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"Relying on a wealth of detailed institutional, policy, and elite information, Hahn presents a magisterial study that fills a significant void in our understanding of USSR's destruction. While readers may at times feel overwhelmed.... readers are presented with a conceptual approach that can be useful for appreciating ongoing institutional changes and oftern subtle elite maneuverings in the post-Soviet era. --John P. Willerton, University of Arizona "This is a big book in all respects, weighty both in size and scholarship. The core is a meticulous analysis of the perestroika period of the Soviet Union (1985-91). Followed by a concluding general chapter that applies the earlier analysis to post-Communist Russia (1992-2000). The work is based on years of painstaking analysis, considerable archival research, and numerous interviews." -- The Russian Review "This is an important book with a number of substantive strengths." -- Slavic Review The fall of the Soviet communist regime in 1991 offers a challenging contrast to other instances of democratic transition and change in the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1991 revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below as occurred in Czechoslovakia nor a negotiated transition to democracy like those in Poland, Hungary, or Latin America. It was not primarily the result of social modernization, the rise of a new middle class, or of national liberation movements in the non-Russian union republics. Instead, as Gordon Hahn argues, the Russian transformation was a bureaucrat-led, state-based revolution managed by a group of Communist Party functionaries who won control over the Russian Republic (RSFSR) in the mid-1990s. Hahn describes how opportunistic Party and state officials, led by Boris Yeltsin, defected from the Gorbachev camp and proceeded in 1990-91 to dismantle the institutions that bound state and party. These revolutionaries from above seized control of political, economic, natural and human resources, and then separated the party apparatus from state institutions on Russian Republic territory. With the failed August 1991 hard-line coup, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and decreed that all Union state organs, including the KGB and military were under RSFSR control. In Hahn's account, this mode of revolutionary change from above explains the troubled development of democracy in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Hahn shows how limited mobilization of the masses stunted the development of civil societies and the formation of political parties and trade unions with real grass roots. The result is a weak society unable to nudge the state to concentrate on institutional reforms society needs for the development of a free polity and economy. Russia's Revolution from Above goes far in correcting the historical record and reconceptualizing the Soviet transformation. It should be read by historians, economists, political scientists, and Russia area scholars. Gordon M. Hahn is visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His articles on Soviet and Russian politics have appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Russian Review, and Russian History/Histoire Russe.
The author has spent upwards of ten years in working on this book. His objective is to clarify the military aspect of the Moscow-Peking dialogue which has not yet received its deserved treatment. The apogee of that dialogue seems to have been passed toward the end of the rule of Khrushchev. Yet the Vietnam war spawns fresh contention. Our cover age will span the development from I956 to the present. The beginning of the dispute with regard to the origins of war in general is taken up in the first two chapters. The next three chapters discuss the several types of war with the frame of reference set in what now appears to be a quondam era. But the principle differences between the disputants are just as outstanding today as they were then. The penultimate chapter is somewhat wide in scope in order to deal with the larger and more intensely bitter polemics evolving after Khrushchev left office. There have been many new and startling views held by both sides since then, views splitting them poles apart. Omi nously at issue now is the question of Sino-Soviet peaceful coexistence. Our work, obviously, cannot wait until that question is answered to be finished. The final chapter concludes our study. To write of subjects as dynamic as this one is a challenge because they are current affairs. Due to the swift change of events, no sooner is our typescript put to press than it needs a revision.