Political Science : Communism & Socialism

“Transition” is the name typically given to the time of radical change following the fall of communism, connoting a shift from planned to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy. Transition is also, in Michael Kennedy’s analysis, a culture in its own right—with its own contentions, repressions, and unrealized potentials. By elaborating transition as a culture of power and viewing it in its complex relation to emancipation, nationalism, and war, Kennedy’s book clarifies the transformations of postcommunism as well as, more generally, the ways in which culture articulates social change. more...

Price: $90.00

This book, based on extensive original research in previously unexplored sources, including the party archives, provides a great deal of new information on the disintegration of the Soviet communist party, in 1991 and the preceding years.  It argues that, contrary to prevailing views, the party was reformable in late Soviet times, but that attempts to reform it failed. more...

Price: $150.00

The enormously complex changes triggered by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe were nowhere more ambiguous than in the heartland of the Soviet bloc, Russia itself. Here the population was divided on all the most fundamental questions of post-communist transition: economic reforms, the Communist Party, the borders of the state, even the definition of the Russian ‘nation‘ itself. This book stands back from the turbulent post-Soviet era and inquires into the nature of the ‘Second Russian Revolution‘. It argues that Russia deserves our attention now as much as ever, because it raises so many of the big questions about how societies operate in the modern world. more...

Price: $90.95

Dissident Marxism describes the left in history. Some readers will enjoy it as a history of revolutionary socialism in the years between Stalin's rise and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others will find here a challenging thesis -- that the most enduring of left-wing traditions, and highly relevant to the times we live in today, were located in a space between the New Left and Trotskyism. Dissident Marxism explores the lives and thinking of some of the most creative and striking members of the twentieth century left, and asks if the new anti-capitalist movement might provide an opportunity for just such another left-wing generation to emerge? more...

Price: $90.95

Written by leading east European scholars, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of fifty years of economic thinking under communist rule in Europe and during the first phase of post-communist economic transformation. more...

Price: $180.00