The Moderate Bolshevik

This first English-language biography of Mikhail Tomsky illuminates how the sole worker in the top echelon of the Bolshevik Party, and the leader of the huge trade-union bureaucracy, helped shape Soviet domestic and foreign policy along generally moderate lines throughout the 1920s.

"The Fullest account to date of the Menshevik party during the first year of Soviet rule. Focusing on the period from October 1917 through October 1918, months when the Soviet political system still permitted a degree of electoral competition among political parties, he explores the moderate socialists' opposition to the Bolsheviks"--back cover.

Access to newly opened archives has allowed Alexander Rabinowitch to substantially rewrite the history of how the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia. Focusing on the first year of Soviet rule in St Petersburg, he shows how state organs evolved in the face of repeated crises.

For generations in the West, Cold War animosity blocked dispassionate accounts of the Russian Revolution. This history authoritatively restores the upheaval's primary social actors-workers, soldiers, and peasants-to their rightful place at the center of the revolutionary process.

Shows that the Russian Civil War was not a struggle between a Communist future and a Tsarist past but rather was a bloody fight among diverse factions in a postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia, Novikova shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support.

In this major reassessment of Russian labor history, Charters Wynn shows that in Imperial Russia's primary steel and mining region the same class that posed a powerful challenge to the tsarist government also undermined the revolutionary movement with its pogromist violence. From the last decades of the nineteenth century through Russia's First Revolution in 1905, the revolutionary parties succeeded in inciting the predominantly young, male "peasant-workers" of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend region to take part in general strikes, rallies, and armed confrontation with troops. However, the parties were never able to control the unrest their agitation helped unleash: Wynn provides evidence that the workers also committed devastating pogromist attacks on Jews, radical students, and artisans. Until now the prevailing image of the Russian working class has been largely based on the skilled and educated workers of St. Petersburg and Moscow. By focusing on the unskilled and semi-skilled laborers of the ethnically diverse Donbass-Dnepr Bend region, Wynn reveals the "low consciousness" that coexisted with radicalism within the Russian working class and traces its origins in the bleak and violent frontier culture of the pit villages and steel towns. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Was the Bolshevik success in Russia during the revolution and civil war years a legitimate expression of the will of the people? Or did Russian workers, peasants, bourgeoisie, and upper-class groups pose numerous challenges to Bolshevik authority, challenges that were put down through unyielding repression? In this book distinguished scholars from East and West draw on recently opened archives to challenge the commonly held view that the Bolsheviks enjoyed widespread support and that their early history was simply a march toward inevitable victory. They show instead that during this period Russian society was at war with itself and with the Bolsheviks. Authors discuss such previously neglected subjects as government policies toward women and toward religious institutions, the protests of workers and peasants, and the anti-Bolshevik movements and parties. In particular, they investigate the actions of other political parties and White leaders, the peasant rebellions and workers' strikes, Bolshevik operations against the church, attitudes toward peasant and working-class women, and new data on Lenin (the last in a chapter by Richard Pipes). Describing not one civil war but several social, political, and military confrontations going on simultaneously, they portray a Russia in turmoil and an outcome that was by no means inevitable.

This book presents an unorthodox identity economics that approaches social identity through a non-classical psychology. Garai applies the modern physics concept of wave-particle duality to economic psychology, finding a corresponding duality in object-oriented activity and historically generated social identity. These two factors interconnect to create a double-storied structure of social identity and its behavioral manifestations. The book then presents a calculation device for mediating between behavioral and identity economics. Garai then applies all these factors to two socioeconomic systems developed during the second modernization: Bolshevik-type “socialism” and post-Bolshevik “capitalism.” In this context, he examines the Eastern Bloc nomenklatura as a duality of bureaucratic and patron-client organization (“state and party”) and the establishment of both today's material capitalism and its other half: human capital economics.