Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition. Essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky
Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition. Essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky
Contributor(s): Tommaso Piffer (Editor), Vladislav Zubok (Editor)
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, History, Political Theory, Governance, Political history
Published by: Central European University Press
Keywords: Totalitarianism;Soviet Union;Politics
and government;Russia;
Summary/Abstract: This book is a tribute to the memory of Victor Zaslavsky (1937–2009), sociologist, émigré from the Soviet Union, Canadian citizen, public intellectual, and keen observer of Eastern Europe.In seventeen essays leading European, American and Russian scholars discuss the theory and the history of totalitarian society with a comparative approach. They revisit and reassess what Zaslavsky considered the most important project in the latter part of his life: the analysis of Eastern European - especially Soviet societies and their difficult “transition” after the fall of communism in 1989–91. The variety of the contributions reflects the diversity of specialists in the volume, but also reveals Zaslavsky’s gift: he surrounded himself with talented people from many different fields and disciplines.In line with Zaslavsky´s work and scholarly method, the book promotes new theoretical and methodological approaches to the concept of totalitarianism for understanding Soviet and East European societies, and the study of fascist and communist regimes in general.
- E-ISBN-13: 978-963-386-132-5
- Print-ISBN-13: 978-963-386-130-1
- Page Count: 442
- Publication Year: 2017
- Language: English
Movement, Formation, and Maintenance in the Soviet Union
Movement, Formation, and Maintenance in the Soviet Union
(Movement, Formation, and Maintenance in the Soviet Union)
- Author(s):Peter Baehr
- Language:English
- Subject(s):History, Political Theory, Governance
- Page Range:19-52
- No. of Pages:34
- Keywords:totalitarianism;Soviet Union;
- Summary/Abstract:A perusal of Victor Zaslavsky’s bibliography shows that his studies of the Soviet Union passed through three discernible phases; although none are severed from the others, each possesses a unique emphasis. The writings collected in The Neo-Stalinist State (1982) are primarily devoted to the USSR during the Brezhnev era, a time of uneasy consolidation or “system-maintenance.” The days of mass terror and ideological fervor were over. Soviet society was undergoing the steady routinization of the founders’ charisma. A kind of quotidian normality existed. But having described this society and Gorbachev’s reforms in detail, and then, in a brief second phase, having explained how it could unwind so quickly along ethnic and national lines), Zaslavsky made a sharp about-face and returned to the time that Arendt made her specialty: the age of Hitler and Stalin’s preeminence. It was not her work that persuaded him to reconsider the concept of totalitarianism. It was new information available in recently opened official archives, coupled to his own scholarly reorientation to the Soviet Union’s most sanguinary period. “For the first time,” he remarked, “comprehensive data concerning the functioning of [the Soviet Union’s] coercive apparatus, the scope of terror and deportations, and, perhaps most important, the true extent of the militarization of [the] Soviet economy and society is available.” It says much about Victor Zaslavsky’s intellectual honesty and wide and deep knowledge of the Soviet Union that he felt compelled to reevaluate his qualms about totalitarianism when new facts called on him to do so.
- Price: 15.30 €
European Liberalism in the Age of Totalitarianisms
European Liberalism in the Age of Totalitarianisms
(European Liberalism in the Age of Totalitarianisms)
- Author(s):Giovanni Orsina
- Language:English
- Subject(s):History, Political Theory, Governance
- Page Range:53-75
- No. of Pages:23
- Keywords:Liberalism;Europe;Totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:This chapter presents some reflections on the fate that awaited the “liberal project” in twentieth-century Europe. Consequently, it addresses how that project’s tormented and incomplete realization mirrored fascist and communist alternatives.
- Price: 10.35 €
Totalitarianism avant la lettre
Totalitarianism avant la lettre
(Totalitarianism avant la lettre)
- Author(s):Vittorio Strada
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:77-90
- No. of Pages:14
- Keywords:USSR;Totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:To say that anti-Stalinism is an ambiguous concept is not to diminish its liberating value within the communist movement, as well as, indirectly, for the world that opposed it. In addition to individual denunciations of Stalin (such as Koestler’s and Silone’s), two major attacks were launched against his system of power. The first was the one by his rival to succeed Lenin, Leon Trotsky. The latter fought against Stalin while still in the Soviet Union, and then, in a more overt and systematic way, after his expulsion from it in 1929. The democratic West provided him with an environment conducive to an open war against the man he believed had betrayed the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin paid him back with boundless violence, which was verbal first, in the form of a campaign of denigration and falsification, and then physical, when he had him assassinated by one of his agents. The second attack—different from the first in both nature and effectiveness, as well as with regard to the historical moment in which it occurred—was launched in the highest echelons of the Soviet Union’s communist power, soon after Stalin’s death, by one of his close collaborators, Nikita Khrushchev, during the 20th Congress of the Communist party.
- Price: 6.30 €
Totalitarianism and Ideological Hubris
Totalitarianism and Ideological Hubris
(Totalitarianism and Ideological Hubris)
- Author(s):Vladimir Tismăneanu
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:91-112
- No. of Pages:22
- Keywords:Totalitarianism;political radicalism
- Summary/Abstract:The main pillars of totalitarianism were the monopolistic party, the ideological utopian project, and the leader. Totalitarianism was also based on direct or indirect terror. The secret police was the instrument that maintained the population in a state of universal fear, distrust, and suspicion. Even if the concept has been criticized, sometimes justifiably, for its neglect of societal components and everyday life under ideocratic regimes, it still has an impressive descriptive force. Totalitarian regimes yearned for the establishment of “perfect societies” and engaged in endless campaigns to achieve their goals. In this chapter, I map out the main features of these new forms of political radicalism, looking for both similarities and differences.
- Price: 9.90 €
From Facts to Words
From Facts to Words
(From Facts to Words)
- Author(s):Emilio Gentile
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:113-138
- No. of Pages:26
- Keywords:totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:Plato counted the farmer-philosopher Myson of Chen among the Seven Sages of Greece, and the Oracle of Delphi declared him one among the wisest of all Greeks. Yet very few traces of his thought survive. Among these rare fragments, one confirms his wisdom: “We should not investigate facts by the light of words, but words by the light of facts.” More than to philosophers, Myson’s maxim ought to be suited to historians, who study the genesis and development of past human experiences, which almost always entail new words and concepts—hence new arguments. These new words are used by the people directly affected in order to name and describe their experiences, and later to pass them down to posterity.
- Price: 11.70 €
Stalin the Statesman
Stalin the Statesman
(Stalin the Statesman)
- Author(s):Vladimir O. Pechatnov
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:141-163
- No. of Pages:23
- Keywords:Stalin;totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:Stalin’s macabre figure has long been a model for the interpretation of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, and of the role that its founders and leaders played in it. For quite some time, starting with the classic works of Hannah Arendt and the other seminal authors of the theory of totalitarianism, this interpretation matured within the confines of the totalitarian paradigm.
- Price: 10.35 €
Stalin’s Dictatorship
Stalin’s Dictatorship
(Stalin’s Dictatorship)
- Author(s):Oleg V. Khlevniuk
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:165-182
- No. of Pages:18
- Keywords:Dictatorship;Stalin;Totalitarianism
- Summary/Abstract:The Stalinist period is the last phase of Soviet history that may be studied with the contribution of significant, if sometimes limited or patchy, archival resources. Investigations carried out from archival records in recent years have yielded remarkable results. The outpouring of information, consisting of previously unpublished documents and research material, has been so profuse that even specialists are finding it hard to keep up. Indeed, the opening of the archives has spurred a change in methodological approaches.
- Price: 8.10 €
The “National Question” in the Soviet Union
The “National Question” in the Soviet Union
(The “National Question” in the Soviet Union)
- Author(s):Andrea Graziosi
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:183-203
- No. of Pages:21
- Keywords:Soviet Union;totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:As his works prove, and as those who knew him remember, Victor Zaslavsky was sensitive with regard to the “national question” in the USSR. Nor could it have been otherwise, given the part this question played in his life. After the war, his mother, a medical officer in Leningrad during the Nazi siege, endured persecution in the dark season of Stalinist “anti-cosmopolitanism.” And he too was barred from carrying out the studies he loved because he was a Jew. Later, his deep knowledge of the country and its diversity—made possible by his work as a mining technician, which he had been forced to pursue because of the barriers placed on his desired path—strengthened his awareness of the importance of the “national question” in the USSR. At the time, a large part of Europe’s left, as well as many specialists of Soviet history and society, preferred to underestimate this issue, or to ignore it altogether.
- Price: 9.45 €
The Katyn Case
The Katyn Case
(The Katyn Case)
- Author(s):Inessa S. Yazhborovskaia
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:205-229
- No. of Pages:25
- Keywords:totalitarianism;Russia;
- Summary/Abstract:The Katyn case has haunted the post–World War II bilateral relations between Russia and Poland, affecting the two countries in different ways. This chapter does not describe the events of Katyn historically,but rather analyze the Katyn discourse or, more precisely, how the issue has been described, internalized, and dealt with in Russia since World War II to the present. I take into account both the macro structure and broader context—that is, the general discourse on Katyn—as well as a number of sublevels (namely, stratifications and specific discourses through which the issue has been articulated in the course of the years).
- Price: 11.25 €
Totalitarianism and Science
Totalitarianism and Science
(Totalitarianism and Science)
- Author(s):David Holloway
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:231-249
- No. of Pages:19
- Keywords:Totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:Nazism and Stalinism constitute the core of the totalitarian experience. The term totalitarianism has been much discussed and much criticized, but it remains useful for distinguishing regimes that sought to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over society. As François Furet has written, “both regimes, and they alone, set in motion the destruction of the civil order by the absolute submission of individuals to the ideology and terror of the party-state.” To put these two regimes into the category of totalitarianism is not to suggest that they were identical or comparable in every way, but rather to indicate that they were different from other authoritarian regimes by virtue of the degree of control they sought to exercise over society and by the pervasive role of ideology and terror in their methods of rule. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the Stalin years were leaders in science, and this naturally prompts the question: What was the relationship between science and totalitarianism?
- Price: 8.55 €
From Fascism to Communism
From Fascism to Communism
(From Fascism to Communism)
- Author(s):Maria Teresa Giusti
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:251-276
- No. of Pages:26
- Keywords:totalitarianism;fascism;communism;
- Summary/Abstract:A Blackshirt’s conversion to communism is the subject of these pages, which aim to follow the personal and political fate of Danilo Ferretti, a restless spirit of fascist Italy. Intensely antibourgeois and anticapitalist, Ferretti pursued politics as revolution, and wanted to build totalitarian popular democracy. His choice to turn his back on fascism and favor the opposite camp, communism, was determined by the time World War II broke out. This reversal was not as unusual as one might think. Many other young fascists found themselves at a crossroads after July 25, 1943, and particularly after the end of the war. Their decisions often diverged. Some remained faithful to fascism, and in 1946 became members of the neo-fascist party (the Italian Socialist Movement; MSI). Others joined the monarchic party, or the Christian Democracy (DC). Finally, many felt it was more consistent with their past to enroll in the political and union organizations of the left, including the Italian Communist Party (PCI), where they sometimes took on important positions.
- Price: 11.70 €
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman
(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman)
- Author(s):Veljko Vujačić
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences
- Page Range:279-308
- No. of Pages:30
- Keywords:Solzhenitsyn;Grossman;Soviet Union;totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:Gregory Freidin argues that in the Soviet Union authorship became the symbolic equivalent of citizenship. The notion of citizenship in this context, however, only partially overlapped with the Western emphasis on formal rights. As Freidin explains, this was because in the Soviet-Russian context the modern roles of the writer as professional and “symbolic citizen” were superimposed on the earlier Orthodox Christian notion of “the holy man’s invocation of a divine calling” whose “preoccupation with ethical and spiritual questions which have no other public forum in Russia except literature becomes inseparable from prophecy or spiritual enlightenment.” As a result “the “modern individualism of literary expression recalls the individuality of sainthood, and the victimization by such a modern rational institution as the political police comes to be identified with a tradition of martyrdom.” This belief in the charismatic power of the author cum holy man-prophet-martyr was shared by the party authorities and the loyal writers with the consequence that literature became “a dynamic force in its own right”; in other words, a social and political factor to be reckoned with.
- Price: 13.50 €
“Without the free word, there are no free people”
“Without the free word, there are no free people”
(“Without the free word, there are no free people”)
- Author(s):Antonella d’Amelia
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:309-325
- No. of Pages:17
- Keywords:Censorship;totalitarianism;
- Summary/Abstract:A fate of death or loss of freedom marks the history of Russian culture: “Beatings, imprisonment, deportation, exile, forced labor, the gallows, the bullet of a carefree duelist—this is but a brief catalogue of the laurels crowning the head of the Russian writer.” Thus noted the exiled poet Vladislav Khodasevich in his 1932 essay, eloquently titled Krovavaia pishcha [Bloody food]. Thinking back on the ordeal suffered by written word in nineteenth-century Russia, he recalls the death sentences commuted to exile in Siberia of Alexander Radishchev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; the deportation to Siberia of Decembrist poets’ Kondraty Ryleyev’s death sentence; the deaths of Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, caused by courtly plotting; the isolation of Pyotr Chaadayev, declared insane because of his philosophical letters; Alexander Herzen’s exile; and many other similar incidents. In the course of the twentieth century, after the revolution, this unfinished list of tsarist cruelties was lengthened and duplicated by the killing or silencing of an equal number of writers and poets. These subsequent instances of violence included Nikolay Gumilyov’s execution and Alexander Blok’s long spiritual agony (1921), the suicides committed after much deliberation by Sergei Yesenin (1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930), Pavel Florensky’s deportation to the Solovki Islands and execution (1937), the emigration of the country’s most significant literary voices, the arrest and thirty-year intellectual isolation of the philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin, the arrest and death sentences of Boris Pilnyak (1929), Nikolai Klyuev (1937), and Isaac Babel (1939), Osip Mandelstam’s deportation and death in a transit camp (1938), Alexander Vvedensky’s conviction for anti-Soviet activities (1941), Daniil Kharms’s death in a psychiatric hospital (1942), Varlam Shalamov’s and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s forced labor in the gulag system, the creative silence imposed on many, and finally the “fall and demise of the Soviet intellectual.”
- Price: 7.65 €
The Transition from Totalitarianism to Authoritarianism in Russia
The Transition from Totalitarianism to Authoritarianism in Russia
(The Transition from Totalitarianism to Authoritarianism in Russia)
- Author(s):Lev Gudkov
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:327-351
- No. of Pages:25
- Keywords:Authoritarianism;Authoritarianism;Russia
- Summary/Abstract:It is an acknowledged fact that most research on totalitarian systems focuses on the period between the 1930s and the 1960s. During this time, “typical” totalitarian systems—which may be described in an entirely satisfactory way with the “totalitarian syndrome” theoretical framework put forward by Friedrich and Brzezinski in the mid-1950s—hit their stride.1 Authors usually deal with the formation and with the institutional features of the fascist state in Italy, of Nazism in Germany, and of the Soviet system in the USSR. For the most part, such research is conducted by historians, who insert ready-made structures and concepts from political and sociological studies into their system, in order to combine or systematize the vast empirical material at their disposal.
- Price: 11.25 €
Totalitarianism, Nationalism, and Challenges for Democratic Transition
Totalitarianism, Nationalism, and Challenges for Democratic Transition
(Totalitarianism, Nationalism, and Challenges for Democratic Transition)
- Author(s):Gail Warshofsky Lapidus
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:353-384
- No. of Pages:32
- Keywords:Totalitarianism;Nationalism
- Summary/Abstract:From the very origins of the Soviet state, its successive leaders have faced the challenge of dealing with both the legacy of empire and the multi-ethnicity of its populations. It was Lenin who put in place the initial ideological concepts and institutional features of Soviet nationality policy, including recognition/support for national rights and cultural pluralism and the ethno-federal structure of the USSR, and Stalin who built on these foundations but developed them in new directions. In the period following Stalin’s death, his successors wrestled with the problem of balancing the inherent contradictions of his legacy. But Gorbachev unintentionally brought these tensions to the forefront when his efforts at liberalization and democratization of the Soviet system unleashed a series of challenges to both the ideological and institutional foundations of the system, which culminated in the dissolution of USSR. Nor did the challenge of reconciling nationalism and democratization end with the disappearance of the USSR. While many of the post-Soviet states could view the end of the Soviet system as a liberation, and an opportunity to construct a new and democratic future, for the Russian Federation the experience was traumatic. It involved the loss of substantial territories and populations, the loss of superpower status, and the loss of a legitimating ideology. As Vladimir Putin would later lament, it was “the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the twentieth century.” The sudden and unexpected collapse—and the widely voiced suspicion that it was the result of a nefarious plot by foreign enemies—created difficult and continuing problems in defining and legitimating a new and nonimperial Russian identity. Indeed, the pervasive fear that the Russian Federation could itself disintegrate along ethno-national lines was an important contributing factor in the movement away from the promise of a democratic post-Soviet Russia to the increasingly authoritarian and conservative regime that has emerged in the 2000s.
- Price: 14.40 €
Public Memory and the Difficulty of Overcoming the Communist Legacy
Public Memory and the Difficulty of Overcoming the Communist Legacy
(Public Memory and the Difficulty of Overcoming the Communist Legacy)
- Author(s):Mark Kramer
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Politics / Political Sciences, History
- Page Range:385-421
- No. of Pages:37
- Keywords:Public memory;totalitarianism;Communism
- Summary/Abstract:In a televised ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow on November 2, 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that he had awarded a posthumous Hero of Russia plaque and Gold Star medal to George Koval, an American technician who had been assigned by the U.S. Army during World War II to the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s top-secret program to build a nuclear bomb. Koval, it turned out, was also working at the time as a spy for the Soviet military intelligence service, operating under the codename “Delmar.” He smuggled highly sensitive information about nuclear weapons technology to the Stalinist regime in Moscow. At the Kremlin ceremony honoring Koval, Putin warmly described him as “our comrade” and extolled him for his “immense contribution to the strengthening of our country’s defense capacity.”
- Price: 16.65 €
List of Contributors
List of Contributors
(List of Contributors)
- Contributor(s):Tommaso Piffer (Editor)
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Essay|Book Review |Scientific Life
- Page Range:423-428
- No. of Pages:6
- Price: 4.50 €
Index
Index
(Index)
- Contributor(s):Tommaso Piffer (Editor)
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Essay|Book Review |Scientific Life
- Page Range:429-435
- No. of Pages:7
- Price: 4.50 €