On the political economy of the early transition to postsocialism, see Fewsmith, Joseph, Dilemmas of Reform in China: Political Conflict and Economic Debate (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); Naughton, Barry, Growing out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and his influential textbook, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006 [updated edition forthcoming]). See also Riskin, Carl, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development Since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). A leading government economic advisor throughout the era, Jinglian, Wu, has also written a helpful survey: Understanding and Interpreting Chinese Economic Reform (Mason, OH: Thomson Higher Education, 2005).

The abandonment of the state-dominated economy and reestablishment of markets has had many critics on the left. See Hart-Landsberg, Martin and Burkett, Paul, China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005). These criticisms were often leveled concurrently with the new policies. See, for instance, Chossudovsky, Michel, Towards Capitalist Restoration? Chinese Socialism After Mao (London: Macmillan, 1986), and the writings of Hinton, William, especially The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978–1989 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).

For a thorough critique of the myth of a Deng-initiated “reform era,” which nonetheless emphasizes the top-down origins of the changes, see the work jointly written by the leading authorities on elite politics in Mao and transitional eras, Teiwes, Frederick and Sun, Warren, especially Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform: Initial Steps Toward a New Chinese Countryside, 1976–1981 (New York: Routledge, 2015) and The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007).

For a bottom-up interpretation of the transition to the market economy that emphasizes unauthorized decollectivization rather than experiments by regional and local leaders, see Zhou, Kate Xiao, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). This view has been popularized by Dikötter, Frank in The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Studies of the rural transformation that acknowledge the impact of local officials include Unger, Jonathan, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). Long-term case studies similarly demonstrate the critical role of local officials. See, for instance, Friedman, Edward, Pickowicz, Paul G. and Selden, Mark, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), and Blecher, Marc and Shue, Vivienne, Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 63–85.

The best-known proponent of the Golden Age of small-scale private enterprise in the 1980s is Huang, Yasheng, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a thorough critique, see Andreas, Joel, “A Shanghai Model?,” New Left Review 65 (Oct.–Nov. 2010). Another study that downplays the role of the state in the economic transformation is Nee, Victor and Opper, Sonja, Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For a balanced assessment of the relationship between TVEs and the state, see Oi, Jean C., Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

The best academic studies of getihu were published by social scientists who observed the implementation of the policies during the 1980s. The most influential is the work by Solinger, Dorothy J., especially Chinese Business Under Socialism: The Politics of Domestic Commerce, 1949–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For a helpful overview of the specific policy changes – and the range of attitudes toward them – in the early development of getihu, see Solinger, Dorothy J., “Commerce: The Petty Private Sector and the Three Lines on the Early 1980s,” in Solinger, Dorothy J. (ed.), Three Visions of Chinese Socialism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), 73–111. Particularly valuable for its use of interviews conducted in the early 1980s is Yudkin, Marcia, Making Good: Private Business in Socialist China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1986). For the implementation in a smaller town, see Bruun, Ole, Business and Bureaucracy in a Chinese City: An Ethnography of Private Business Households in Contemporary China (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992).

Sociologist Gold, Thomas has written several articles on getihu based on personal observation. See, for instance, “Urban Private Business and China’s Reforms,” in Baum, Richard (ed.), Reform and Reaction in Post-Mao China: The Road to Tiananmen (New York: Routledge, 1991), 84–103. Likewise, scholar-journalist Schell, Orville’s To Get Rich Is Glorious (New York: Pantheon, 1984) captures the Zeitgeist of the early transition and is based on extensive interviews.

Finally, China’s first generation of postsocialist entrepreneurs has spawned many Chinese popular works and biographies of success stories. See the collection reprinted in Lingxu, Wang (ed.), Ziyou guodu: gongshang getihu shenghuo jishi [A Land of Freedom: A Record of the Business getihu Economy] (Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1993).

Human development, its meaning and its measurement are discussed in every annual Human Development Report (HDR) issued by the United Nations Development Programme since the first one appeared in 1990. In addition, each report focuses on a particular aspect of human development. These can be found at the HDR web site, hdr.undp.org/en. Since 1997, a national HDR for China has been issued every few years by UNDP China, and these are available at www.cn.undp.org/content/china/en/home/library/human_development.html?rightpar_publicationlisting_7_start=3. The first one, for 1997, contains a broad survey of human development in China to that date.

There is a vast literature on the critique of central planning and the feasibility of market socialism. One convenient summary of this long debate can be found in Levy, D. M. and Peart, S. J., “Socialist Calculation Debate,” in Durlauf, S. N. and Blume, L. E. (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edn. (Basingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). An introduction to the way central planning was done in China from the 1950s to the early 1980s can be found in Perkins, D. H., “The Centrally Planned Command Economy (1949–1984),” in Chow, G. and Perkins, D. H. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Economy (London and New York, Routledge, 2014), 41–54, and online at www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315767475.ch3#sec3_2. The deterioration of central planning under Mao Zedong is discussed in Riskin, C., “Neither Plan nor Market: Mao’s Political Economy,” in Joseph, W. A., Wong, C. and Zweig, D. (eds.), New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 133–52.

The most comprehensive introduction to China’s evolving economy of the reform period is Naughton, B.’s The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Look for the appearance of a thoroughly revised second edition, which is in press at this writing. Chow, G. C.’s China’s Economic Transformation, 3rd edn. (Oxford and Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), touches usefully and briefly on many different aspects of China’s economy, as well as on technical issues (e.g., ch. 6.2 “Dynamic Properties of the Multiplier-Accelerator Model”).

Poverty alleviation and the reduction of economic inequality are two core components of human development. The work of the China Household Income Project has thrown light on both topics. See Li, S., Sato, H. and Sicular, T. (eds.), Rising Inequality in China: Challenges to a Harmonious Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Gustafsson, B., Li, S. and Sicular, T. (eds.), Inequality and Public Policy in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Khan, A. R. and Riskin, C., Inequality and Poverty in China in The Age of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Riskin, C., Zhao, R. and Li, S. (eds), China’s Retreat from Equality: Income Distribution and Economic Transition (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001). A new book from this project, discussing the results of the 2013 survey of household income and related topics in China, is currently (August 2016) being prepared.

The World Bank has also contributed to the understanding of poverty and inequality in China, especially work by M. Ravallion and S. Chen. See, for example, Ravallion, M., “An Emerging New Form of Social Protection in 21st Century China,” in Fan, S., Kanbur, R., Wei, S.-J and Zhang, X., Oxford Companion to the Economics of China (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 441–45.

Demographic aspects of China’s human development are insightfully discussed in Wang, F., Gu, B. and Cai, Y., “The End of China’s One-Child Policy,” Studies in Family Planning 47, 1 (2016), 83–86. The enormous internal migration of workers from poorer rural areas to coastal cities and the problem of the population registration system are discussed by Davin, D., Internal Migration in Contemporary China (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), and Chan, K. W., “Internal Labor Migration in China: Trends, Geography and Policies,” in United Nations Population Division, Population Distribution, Urbanization, Internal Migration and Development: An International Perspective (New York: United Nations Publications, 2012), 81–102. See Chan, K. W. and Buckingham, W., “Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?,” China Quarterly 195 (2008), 582–606, while Charlotte Goodburn considers more recent reforms in “The End of the Hukou System? Not Yet,” University of Nottingham, China Policy Institute Policy Paper 2 (2014), at www.nottingham.ac.uk/cpi/documents/policy-papers/cpi-policy-paper-2014-no-2-goodburn.pdf.

An excellent summary of the evolution in healthcare policy and status in China can be found in Hsiao, W. C., “Correcting Past Health Policy Mistakes,” Daedalus 143, 2 (special issue on “Growing Pains in a Rising China”) (Spring 2014), 53–68. The same issue of Daedalus includes an informative discussion by M. W. Frazier of recent social policy in general: “State Schemes or Safety Nets? China’s Push for Universal Coverage,” 69–80. Changing policy on education and the intergenerational transmission of education are closely discussed in J. Knight, T. Sicular and Y. Ximing, “Educational Inequality in China: The Intergenerational Dimension,” in Li, Sato and Sicular (eds.), Rising Inequality in China, 142–96.

The problem of environmental degradation in China has been much written about. A good place to start might be Edmonds, R. L., “The Environment in the People’s Republic of China 50 Years on,” China Quarterly 159 (special issue on “The People’s Republic of China After 50 Years”) (Sep. 1999), 640–49. A Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder, “China’s Environmental Crisis,” can be found at CFR.org. It includes suggestions for further reading. Economy, E. C., The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, 2nd edn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), is a useful comprehensive discussion. The China Human Development Report (CHDR) for 2009–10 has as its theme, “Sustainable Future: Towards a Low-Carbon Economy and Sustainable Society,” while the 2013 CHDR deals with the topic of “Sustainable Cities.” They can both be found at the UNDP-China website. A relatively upbeat account of China’s efforts to “green” its energy production and curtail greenhouse gases can be found in Matthews, J., “China’s Continuing Renewable Energy Revolution – Latest Trends in Electric Power Generation,” Asia-Pacific Journal 14, 17, 6 (1 Sep. 2016).

China’s recent rise as a regional and global geopolitical power can be traced back to its regional centrality in the early modern world. For a discussion of this centrality and its loss in 1800–1950 as the background to China’s contemporary resurgence, see Hamashita, Takeshi, China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives, eds. Selden, Mark and Grove, Linda (London: Routledge, 2008), and Arrighi, Giovanni, Hamashita, Takeshi and Selden, Mark (eds.), The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008).

For the dynamics of the rise of the East Asian Tigers during the Cold War as a prelude to China’s economic boom, see Haggard, Stephen, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

For the nature of contemporary China’s state-capitalist economic boom, see Naughton, Barry, Growing out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Naughton, Barry, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Lardy, Nicholas R., Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2014); Dickson, Bruce J., Wealth into Power: The Chinese Communist Party’s Embrace of China’s Private Sector (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Hsing, You-tien, Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Shirk, Susan L., The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Selden, Mark, The Political Economy of Chinese Development (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).

For the nature of state-capitalist transformation and the communist party-state’s handling of challenges from below and the nature of state-capitalist transition, see Dickson, Bruce, The Party’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival (London: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lee, Ching Kwan, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Goodman, David S. G., Class in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014); Perry, Elizabeth and Selden, Mark (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, 3rd edn. rev. and enlarged (London: Routledge, 2010); Heilmann, Sebastian and Perry, Elizabeth J. (eds.), Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Solinger, Dorothy, States’ Gains, Labor’s Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980–2000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Fewsmith, Joseph, The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Wright, Teresa, Accepting Authoritarianism: State–Society Relations in China’s Reform Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Huang, Ya-sheng, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

For China’s increasing influence in the global economy and global politics (but also the limits of Chinese growth), see Hung, Ho-fung, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Brautigam, Deborah, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gallagher, Kevin, The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of Latin American Industrialization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Fang, Cai and Yang, Du (eds.), The China Population and Labor Yearbook, vol. I, The Approaching Lewis Turning Point and Its Policy Implications (Leiden: Brill, 2009).For nationalist upsurge amidst China’s geopolitical rise, see Zhao, Suisheng, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Gries, Peter Hays, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

As of this writing, there is no book-length study that examines environmental history and resource management across all major communist regimes in a comparative framework. The bulk of scholarship focuses on the Soviet Union, and here a serviceable broad-stroke overview may be found in Josephson, Paul, Dronin, Nicolai, Mnatsakanian, Ruben, Cherp, Aleh, Efremenko, Dmitry and Larin, Vladislav, An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For an in-depth analysis of Soviet environmental policies from 1917 to the First Five-Year Plan era, see Weiner, Douglas’s Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). That work and its sequel, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), also explain the diverse roots and significance of nature protection activism in the Soviet context, focusing foremost on the struggle around protected territories (zapovedniki). This struggle is also treated in the work of an activist, Shtil’mark, Feliks Robertovich, The History of Russian Zapovedniks, 1895–1995, trans. Harper, G. E. (Edinburgh: Russian Nature Press, 2003). Another fine historical work is Brain, Stephen C.’s Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalin’s Environmentalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), which puts Stalin’s forest-protection measures into context in addition to documenting a unique, peasant-oriented Russian approach to forest management.

Environmental histories of Soviet geographical regions for the post-Khrushchev period have thus far focused on the Arctic, researched by Josephson, Paul, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Central Asia, whose various late Soviet agricultural problems are analyzed in chapters by Marc Elie and Julia Obertreis in Breyfogle, Nicholas (ed.), Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).

In addition to Weiner’s A Little Corner of Freedom, environmental activism in Russia, especially among university students, is the subject of the opus of Yanitsky, Oleg Nikolaevich, notably his Russian Environmentalism: Leading Figures, Facts, Opinions (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyje Otnoshenija Publishing House, 1993). Environmental activism as a vehicle for nationalist struggles is addressed by Dawson, Jane I.’s Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

More policy-oriented works have chronicled and analyzed Soviet resource and environmental policies and problems of the post-Khrushchev final decades. These include Volf’son, Ze’ev (Komarov, Boris), The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union, trans. Hale, Michael and Hollander, Joe (London: Pluto Press, [1980]), originally published as Unichtozhenie prirody, Obostrenie ekologicheskogo krizisa v SSSR (Frankfurt-am-Main: Posev, 1978); Goldman, Marshall’s The Spoils of Progress: Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972); Pryde, Philip R.’s Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Feshbach, Murray and Friendly, Alfred Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Feshbach, Murray’s Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995); Lemeshev, Mikhail, Vlast’ vedomstv – ekologicheskii infarkt (Moscow: Progress, 1989), translated into English as Bureaucrats in Power – Ecological Collapse (Moscow: Progress, 1990); Petersen, D. J., Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Boulder: Westview Press and RAND, 1993); and Jancar, Barbara’s Environmental Management in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987).

A number of works focus on one resource. Thus, Barr, Brenton M. and Braden, Kathleen E. in their The Disappearing Russian Forest: A Dilemma in Soviet Resource Management (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988) focus on post-1960 overharvesting. For a broad look at Soviet nuclear problems, the reader is directed to Yemelyanenkov, Alexander, The Sredmash Archipelago (Moscow: IPPNW/SLMK, 2000), and Schmid, Sonja D., Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), while an excellent social, political and technological dissection of the Chernobyl accident may be found in Medvedev, Zhores A., The Legacy of Chernobyl (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Brown, Kate’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) compares the social and epidemiological ramifications of the Soviet and American plutonium production programs.

Although the question of ideology is raised in many of the works cited here, DeBardeleben, Joan’s The Environment and Marxism-Leninism: The Soviet and East German Experience (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985) compares regime and intelligentsia environmental discourse in those states to ask whether official ideology could accommodate a more environmentally sensitive approach to development, although, as Fehér, Ferenc, Heller, Agnes and Markús, György, Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), argue, official dogma may not be the actual operating software of Soviet regimes.

On Eastern Europe, see DeBardeleben, Joan, To Breathe Free: Eastern Europe’s Environmental Crisis (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991), and on activism specifically see Hicks, Barbara, Environmental Politics in Poland: A Social Movement Between Regime and Opposition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and Jancar-Webster, Barbara (ed.), Environmental Action in Eastern Europe: Responses to Crisis (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).

Concerning the People’s Republic of China, the Mao period is examined in Shapiro, Judith’s lively Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and in Pietz, David, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), while for a comparison with the Deng Xiaoping years see Sanders, Richard, “The Political Economy of Environmental Protection: Lessons of the Mao and Deng Years,” Third World Quarterly 20, 6 (Dec. 1999), 1201–14. Finally, there is one monograph devoted to the environmental history of Communist Cuba, that of Diaz-Briquets, Sergio and Pérez-López, Jorge, Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

Over the past decades the aftermath of communism in Europe has been discussed widely. Initially, the historical optimism of such public intellectuals as Timothy Garton Ash or Francis Fukuyama had a strong impact on the perception of 1989–91. Right after the revolution a master narrative about peaceful change and embrace of a liberal order was established that has long prevailed among the Western public. This normative perspective was also echoed in political science (“transition to democracy”) where yet another wave of global democratization was studied. The term “third wave of democratization” was coined by the otherwise more skeptical Samuel P. Huntington and proved influential: see Huntington, Samuel P., The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Transformation studies argued that urbanization, education and the rise of a middle class favored the development of a liberal order, that the United States as well as the European Union served as models and that local “snowball effects” could be observed. For an overview, see e.g. Kollmorgen, Raj, Merkel, Wolfgang and Wagener, Hans-Jürgen (eds.), Handbuch Transformationsforschung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015). Implicitly, this approach suggested that new political and social systems emerged after 1989–91 and that they could be approached without a deeper understanding of the old regime. While individual studies may still be valuable, the approach taken in the 1990s should today be historicized and analyzed as a product of that particular time.

Few studies have explicitly tackled the difficult question of how revolutionary upheaval and Stalinism still shape (post)communist societies today. A possible exception is foreign policy, where a longue durée perspective has a lengthy tradition. See e.g. Legvold, Robert (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century and the Shadow of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). A model for such a perspective is Dobson, Miriam’s study of Gulag returnees that explains how the release of millions from the camps impacted on Russian society: Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reform After Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Only in hindsight do we come to understand the significance of the spreading of violent and criminal culture from the camps into society. Other such studies, however, are still lacking. Therefore we do not yet understand the full political as well as cultural impact of decades of mass violence on postcommunist societies. Psychological terms such as “trauma” are merely descriptive and add little to our understanding of the historical phenomenon.

The past decades have produced a number of books that have marked the historicization of the transformation and that may be read as contributions to the debate about legacies of communist power. Verdery, Catherine was among the first to connect the old order and the new regimes: See her What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Kotkin, Stephen’s monographs about the post-Soviet space and Eastern Europe serve as an introduction to the debate: Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009). In cooperation with Mark Beissinger, Kotkin has also edited a volume that was the first attempt to systematically explore the legacies of communism in several countries: Beissinger, Mark R. and Kotkin, Stephen (eds.), Historical Legacies of Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gel’man, Vladimir has written a comprehensive history of postcommunist politics in Russia, Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), while both Kenney, Padraic, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe Since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2006), and Ther, Philipp, Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent. Eine Geschichte des neoliberalen Europa (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), offer comparative introductions on the recent history of Eastern and Central Europe. Exploring the legacy of Deng, Ezra F. Vogel provides a similar overview for the Chinese case: Vogel, Ezra F., Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). To understand the social structure as well as the values that prevail in postcommunist societies the sociology of Finn Sivert Nielsen, Yuri Levada and Boris Dubin as well as the work of Svetlana Alexievich present milestones of research on the post-Soviet space. See Nielsen, Finn Sivert, The Eye of the Whirlwind: Russian Identity and Soviet Nation-Building: Quests for Meaning in a Soviet Metropolis (Oslo: Department of Social Anthropology, 1987); Levada, Yuri, Sovetskii prostoi chelovek. Opyt sotsial’nogo portreta na rubezhe 90-kh [Regular Soviet Man: Social Experiences at the Beginning of the 1990s] (Moscow: Mirovoi okean, 1991); Dubin, Boris (ed.), Rossiia nulevykh. Politicheskaia kul’tura, istoricheskaia pamiat’, povsednevnaia zhizn’ [Russia in the 2000s: Political Culture, Historical Memory, Everyday Life] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011); and Alexievich, Svetlana, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (London: Random House, 2015). In more recent years, interest in the study of postcommunism has been stimulated by the rise of China and by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as well as by the comparative study of authoritarian regimes that characterize most postcommunist states: Diamond, Larry, Plattner, Marc F. and Walker, Christopher (eds.), Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

The Russian Revolution was at the heart of Soviet and Western historical research from the beginning of Soviet-style communism until its very end on 31 December 1991. Writing about the revolution always meant taking an ethical-political stance and situating oneself within the bipolar politics of the Cold War. In the post-Soviet period the revolution became depoliticized – and insignificant: The center of research gravity moved first to Stalinism during the 1930s, then to the war years, later to the postwar period, and more recently to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods. Only as the centenary of the revolution came closer was there a spate of new books and articles on the Russian Revolution with the crescendo likely reaching its height in 2017 itself. The memory of 1917 – collective and group memories, and the politics and symbols of memory, as well as speculative forecasts about what these variegated practices of commemorating the revolution might look like in 2017 – have yet to become the subject of monographic research, although the first journalistic treatments have appeared, most of them online.

With the approaching centenary, new surveys of the historiography of the Russian Revolution and its legacy for communism have been published. In a 2015 special issue of the journal Kritika, Smith, S. A. provides a state-of-the-art overview, forcefully arguing for a recovery of the central category of class that typified all of the historical actors in 1917 and more so than in any other revolution – this category had moved out of sight during the new cultural history of the Russian Revolution: “The Historiography of the Russian Revolution 100 Years on,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, 4 (2015), 733–49. In the same issue Kolonitsky, Boris, arguably the most important Russophone author writing on the Russian Revolution today, criticizes the preponderance of memoiristic accounts of the revolution and thus the lapse into the main interpretations of the historical actors and the political currents they embodied. He also bemoans the emphasis on elites that comes with the rise of the memoir genre in Russian post-Soviet history-writing of the revolution – less powerful, less literate people thus move out of focus: “On Studying the 1917 Revolution: Autobiographical Confessions and Historiographical Predictions,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, 4 (2015), 751–68. Other influential surveys of the historiography written from the perspective of cultural history (and after the end of the Soviet Union) include Kotkin, Stephen, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70, 2 (Jun. 1998), 384–425, and, from the perspective of social history (and during the early 1980s before the end of the Soviet Union) by Suny, Ronald, “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical Review 88, 1 (Feb. 1983), 31–52. The historiographical sections in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), Wade, Rex A., The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Smith, S. A., The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), still remain excellent places to start. Acton, Edward, Cherniaev, Vladimir and Rosenberg, William (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (London: Arnold, 1997), contains superb surveys of Russian-language work as well.

The general historiography of the Russian Revolution over the past five or so decades was for the most part dominated by social-historical studies that downplayed the role of high politics and individuals: e.g. Haimson, Leopold’s key essays from 1964 and 1955 republished as Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905–1917: Two Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1968), and the many works by Rabinowitch, Alexander, beginning with Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1968). During the 1990s and 2000s several (partly Lotman- and Geertz-, partly Foucault-inspired) cultural-cum-political histories appeared: Wortman, Richard, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Steinberg, Mark D., Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry 1867–1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Steinberg, Mark D., Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Steinberg, Mark D., Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Holquist, Peter, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and now also Smele, Jonathan, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Holquist’s influential work, especially, has shifted the focus from October to the civil war and more generally from the revolution as an event to longue durée practices such as surveillance that enveloped all of the fighting parties in the civil war, including the Bolshevik Reds and monarchist Whites. Regional studies have expanded since the 1980s – these have been mitigating against the Petrograd-centrism of the historiography and highlighting the complexity and diversity on the ground beyond the major urban centers: Raleigh, Donald J., Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Badcock, Sarah, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Popular, widely read accounts include both the conservative, political history by Richard Pipes and a new social history in which a cast of characters stands in for social groups: Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990); Figes, Orlando, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

Comparative histories of the communist revolutions in Russia and China are far and few between, not least for lack of language competency – Smith, S. A. is the sole exception: Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); but also see the collection by Rosenberg, William G. and Young, Marilyn B. (eds.), Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Most recently comparative and entangled histories of empires include Reynolds, Michael, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); McMeekin, Sean, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); and Sanborn, Joshua A., Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). The centenary itself will furnish synthetic works by master historians of the revolution: Lieven, Dominic, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Smith, S. A., Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Steinberg, Mark D., The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Engelstein, Laura, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

As for the memory of the Russian Revolution, Corney, Frederick’s Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) was a milestone in retracing early Bolshevik commemorative practices, showing that October before the mid 1920s was not a central site of memory and had to be actively implanted in collective memory. More generally on the Putin-era politics of history, especially as relates to the 2007 Filippov textbook, see the articles by Brandenberger, David, Solonari, Vladimir, Mironov, Boris and Zubkova, Elena in the special issue, “Ex Tempore: Toward a New Orthodoxy? The Politics of History in Russia Today,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 4 (2009). On conspirology and cyclical theories of history, see Laruelle, Marlène, “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?,” Russian Review 71, 4 (Oct. 2012), 565–80.

On the general economic record of the socialist governments after 1945, see Bruszt, László, “Postwar Reconstruction and Socio-economic Transformation,” in Kaser, M. C. (ed.), The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919–1975, vol. III, Institutional Change with a Planned Economy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). See also Eichengreen, Barry, The European Economy Since 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945). For theoretical reflections, see Kornai, János, By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.); and Kornai, János, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). On the economic predicament of the GDR and its wider implications, see Maier, Charles S., Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

On “civil society” and the opposition to the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, see Ehrenberg, John, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 173–98; Arato, Andrew, “Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980–1981,” Telos 47 (Spring 1981), 23–47;Cohen, Jean and Arato, Andrew, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Keane, John (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988); Tismaneanu, Vladimir, In Search of Civil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Tismaneanu, Vladimir, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992); as well as essays by Havel, Václav, Michnik, Adam and the US Helsinki Watch Committee, Reinventing Civil Society: Poland’s Quiet Revolution, 1981–1986 (New York: US Helsinki Watch Committee, 1986).

On Western ideas of growth, see Schmelzer, Matthias, The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For discussions of the long inflation of the 1970s, see Lindberg, Leon and Maier, Charles S. (eds.), The Politics of Global Inflation and Stagnation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1987). On the economic impact of the 1970s and its consequences for Soviet-type economies, see Ferguson, Niall, Maier, Charles S., Manela, Erez and Sargent, Daniel S. (eds.), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

For an assessment of the postcommunist economic transition in some East European countries and in Russia, see Roland, Gérard (ed.), Economies in Transition: The Long-Run View (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan in association with the UN University-World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2012). On the Chinese transition, see Vogel, Ezra F., Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).