I was pretty surprised that there's no citation of this speech since all of the writings and speeches of Stalin are published somewhere. If it's a quote from an archive, I would still expect a citation. But this quote also stands out because Lewin extrapolates a lot of Stalin's character traits from it. It's mentioned over and over again so I decided to try and find it myself. By the fortune of me speaking in Russian, I've tried to google something akin to "speech Stalin Sverdlov Party University 1924". As it turns out, it's not a speech, but a series of lectures called "Foundations of Leninism", that Stalin gave at the aforementioned university in 1924. These lectures do not contain the said quote. If it's a thing from memoirs, why not mention who wrote the memoir or whatever the source might be? How should the reader verify that the quote even exists if it's ungooglable and basically impossible to verify? U.S. President John F. Kennedy responded to Gagarin’s feat by making the bold claim that the U.S. would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The U.S. succeeded—on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. Mikhail Gorbachev A] magnum opus. . . . This invaluable study casts a lost world in a new light."— Publishers Weekly (Starred review) Schlögel – assisted by his excellent translator, Rodney Livingstone – is an eloquent writer and a captivating travel guide around this Soviet “lost world”."—Stephen Lovell, Times Literary Supplement

Section two does crucial work in seperating the Stalin era from the post-Stalin era that shows some development including the dismantling of the Gulag prison system, increased leniency of the criminal code, reduction of overall prisoner numbers, and other hopeful shifts that are tempered by debates from the liberal and conservative elements of society. The final section likewise covers various shifts through the whole system and covers their positive and negative elements that contributes to an overall more robust understanding of the USSR outside of straw man representations. The author dug deep in the secret archives, once available after the cold war, disregarding the bureaucracy propaganda and the imperialist slander. Then divided the book in three parts: 1) the USSR from the '30s to Stalin's celebrated death, 2) from the post war and 50's to the collapse of the soviet state and, 3) a wide vision of the Soviet society as a whole. Here reliance on new materials – archives, memoirs, autobiographies or documentary publications – is an objective in itself Ok, a little: Russian archive and a massive wealth of administrative data and statistics based deep dives into the intricacies of Stalin's paranoid and murderous bureaucracy of the 1930s and 40s; Khrushchev's de-Stalinization and state and party apparatus governance reform processes post 1953, the establishment and rise of the KGB under Andropov, dissidents and political opening in the 70s and 80s, Gorbachev and, well, the rest is history. In 1949, the U.S., Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO). The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies.

Soviet student life

B. Lewin is no apologist for Stalinism. He reports the body count, the level of imprisonments and exile, the arbitrary application of state power, without flinching. Also missing from The Soviet Century is any information at all on one of the most significant elements of the system’s history, i.e. its impact on the outside world and international relations. Of the revolutionary Comintern era in the time of European revolution, to the role the Soviet Union played in the anti-colonial revolutions of the 60s and 70s, we learn nothing. This is a history of the Soviet Union as it might have been seen through the eyes of an apparatchik in some Moscow ministry, not through the eyes of the outside world.

A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police. The Soviet Century is a great monument to the vanished Soviet world. Rich, witty, and entertaining, the book offers a comprehensive textual museum that is all the more important because no such real-life museum exists in Russia or elsewhere, and I doubt that it will be created anytime soon. The more difficult it is to go to the White Sea Canal, the Lenin Mausoleum, or a Russian dacha, the more enjoyable is this book.”—Alexander Etkind, Central European University In The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin traces this history in all its complexity, drawing widely upon archive material previously unavailable. Highlighting key factors such as demography, economics, culture and political repression, Lewin guides 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 Soviet bureaucracy, the "tentacled octopus"; which held the real power. The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide. Although as a good social historian, Lewin continues to emphasise the broader context that supported Stalin’s authoritarianism, there is much more weight put on Stalin’s character. Reference is made to Stalin’s desire for absolute power, to be recognised as the indisputable authority on history, politics, ideology, etc., that lay behind the decision to destroy the Bolshevik Old Guard and indeed anyone whose historical memory might undermine Stalin’s version of events. Lewin claims that Stalin had the Great Terror of 1936–38 in mind as early as 1933. The references to Stalin’s ‘mania’, ‘paranoia’, ‘political pathology’ and their impact on the system more generally brought Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to mind. The Secret Speech is often presented as an élite cynical ploy to lay systemic failings at an individual’s door and to give a rationale for continuing to believe in the USSR. However, Lewin’s reading of events may lead us to see the Secret Speech as an honest attempt to understand what really happened in the change from Lenin’s leadership to Stalin’s.Drawing on Schloegel's decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.

This is a dense book, which is part of the reason it took me so long to finish - at times it truly is difficult to slog through. At other times, however, it provides a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the Soviet Union. Lewin ultimately concludes that in the post-Stalin era, the USSR was what he terms "bureaucratic-absolutist." "In the Soviet case," he writes, "it was the bureacracy which, in the final analysis, collectively acquired undivided and unchallenged power." Indeed, the book explores numerous moments in which particular individuals saw the flaws in the Soviet system and sought to engage in much-needed reform, but who were ultimately stymied by the conservative nature of the system and the total power of the bureaucracy. Empecemos por el principio. No cabe duda de que el autor sabe de qué está hablando. Es un experto en el tema, ha buceado en las fuentes originales y, además, intenta en todo momento ser neutral. Como bien dice, nuestra visión de la Unión Soviética está viciada en buena parte por la propaganda pro/anti soviética. Es perfectamente compatible criticar los horrendos crímenes del estalinismo y, al mismo tiempo, dar cuenta de que el régimen se volvió bastante más humano de Kruchev en adelante. C. He focuses a lot on the Party- who were its cadres, how were they recruited, to what extent they were veterans of the Revolution and the Civil War, when the terror turned on it. His sympathies are with the Old Bolsheviks, the idealists. They began to be pushed aside in the initial Five-Year Plans, and then were decimated in the terror of the late 1930s. He is sensitive to the erosion of the Bolshevik culture of intraparty debate, but not to the erosion of debate beyond the limits of the Party.

Success!

Stalin implemented a series of Five-Year Plans to spur economic growth and transformation in the Soviet Union. The first Five-Year Plan focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization. Subsequent Five-Year Plans focused on the production of armaments and military build-up. The wealth of this book cannot be sufficiently explored within the limits of a review. Gibbonian in scale, it is a veritable cornucopia of jewels. “In Russia, radical changes and catastrophic experiences occur in their pure form,” Schlögel states. Reading his chronicle of this massive churn in all its sensory whimsies, we gain fresh insights into the lost world of the Soviet Union."—Prasenjit Chowdhury, Hindustan Times A detailed examination of the relics of ordinary communist life. Perfect for dipping into."—Fred Studemann, Financial Times In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War. An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.

This urban metamorphosis was essential to showcasing the Socialist experiment to foreign visitors. Right from the start, journalists, diplomats, intellectuals, anti-colonial activists and professionals came to experience, challenge and participate in the creation of the new state. The symbolic centre of the Soviet universe Moshe Lewin's great tome, The Soviet Century, is about neither the people of the Soviet Union nor the ideologies that drove them. Instead, it is a book about the institutions of the USSR, from before the start of Stalin's rule through to its collapse. The book is not written chronologically, but rather split into three parts: one about the Soviet Union under Stalin, one about the country from the 1960s on, and one situating it in historical context.

It’s hard for people’s reaction to the USSR not to become a Rorschach test. A centuries worth of fighting it out in the public sphere has ingrained rigid perceptions about what the USSR was. Lewin’s book is not a place to begin if you’re unfamiliar with these legendary, intimidating arguments. Thankfully, this is probably the first book I’ve read on this subject that effectively cuts through all of this. It’s dense, but very insightful. Throughout the book, the reader is enlighten on several crucial aspects on how Stalin betrayed Lenin while destroying the Bolshevik Party, and dismounting its accomplishments to accommodate both the party and the state to his own personal goals; which relied on eliminating any kind of connection between the revolutionary cadres that seized power in 1917, both physically -trough slandering, smearing, framing and forced confessions to the ultimate bloodshed of Lenin's comrades- and incorporating new waves of cadres that had nothing to do with the revolution, that were careerists and useful scapegoats at the same time; on top of this, fal During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 1936 and 1938 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Cold War El siglo soviético se presenta como un libro que cubre (casi) todos los aspectos de lo que sucedió en la Unión Soviética. No resulta fácil cubrir 70 años de historia (bastante movidita, además) en un país que tiene miles de kilómetros y multitud de etnias. El autor lo repite varias veces a lo largo de la obra.