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Cargando... The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Unionpor Walter Laqueur
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This excellent interpretation of the Soviet Union does not provide a strict narrative but organizes the story around important topics. Laqueur reviews the initial romance and enthusiasm for the revolution that wore off overtime, whether there were other options in 1917, and how and why the Soviet Union fell. He discusses the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union and whether it had ceased to be totalitarian. He criticized Western Sovietology, not for failing to see the collapse coming because that entailed accidents of history (such as the rise to power of Gorbachev) that cannot be predicted by social science, but for the use of models and ideological bias that prevented it from seeing the seriousness of the problems faced by the Soviet Union. Individual chapters also address the calculation of the number of victims, the nationalist revival that was the final but not only cause of the end of the Soviet Union and a case study on the collapse of East Germany in which he again criticizes Western social scientists. ( ) sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Walter Laqueur as been hailed as "one of our most distinguished scholars of modern European history" in the New York Times Book Review. Robert Byrnes, writing in the Journal of Modern History, called him "one of the most remarkable men in the Western world working in the field." Over a spanof three decades, in books ranging from Russia and Germany to the recent Black Hundred, he has won a reputation as a major writer and a provocative thinker. Now he turns his attention to the greatest enigma of our time: the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.In The Dream that Failed, Laqueur offers an authoritative assessment of the Soviet era--from the triumph of Lenin to the fall of Gorbachev. In the last three years, decades of conventional wisdom about the U.S.S.R. have been swept away, while a flood of evidence from Russian archives demandsnew thinking about old assumptions. Laqueur rises to the challenge with a critical inquiry conducted on a grand scale. He shows why the Bolsheviks won the struggle for power in 1917; how they captured the commitment of a young generation of Russians; why the idealism faded as Soviet power grew; howthe system ultimately collapsed; and why Western experts have been so wrong about the Communist state. Always thoughtful and incisive, Laqueur reflects on the early enthusiasm of foreign observers and Bolshevik revolutionaries--then takes a piercing look at the totalitarian nature of the SovietUnion. We see how Communist society stagnated during the 1960s and '70s, as the economy wobbled to the brink; we also see how Western observers, from academic experts to CIA analysts, made wildly optimistic estimates of Moscow's economic and political strength. Just weeks before the U.S.S.R.disappeared from the earth, scholars were confidently predicting the survival of the Soviet Union. But in underscoring the rot and repression, he also notes that the Communist state did not necessarily have to fall when it did, and he examines the many factors behind the collapse (the pressure fromReagan's Star Wars arms program, for instance, and ethnic nationalism). Some of these same problems, he finds, continue to shape the future of Russia and the other successor states.Only now, in the rubble of this lost empire, are we coming to grips with just how wrong our assumptions about the U.S.S.R. had been. In The Dream That Failed, an internationally renowned historian provides a new understanding of the Soviet experience, from the rise of Communism to its suddenfall. The result of years of research and reflection, it sheds fresh light on a central episode in our turbulent century. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)947.084History and Geography Europe Russia and eastern Europe [and formerly Finland] Russian & Slavic History by Period 1855- 1917-1953 ; Communist periodClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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