Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001
From: Vladimir Shlapentokh <shlapent@pilot.msu.edu>
Subject: New book
Title -- A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed
Author(s): Vladimir Shlapentokh
Description: Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. By forgoing engagement in ideological debates and the projection of Western norms and assumptions, the author seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.
Selected Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
1. Theoretical Concepts
2. Two Components of Soviet Ideology: Socialism and Russian Nationalism
3. Adjusting the Revolutionary Ideology to Totalitarian Goals
4. World Revolution as a Geopolitical Instrument
5. Open and Closed Ideologies
6. Policy Toward the Key Social Groups: Workers and the Creative Intelligentsia
7. The Political System: The Supreme Leader as the Major Institution
8. An Effective Political Machine
9. The Economy: Organic Flaws and Achievements
10. Public Opinion: Acceptance of the Regime
11. The Regime and the Empire: A Complex Relationship
12. Reforms: Alternatives in History
13. Reforming the System, Destroying its Fundamentals
14. Consequences
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
Hardcover Information
1-56324-471-3 $66. 95
Paperback Information
1-56324-472-1 $26. 95
360 pp. Index
Publication Date: September 2001
Published by M. E. Sharpe, Inc.
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