal regime, Khruschev's doomed attempts at reform and the crumbling of the state in the late 80s under Gorbachev, Lewin expertly clarifies the bewildering complexities of Soviet bureaucracy without reductive simplification. Meanwhile, with one eye on the coups and intrigues of the Kremlin's corridors of power, he explains the wider history of a vast and heterogeneous state, overturning many widely held preconceptions on the way.

Stalin knows where he wants to go and is going there -- Autonomization versus federation? (1922-3) -- Cadres into heretics -- The party and its apparaty -- Social flux and systemic paranoia -- The impact of collectivization -- Between legality and bacchanalia -- How did Stalin rule? -- The purges and their rationale -- The scale of the purges -- The camps and the industrial empire of the NKVD -- Endgame -- An agrarian despotism? -- E pur, si muove! -- The KGB and the political opposition -- The avalanche of urbanization -- The administrators : bruised but thriving -- Some leaders -- Kosygin and Andropov -- Lenin's time and worlds -- Backwardness and relapse -- Modernity with a twist -- Urbanization : successes and failures -- Labour force and demography : a conundrum -- The bureaucratic maze -- Telling the light from the shade? -- What was the Soviet system?