How The Soviet Union Is Governed

This is a new and thorough revision of a recognized classic whose first edition was hailed as the most authoritative account in English of the governing of the Soviet Union. Now, with historical material rearranged in chronological order, and with seven new chapters covering most of the last fifteen years, this edition brings the Soviet Union fully into the light of modern history and political science. The purposes of Fainsod's earlier editions were threefold: to explain the techniques used by the Bolsheviks and Stalin to gain control of the Russian political system; to describe the methods they employed to maintain command; and to speculate upon the likelihood oftheir continued control in the future. This new edition increases very substantially the attention paid to another aspect of the political process--how policy is formed, how the Soviet Union is governed. Whenever possible, Mr. Hough attempts to analyze the alignments and interrelationships between Soviet policy institutions. Moreover, he constantly moves beyond a description of these institutions to probe the way they work. Two chapters are devoted to the questions of individual political participation. Other chapters examine the internal organization of institutions and explore the ways in which the backgrounds of their officials influence their policy positions and alliances. The picture that emerges is an unprecedented account of the distribution of power in the Soviet Union.

Following his great trilogy of biographies of the giants who dominated the history of the Soviet Union - Stalin (1991), Lenin (1994) and Trotsky (1996) - Dmitri Volkogonov delves deeper into the Soviet archives to produce new character evaluations and political assessments of the seven leaders who ruled the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. A former general in the Soviet Army's propaganda department, Director of the Institute for Military History, and Defence Adviser to President Yeltsin from 1991 to his death from cancer in December 1995, Dmitri Volkogonov had unrivalled access to Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents and secret presidential files. Basing his new book on these inside sources, he has continued his pioneering work of revealing the truth behind the activities of the world's most secretive political leaders. He throws new light on: Lenin's paranoia about foreigners in Russia; his creation of a privileged system for top Party members; Stalin's repression of the nationalities and his singular conduct of foreign policy; the origins and conduct of the Korean War; Khrushchev's relationship with the odious secret service chief Beria; Brezhnev's vanity and stupidity; the Afghan War; Poland and Solidarity; Soviet bureaucracy; Gorbachev's Leninism and role in history.

Ukrainization originally meant active recruitment of Ukrainians into the Soviet state, but soon Ukrainian communists came to demand far greater self-determination than Moscow would tolerate. Those who made such demands in the 1920s were labelled "national deviationists," and the issues they raised engulfed the regime in a major political crisis.

The Soviet project of creating a new culture and society entailed a plan for the modeling of "new" persons who embodied and fulfilled the promise of socialism, and this vision was expressed in the institutions of government. Using archival sources, essays, and interviews with journalists, Thomas C. Wolfe provides an account of the final four decades of Soviet history viewed through the lens of journalism and media. Whereas most studies of the Soviet press approach its history in terms of propaganda or ideology, Wolfe's focus is on the effort to imagine a different kind of person and polity. Foucault's concept of governmentality illuminates the relationship between the idea of the socialist person and everyday journalistic representation, from the Khrushchev period to the 1990s and the appearance of the tabloid press. This thought-provoking study provides insights into the institutions of the Soviet press and the lives of journalists who experienced important transformations of their work.