In this book Anthony Heywood reassesses Bolshevik attitudes towards economic modernization and foreign economic relations during the early Soviet period. Based on hitherto unused Russian and Western archives, he examines an extraordinary decision made in March 1920 to import vast quantities of railway equipment. The book argues that under War Communism and the NEP railway modernization was vital to a strategy of rapid economic modernization, and provides the first detailed case study of the government's import policy. Following the histories of the principal contracts, it analyses Soviet foreign trade as a means to tackle domestic economic challenges. This book provides readers with a new perspective on Soviet economic development, and reveals the scale of Bolshevik business dealings with the capitalist West immediately after the Revolution.

This book is based on the premise that the foreign policy of any country is heavily influenced by a society's evolving notions of itself. Applying his analysis to Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, the author argues that national identity is an ever-changing concept, influenced by internal and external events, and by the manipulation of a polity's collective memory. The interaction of the narrative of a society and its foreign policy is therefore paramount. This is especially the case in East-Central Europe, where political institutions are weak, and social coherence remains subject to the vagaries of the concept of nationhood. Ilya Prizel's study will be of interest to students of nationalism, as well as of foreign policy and politics in East-Central Europe.

In this book, first published in 1997, Kazimierz Z. Poznanski offers an integrated study of institutional change in the Polish economy since 1971. He examines the economic peak of the communist phase, the decline of the system, and the post-communist transition since 1989. Taking his analytical framework from evolutionary economics, he provides a complete re-evaluation of conventional views of communist economies and the post-communist transition. The book presents the communist economy as subject to major changes, particularly due to political pressures, and interprets its economic difficulties as related to underlying political decay. The economic 'shock therapy' of 1990 is seen as very much a continuation of earlier trends and pressures, which has led to probably an even deeper, though brief, economic collapse. This book will be of interest to economists and political scientists concerned with institutional transitions, as well as to students of East European and post-Soviet studies.

In this book Mark Harrison rebuilds and analyses the Soviet economy's wartime statistical record, examining its prewar size and composition, and wartime changes in GNP, employment, the defence burden, and the role of foreign aid. Complementing classic long-run growth studies, the book compares the Soviet experience with that of other great powers. It emphasises the severity of current costs and capital losses arising from the war, which had a negative effect on GNP that persisted well after the end of the war. The results are based on a comprehensive analysis of hitherto closed official documents, shedding light on the dimensions of the Soviet war effort, the comparative economics of the war, and its long-term impact on the Soviet economy.

Poland was a problematic issue for the Big Powers throughout the Second World War. For Britain, Poland was a major stumbling block in British-Soviet relations as Polish-Soviet territorial disputes clashed with the needs of the British-Soviet-United States alliance. As the Polish government-in-exile attempted to obtain a guarantee of British support, and many thousands of Polish troops fought for the British cause, the perception grew that the Churchill government had a debt to pay. Ultimately, however, it was a debt which Britain could not discharge because of its dependence on Soviet participation in the war. In this book Anita Prazmowska looks at British policies from the point of view of wartime strategy, relating this to Polish government expectations and policies. She describes a tragic situation where Polish soldiers were trapped between the grandiose and unrealistic plans of their government and the harsh realities of a war which they fought with no prospect of a satisfactory outcome for them or their country.

In this 1994 book Graeme Gill traces the disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. Based principally on the contemporary Soviet press, the book to follows the debates in the party over the implications of Gorbachev's reforms and how the party should respond to them. It is an in-depth analysis of the institutional dynamics of a party under pressure. When it came under challenge and it could no longer use the weapon of suppression, the party was unable to mount a serious defence of its position and role. Confronted from the top by Gorbachev's call to reform itself and by his changes to the political arena, and from the bottom by new political forces taking advantage of that arena, the party's unity collapsed and with it any sense of purpose or possibility of survival.

This book seeks to understand the evolution of Soviet policy towards the countries of South Asia, the regional constraints and policy opportunities which influenced the policy process in Moscow, and the relationship between Soviet perceptions and policy objectives. The author divides Soviet foreign policy into three aspects: a perceptual aspect in which assessment of the regional and international environment occurs; a formulative aspect in which aims and strategies are developed; and an implementation aspect. The book analyses Soviet policy objectives and instruments in distinct historical phases: 1970–1978, which covers the Indo-Pakistani War and bilateral relations; 1979–1985, which covers the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and and its impact on regional politics; and 1985 to the present which examines the Gorbachev era and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This book provides an economic historian's perspective on major questions that confront all students of Russian history: how stable were the economic and administrative structures of late-imperial Russia, and how well prepared was Russia for war in 1914? The decade following the Russo-Japanese War witnessed profound changes in the political system and in the industrial economy. The regime faced challenges to its authority from industrialists, caught in the throes of recession, and from parliamentary critics of tsarist administration. Peter Gatrell provides a comprehensive account of the attempts made by government and business to confront these challenges, examining the organisation and performance of a key industry and showing how decisions were reached about the allocation of resources, and the far-reaching consequences these decisions entailed.

When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they believed that under socialism the family would 'wither away.' They envisioned a society in which communal dining halls, daycare centres, and public laundries would replace the unpaid labour of women in the home. Yet by 1936 legislation designed to liberate women from their legal and economic dependence had given way to increasingly conservative solutions aimed at strengthening traditional family ties and women's reproductive role. This book explains the reversal, focusing on how women, peasants, and orphans responded to Bolshevik attempts to remake the family, and how their opinions and experiences in turn were used by the state to meet its own needs.

In this 1992 book Professor Peter Rutland analyses the role played by regional and local organs of the Soviet Communist Party in economic management from 1970 to 1990. Using a range of political and economic journals, newspapers and academic publications, he examines interventions in the construction industry, energy, transport, consumer goods and agriculture. Rutland argues that party interventions hindered rather than assisted the search for efficiency in the Soviet economy, and repeated attempts to introduce more economically rational management methods failed to alter these traditional patterns of party intervention. He further demonstrates how as the Soviet economy matured and grew more complex over the last three decades, party interventions became increasingly out of tune with the needs of the economy. Yet even the calls for radical reform of the economy since 1985 were not accompanied by any decisive changes in this pattern of party intervention; this, argues Peter Rutland, casts serious doubts on the political feasibility of economic reform in a Soviet-type system.

This 1992 book is a comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Filtzer examines the main features of labour policy, shop-floor relations between workers and managers, and the position of women workers. He argues that the main concern of labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This 'de-Stalinization' had to be carried out without undermining the power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term decline into economic stagnation. The labour problems under Khrushchev are shown to be the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and his ill-fated perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.

This book was first published in 1992. For decades Yugoslavia had been developing its own model of socialism based on workers' self-management and the increasing use of the market mechanism. As a result, many scholars view the Yugoslav economy differently from other socialist systems. In this book, Dr Milica Uvalic demonstrates how some of the fundamental features of the Yugoslav economy have remained similar to those characterising other socialist economies. Dr Uvalic focuses on theoretical and empirical issues related to investment in Yugoslavia since 1965. She examines investment policies, sources of finance, macroeconomic performance, enterprise incentives, and current property reforms in relation to Western theory on investment behaviour in the labour-managed firm and Kornai's theory on socialist economies. In line with Kornai's theory, the author argues that investment reforms have not led to substantially changed enterprise behaviour, which illustrates the limited results to be expected from partial reforms in a socialist economy. The fundamental problems in Yugoslavia are thus generic to socialist economic systems, rather that the specific characteristic of self-management.

With the signing of the Moscow Treaty in 1970, West German-Soviet relations came to the forefront of world politics. Two decades later, the historic opening of the Berlin Wall and German reunification once again focused world attention on the Federal Republic's relations with the USSR. This book explores the development of this relationship from the perspective of West Germany. Dr Avril Pittman outlines the main events after the Second World War and then focuses on four issues central to this relationship in the 1970s and early 1980s. She explores family reunification and emigration rights for ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union; the central role of Berlin and the reasons why the city persisted as a serious bilateral problem; the triangular relations between West Germany, the Soviet Union and East Germany; and the significance of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan which led to a sharp deterioration in East-West relations.

In the early 1920s the Bolsheviks, who were overwhelmingly urban, proletarian, and Russian, believed that rapid industrialization would dissolve the non-Russian national identities and create a solid base of support for the new political order. By the end of the decade, however, the social changes initiated by rapid economic development strengthened national assertiveness. This book analyzes the precarious relationship between Soviet legitimacy-building and the consequences of rapid industrial development in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the most populous non-Russian republic in the USSR, during the 1920s and 1930s. The author shows how the interplay between industrialization, urbanization, and Soviet preferential policies produced a modern, urban Ukrainian identity. This, he argues, explains why the Stalinist leadership changed its course on the nationality question in the 1930s and gave precedence to the Russians in the USSR.

How do Soviet politicians rise to power? How are national and regional regimes formed? How are conflicting political interests brought together as policies are developed in the Soviet Union? In Patronage and Politics in the USSR, first published in 1991, Professor John Willerton offers major insights into the patronage networks that have dominated elite mobility, regime formation, and governance in the Soviet Union during the past twenty-five years. Using the biographical and career details of over two thousand national leaders and regional officials in Azerbaijan and Lithuania, John Willerton traces the patron-client relations underlying recruitment, mobility, and policymaking. He explores the strategies of power consolidation and coalition building used by Soviet chief executives since 1964 as well as the institutional links and policy outcomes that have resulted from network politics. The author also assesses the manner and extent to which leaders in politically stable and less stable settings, spanning different national cultural contexts, have relied upon patronage networks to consolidate power and to govern. Finally, Professor Willerton explores how, in a period of dramatic change, patron-client networks may have given way to institutionalised interest groups and political parties.

This 1991 book makes an important contribution to the evaluation of the origins of Stalinism. Although it is widely acknowledged by Western scholars that the Soviet grain crisis of 1927–8 and Stalin's Siberian tour of January 1928 were crucial factors in the decision to abandon the New Economic Policy (NEP) and return to a more ideologically rigid policy of collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, studies have hitherto concentrated on the role of leading personalities and 'high politics'. In this book, Dr James Hughes presents an in depth examination of the crisis of the NEP from the regional perspective of Siberia and analyses the events and pressures 'from below', at the grassroots level of Soviet society. Using publications of the Siberian party and statistical investigations of the countryside, Dr Hughes offers insights into several largely uncharted features of the Soviet system in these years.

In this book, Iliana Zloch-Christy analyses the problems of Eastern Europe's convertible currency external debt situation and its impact on the financing of East-West trade in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This book, published in 1991, is a continuation of Dr Zloch Christy's Debt Problems of Eastern Europe (1987) and is the first study of the complexities of East-West trade and finance in this period. The author addresses four main issues. First, she examines market-oriented reforms in Eastern Europe's economic system and the changes that took place in East-West political relations. Dr Zloch-Christy then assesses whether convertible currency debt problems are an inherent part of the economic development of Eastern Europe, and if the problems are region-wide, and she discusses the strategies adopted to deal with them. She continues by exploring the extent to which the problems which arose from indebtedness affected the financing of East-West trade. Finally, the author assesses medium- and long-term debt prospects at this time, both for Eastern Europe as a whole and for each country within the CMEA.

In this important 1991 study of Soviet Jewry, Yaacov Ro'i examines the cultural, social, political and international context of the movement for emigration, from the establishment of the state of Israel to the outbreak of the Six Day War. A discussion of the lives of Soviet Jews, based upon oral testimony, shows how Jewish self-awareness arose as a product of the Holocaust, of the founding of the State of Israel, and of popular antisemitism and Soviet policy, and how local groups developed in clandestine conditions to sustain Jewish cultural interests. The author also analyses the campaign conducted in the West on behalf of Soviet Jewish rights as a whole and emigration in particular. By 1967 Soviet Jewish efforts to maintain even a minimal Jewish existence seemed doomed to constant frustration, and most nationalistically minded Jews accepted that the only way of fulfilling their aspirations was to emigrate to Israel.

The Solidarity movement of the early 1980s not only triggered a transformation in Polish society, it forced a fundamental reconsideration of the nature of socialism throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Seen as one of the most important social movements of the twentieth century, Michael Kennedy develops a theoretical conception of Soviet-type societies by analysing Solidarity's significance. He explains the background to the nature of the conflict between Solidarity and the authorities and considers the implications of Solidarity's struggle for the theory of the Soviet-type system's reproduction and transformation. Then, the internal constitution of Solidarity in terms of gender and, in particular, cross-class alliances is examined, which is followed by the implications of his analysis both for understanding perestroika in the Soviet Union and more generally for reformulating a critical sociology of Soviet-type societies.

India was the Soviet Union's most important trading partner among the less developed countries (LDCs) and the largest recipient of Soviet aid to non-socialist LDCs. Similarly the Soviet Union is one of India's largest trade partners. In this 1991 book, Santosh Mehrotra presents a comprehensive study of this trading relationship and the transfer of technology from the Soviet Union. He begins by outlining Indian economic strategy since the 1950s and the role of Soviet and East European technical assistance. Part II examines Soviet technological transfer to India since 1955. The final chapters analyse Indo-Soviet trade in the 1970s and 1980s, covering payment arrangements and bilateral trading. The book is an exhaustive analysis of economic relations between an industrialised planned economy and a developing market economy. It will therefore become essential reading for students and specialists of development economics and international relations as well as for government and institutional economists in international trade and finance.