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This updated and expanded biographical directory is the first in the series of directories published by Radio Liberty since 1981 to include photographs. The volume provides detailed information about the careers and lives of current members of top Soviet party and government bodies, officials of the armed forces, and diplomats. Also represented are a number of middle-ranking officials who stand a good chance of attaining top-level posts in the next few years. Entries are in alphabetical order, and each entry includes a biographical sketch, a career chronology, a summary of the content of published articles and speeches, and details of political alignment and connections. The volume is current through summer 1990 and documents the substantial recent turnover in party organizations such as the Central Committee and in state bodies such as the newly elected Council of People's Deputies. It is an indispensable reference for scholars, business people, journalists, government officials, and others trying to follow the rapid changes taking place in the USSR.
From 1982 to 1985, the period on which this book focuses, the Soviet Union was governed by a succession of ailing old men—Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko—who, supported by an equally elderly Politburo, were often physically incapable of controlling and directing the bureaucratic state machine and party organization. This unprecedented situation precipitated a secret and bitter power struggle within the top Soviet leadership between two main factions: the Chernenko apparatchiks, who had risen to power under Brezhnev and owed their positions to him; and the supporters of Andropov, including the younger, more dynamic, and power-hungry members of the party elite, who had been advocating fairly bold reforms to deal with the grave social and economic problems facing the USSR. Dr. Hazan provides a detailed analysis of this hidden power struggle as he examines the final years of Brezhnev's reign and the brief ascendancies of Andropov and Chernenko. These rapid changes led to the demise of the old guard in the Politburo and the emergence of a new breed of leader in Mikhail Gorbachev, culminating in the final consolidation of his power at the 27th CPSU Congress. Drawing on an extensive range of primary sources and using vivid examples of how the factions exploited the gigantic propaganda machine of the Soviet mass media, the author looks behind the Kremlin's walls to explore the essence of Soviet politics. The book describes the power base of each of the recent Soviet leaders and analyzes the steps they took to consolidate their positions and tighten controls over the bureaucracy and the military.
This ground-breaking book examines the Soviet ruling elite over the entire period of Communist rule. It serves as a collective biography of nearly two thousand people who served on the Communist Party's Central Committee from 1917 to 1991. The book is based on archival research, only available after the collapse of communism, and extensive interviews with former Central Committee members.
Drawing on newly accessible archives as well as memoirs and other sources, this biographical dictionary documents the lives of some two thousand notable figures in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. A unique compendium of information that is not currently available in any other single resource, the dictionary provides concise profiles of the region's most important historical and cultural actors, from Ivo Andric to King Zog. Coverage includes Albania, Belarus, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Moldova, Ukraine, and the countries that made up Yugoslavia.
First published in 1999, this volume is the first full length study of one of the most important political institutions of the erstwhile Soviet political system – the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The originality of this work lies in its main argument that the central reform during Perestroika was that of the Party and the State – a reform which ultimately resulted in the CPSU and its institutions, the Central Committee being one of the most vital among them – firstly, surrendering the monopoly over political power and control over the instrumentalities of the State and secondly, systematically de-institutionalising and dismantling the formidable Soviet political system. The seeds of transformation and the shape of politico-economic and socio-cultural systems that emerged in successor States were laid down during the Soviet era – in particular during Perestroika itself. The continuity is, therefore, as striking as the change – if not more so.
First published in 1997, this book explored Russia’s politics at an important phase in the life of the Russian state. Focusing on the different types of cooperative interactings between Russia and the fourteen other republics of the former Doviet Union from mid 1990-late 91. The book brings out the nature of the Russians effort to reconfigure its ties with these republics. At a time when the Soviet empire with an aim to limit the damage to the interests of the Russians. As the author concludes, Russia’s inter-republican cooperation was a carefully thought-out policy to undermine the Gorbachev government’s effort to control centre-periphery relations and manage the uncontrolled break-up of the Soviet Union. Russia signalled, through its cooperative relations with the republics, that it was willing to accept the republics as sovereign and view its own interaction with them as inter-state relations.
The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Politburo (1992) is the definitive history and political analysis of this institution. Extensive use of new Soviet sources permitted the authors to provide a comprehensive analysis of the way in which the Politburo operated and a sociological examination of its membership. The history of the Politburo is presented in a lucid and rigorous account that charts its development from creation by Lenin in 1919 to sidetracking by Gorbachev in 1990: an organization that, as the authors state, ‘subjected the whole of the USSR to its ruthless dictatorship, but itself bowed time and again to the leader of its own making’.
Why did the Soviet Union squander the political leverage afforded by its trade subsidy to Eastern Europe? Why did Soviet officials fail to bargain with resolve, to link subsidies to salient political issues, to make credible commitments, and to monitor the satellites' policies? Using an unprecedented array of formerly secret documents housed in archives in Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague, as well as interviews with former Communist officials across Eastern Europe, Randall Stone answers these questions and others that have long vexed Western political scientists. Stone argues that trade politics revolved around the incentives created by distorted prices. The East European satellites profited by trading on the margin between prices on the Western market and those in the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union made numerous attempts to reduce its implicit trade subsidy and increase the efficiency of the bloc, but the satellites managed consistently to outmaneuver Soviet negotiators. Stone demonstrates how the East Europeans artfully resisted Soviet objectives. Stone draws upon recent developments in bargaining and principal-agent theory, arguing that the incentives created by domestic institutions weakened Soviet bargaining strategies. In effect, he suggests, perverse incentive structures in the Soviet economy were exported into Soviet foreign policy. Furthermore, Stone argues, incentives to smother information were so deeply entrenched that they frustrated numerous attempts to reform Soviet institutions.