Books on Soviet Union

[VNHCM]

I am looking for books from socialist-sympathetic perspectives (or at least not rabid anti-communist) explaining:

- Why did Soviet Union collapse
- Life in Soviet republics

Thank you:thumbup1:

[ComradeOm]

Shelia Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism is very good on daily life during the 1930s. Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century is a serviceable single-volume overview of the USSR. Other than that, most of my books are political/economic in nature and largely deal with the early decades

[Lyev]

Hmm, I'm not sure, it's quite general, but J.P Nettl's The Soviet Achievment is not too bad. It is out of print now; I found my copy in a second-hand bookstore, but I also saw another copy of it in my college's library the other day. It deals with the revolution up to about the mid-60s with Khrushchev (it was written when he was still in power). The author is quite well-known. He also wrote a biography on Rosa Luxemburg.

[graymouser]

Well, for an early and thorough Marxist critique of the USSR, there is Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed which looks at the takeover by the bureaucracy and the transformation of Soviet society from the early years to the Stalin period. But that was written in 1937 so it obviously doesn't take everything into account.

Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny's book from 2005, Socialism Betrayed, has an excellent view of the economics of the USSR's failure. It's from a pro-Soviet view (they are ortho-Stalinist members of the Communist Party) but it really goes into considerable depth on what forces arose in Soviet society leading up to the fall.

[KurtFF8]

I highly recommend Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pr/Western-Marxism-and-the-Soviet-Union) that Haymarket Books put out.

I believe it was originally written in the later 80s but has since been updated. It pretty much accounts the various different Western Marxist views on the nature of the USSR and doesn't really "take sides" and actually critiques all of them at the end in a very thoughtful manner.

It may give more insight not only to the USSR but also Marxist analysis of socialism in general

[VNHCM]

Thank you all for the suggestions.

[RedTrackWorker]

Rogovin's work.
And of course a shameless plug for The Life and Death of Stalinism (html and pdf (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/index.html)), which comes out of a theory which specifically predicted the Stalinist systems would suffer serious economic crises and collapse before the traditional capitalist power.

[milk]

A great little book is Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 by David L. Hoffman.

It covers the experiences of ordinary people during the huge migration of peasants into Moscow to participate in the industrialisation drive of the Soviet state, up until the outbreak of the war with German fascism, and consisted of many people who really couldn't have cared less about socialism as understood by representatives of the new state nor the idea of a world proletarian revolution, regardless of whether the Bolsheviks had given up on the latter or not. They reacted to the circumstances they found themselves in and indeed found ways of reshaping and bending them to their own benefit. Even the 'Little Stalins,' assorted industry managers and influential bureaucrats whose positions gave them a chance of a certain amount of material advancement, could be held to ransom by ordinary peasant workers, because even they were not immune from having their attitudes to the building of socialism readjusted elswhere if quotas went unfulfilled. The redundancy of the trade unions as being organs of working class power under the Bolsheviks did eventually have to be revived from their role of merely transmitting state-approved political education and the like, and instead transformed into something else entirely during the industrialisation drive, by pressure placed on local government structures from below, to become centres of state welfare provision for these new industrial workers. Not just a device to keep loyalty and support, as the authorities realised this opportunity and co-opted something that originally wasn't top-down. This was also accompanied by tightly-knit peasant artel activity in workplaces, which had some success, at least early on, in winning for them an easing in their working conditions, considering also that established working class people in urban areas, and who were preferred in the eyes of the industrialising state, were often in conflict with the peasant incomers and wanted to protect their own privileges. All to the detriment of these poorer and often unskilled people.

Not just in Moscow, but elsewhere, those moving into the cities during this period brought peasant-style everyday forms of resistance with them, made use of established informal networks between village and town, that had been in place before the revolution, and preferred them to what the Soviet state could provide, if it could provide help at all, early on in the upheaval created by the Five-Year Plans. Help as in finding accommodation, support with food and money when looking for work, acceptance at a certain factory, all due to village, family and regional associations. Also, they provided their own community protection against "hooliganism" and other forms of anti-social and criminal activity in the poorly-built and poorly-policed worker settlements on the outskirts of cities, and at work ganged up on and beat up Stakhanovites when they tried to stupidly and dangerously raise work norms. But of course they clashed with the native working class of these cities, who had broken their ties with the countryside for some time, were better looked after by the authorities and who looked down on the country bumpkins and saw them as a threat to their own working and living conditions.

[Tablo]

Enjoy! :D

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/index.htm

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/further/further_toc.html