Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union
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Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
The book I mentioned in the other thread was A History of Twentieth Century Russia by Robert Service. Make sure you get the version that goes all the way to Putin.
But once again, Service is neither communist nor Marxist.
Also, this is probably an Ungentlemanly discussion, and there are more fruitful environs for this question to be asked.
But once again, Service is neither communist nor Marxist.
Also, this is probably an Ungentlemanly discussion, and there are more fruitful environs for this question to be asked.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Again, the above-mentioned book is an excellent survey of the Soviet era, with a much clearer head than IRD functionaries and neo-conservatives.
Any of Sheila Fitzpatrick's books are also very good resources. If you're looking for more anecdotal evidence, Russia's Sputink Generation by Raleigh is wonderful. You can also use biographical accounts like Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union by Robinson and Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel by Scott. Be aware that the last two deal specifically with Stalinist era society, so your whole "it wasn't that bad" shtick might not go over so well. The Khrushchev era is, IMO, the "golden years" of the USSR, though things were by no means bad in the 70s or early 80s. A more viewer-friendly book is A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, which is a big coffee-table book with some great pictures of late-80s Soviet daily life. If you were not told they were in the USSR, you could very easily mistake them for an American or Western European scene. It really opens your eyes (literally, instead of just reading about things) as to how un-different things were in East and West.
If you care to venture there, soviet-empire.com has a whole section of their website devoted to daily life stuff in the Eastern Bloc. There are some good articles and anecdotes to be found there as well.
I hope this helps you some.
Any of Sheila Fitzpatrick's books are also very good resources. If you're looking for more anecdotal evidence, Russia's Sputink Generation by Raleigh is wonderful. You can also use biographical accounts like Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union by Robinson and Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel by Scott. Be aware that the last two deal specifically with Stalinist era society, so your whole "it wasn't that bad" shtick might not go over so well. The Khrushchev era is, IMO, the "golden years" of the USSR, though things were by no means bad in the 70s or early 80s. A more viewer-friendly book is A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, which is a big coffee-table book with some great pictures of late-80s Soviet daily life. If you were not told they were in the USSR, you could very easily mistake them for an American or Western European scene. It really opens your eyes (literally, instead of just reading about things) as to how un-different things were in East and West.
If you care to venture there, soviet-empire.com has a whole section of their website devoted to daily life stuff in the Eastern Bloc. There are some good articles and anecdotes to be found there as well.
I hope this helps you some.
Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union by Scott Shane.
This isn't from a Marxist perspective, but it is fairly unbiased. It is probably the best book on the fall of the Soviet Union I know of. It focuses on information and information technology as one of the primary reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union and gives a very step-by-step play out of how it all happened, especially from Gorbachev on.
Moscow Stories by Loren Graham might be a good choice.
Graham was in the first wave of American exchange students in the Soviet Union and lived there for quite a bit. It takes a particular look at the educational/university/research scene in the Soviet Union but does a good job of examining life both for expatriates living there as well as Soviet citizens and life in Moscow in the 1960s-70s in general. It's a fairly light read and actually pretty humorous in certain parts.
Richard Cribb
He does monologues
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Not my special field, but you might be interested in this one: Socialism Betrayed by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenney
Go here for an interview with the authors:
http://mltoday.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=469&Itemid=57
Go here for an interview with the authors:
http://mltoday.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=469&Itemid=57
The Russians, By Hendrick Smith. A journalist from the (liberal) New York Times wrote of his tour of duty in Moscow in the late 1970's.
Neonanocyborgasm
Deity
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That's your first problem, for history should not be written from a bias, but from impartiality.
Ahahaaha
Anyway here are the books I picked up:
Socialism Betrayed by Keernan
Dissolution by Walker about national sovereignty as the main theme
Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology and the Death and Commounism and the New Russia by Michael Cox
A History of Modern Russia from Tsarism to the 21st Century by Robert Service
The USSR 1987-1991: Marxist Perspective by Vogot-Downey
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Why would you want a liberal or conservative point of view? It kinda goes without saying that it would be biased.
Same as asking an American why the Allies won World War II.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
... yes? If the author specifically designated that he was going to interpret evidence through his personal dogma, I would be very skeptical of his conclusions.
Which is not to say that we should toss out all analysis done by people who aren't utterly indifferent to politics/religion/any other sort of highly opinionated field, but there is something to be said about not caring about conclusions reached by other people just because they don't share your ideological beliefs.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That assumes that "Marxist" is necessarily equivalent to "Stalinist", which is hugely over-simplistic. Some of the most comprehensive criticism of the Soviet state has originated in Marxist, particularly Trotskyite thought. Many socialists, of all stripes, reject the categorisation of the Soviet state as such altogether. Granted, the whole thing will be framed within a particular intellectual structure, but that hardly necessitates something as emotive as "bias". One could trust a capitalist to discuss the collapse of the British Empire, after all; why not a Marxist of the Soviet Union?
I think that you confuse "dogma" with "intellectual position"; the former is questionable, the latter and inevitability, given that you are necessarily dealing with an informed academic. If you are to dictate that no-one have any pre-existent perceptions or ideas in regards to their topic, then nothing will ever be written about anything, which is hardly productive. You just have to hope that professional integrity and peer review keep any given writer in line.
I can't help but wonder if people would react in the same manner if I were to suggest that a Christian write Biblical commentary?
LightSpectra
me autem minui
Yes, I covered that in the second half of my previous post.
One, religion is a peculiar exception to this principle, because even a position of complete detachment is in some manner a religious opinion. This makes your comparison rather difficult to work with, but nevertheless: Two, I would not be a very intellectually secure Christian if I were unable to digest opinions from non-Christians; in the same manner, I would not be an able critic of socialism if I did not tolerate the opinions of socialists (and vice versa). Three, a great deal can be learned of the Bible by reading opinions of Jews, pagan Greeks/Romans, et al. -- one does not have to accept the veracity of the ideology of a person in order to be educated by his reasoning. Hence it would be wise to observe both the writings of Marxists and non-Marxists when it comes to the issue of the failure of a Marxist state in history.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
You did, true enough, but I still contest your apparent assumption that "bias", as commonly understood, is necessarily present simply because an academic uses a particular intellectual framework. Such things are, or at least can be, legitimate perspectives from which to conduct study, provided that they are treated properly. I also question the usage of the term "dogma"; it seems a misleading pejorative as you used it.
This is certainly true, yes. However, as I note above, it's important to maintain the distinction between perspective and bias.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
I agree. There's certainly nothing wrong with putting a Marxist view into the equation, but it forces you to ignore about 90% of reality that doesn't fit neatly into Marx's view of history (it is possible, at least until Stalin, to view it through Marx-Lenin dogma, but even then it's a simplification and I'm not sure if anyone even bothered to try by the time you get the Bresnev who himself didn't like to use Marxist rationales.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That assumes that a Marxist view necessarily views the Soviet Union as the fulfilment of Marx's predictions of the emergence of socialism, which rather ignores those Marx-Leninists who have been criticising since Stalin's take-over, or those Marxists who have done so since it's very inception. Terms like "deformed worker's state" and "state capitalist" spring readily to the mouths of many Marxists.
It also assumes that Marxist theory is necessarily limited to the work of Marx himself, which, to be honest, I would have assumed the existence of the Soviet Union itself acted as a something of a contradiction to.
RedRalph
Deity
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I can't say too much on the internal causes, but here's some of the things I think could have made the international situation much better for the USSR
Some sort of rapprochement with China. Though I think the Chinese were mostly at fault for the split, if relations could have even been civil, both would have benefited politically
More freedom for other members of the Warsaw Pact. If they wanted to do things slightly differently, they should have been allowed to. There was no reason a Yugoslav-style setup in, say, Czechoslovakia should have harmed the USSR. If the locals didn't want statues of Lenin, let them replace them. the symbolic value of that sort of thins was minimal, and obviously some of the locals resented it
Brezhnev used western weakness in the 70s to take time to stablise the USSR, understandably, but if he had pressed them in places like the Middle East, who knows what could have happened? We will never know
If the Pope had died in 1981, who knows what might have happened? Just a few inches closer to his heart...
They could have given up on Afghanistan way earlier. Easy to say with hindsight, of course.
Some sort of rapprochement with China. Though I think the Chinese were mostly at fault for the split, if relations could have even been civil, both would have benefited politically
More freedom for other members of the Warsaw Pact. If they wanted to do things slightly differently, they should have been allowed to. There was no reason a Yugoslav-style setup in, say, Czechoslovakia should have harmed the USSR. If the locals didn't want statues of Lenin, let them replace them. the symbolic value of that sort of thins was minimal, and obviously some of the locals resented it
Brezhnev used western weakness in the 70s to take time to stablise the USSR, understandably, but if he had pressed them in places like the Middle East, who knows what could have happened? We will never know
If the Pope had died in 1981, who knows what might have happened? Just a few inches closer to his heart...
They could have given up on Afghanistan way earlier. Easy to say with hindsight, of course.
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