Author: Lara Douds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.
Inside Lenin's Government
Author: Lara Douds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.
Lenin's Government
Author: T. H. Rigby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521222818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This book attempts a detailed account of Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks their efforts to create a socialist 'cabinet' (Sovnarkom).
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521222818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This book attempts a detailed account of Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks their efforts to create a socialist 'cabinet' (Sovnarkom).
Inside Lenin's Government
Author: Lara Douds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.
Lenin's Tomb
Author: David Remnick
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804173583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626
Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804173583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626
Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
The State and Revolution
Author: Vladimir Ilʹich Lenin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Lenin on the Train
Author: Catherine Merridale
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1627793011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
"A gripping, meticulously researched account of Lenin's fateful rail journey from Zurich to Petrograd, where he ignited the Russian Revolution and forever changed the world. In April 1917, as the Russian Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution Vladimir Lenin was far away, exiled in Zurich. When the news reached him, Lenin immediately resolved to return to Petrograd and lead the revolt. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries. Germany saw an opportunity to further destabilize Russia by allowing Lenin and his small group of revolutionaries to return. Now, drawing on a dazzling array of sources and never-before-seen archival material, renowned historian Catherine Merridale provides a riveting, nuanced account of this enormously consequential journey--the train ride that changed the world--as well as the underground conspiracy and subterfuge that went into making it happen. Writing with the same insight and formidable intelligence that distinguished her earlier works, she brings to life a world of counter-espionage and intrigue, wartime desperation, illicit finance, and misguided utopianism. This was the moment when the Russian Revolution became Soviet, the genesis of a system of tyranny and faith that changed the course of Russia's history forever and transformed the international political climate"--
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1627793011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
"A gripping, meticulously researched account of Lenin's fateful rail journey from Zurich to Petrograd, where he ignited the Russian Revolution and forever changed the world. In April 1917, as the Russian Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution Vladimir Lenin was far away, exiled in Zurich. When the news reached him, Lenin immediately resolved to return to Petrograd and lead the revolt. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries. Germany saw an opportunity to further destabilize Russia by allowing Lenin and his small group of revolutionaries to return. Now, drawing on a dazzling array of sources and never-before-seen archival material, renowned historian Catherine Merridale provides a riveting, nuanced account of this enormously consequential journey--the train ride that changed the world--as well as the underground conspiracy and subterfuge that went into making it happen. Writing with the same insight and formidable intelligence that distinguished her earlier works, she brings to life a world of counter-espionage and intrigue, wartime desperation, illicit finance, and misguided utopianism. This was the moment when the Russian Revolution became Soviet, the genesis of a system of tyranny and faith that changed the course of Russia's history forever and transformed the international political climate"--
The House of Government
Author: Yuri Slezkine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1123
Book Description
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1123
Book Description
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Russia under Western Eyes
Author: Martin E Malia
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Book Description
A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Book Description
A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.
Lenin
Author: Tony Cliff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
Author: Lara Douds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.