Se centra en algunos aspectos mientras obvia otros difíciles de justificar. Si la estructura no me gustó, las omisiones resultan estridentes. ¿La Segunda Guerra Mundial? Se la salta. ¿Brezhnev? No merece mención especial (no es que no se hable de Brezhnev sino que, mientras que otros personajes menores merecen una biografía propia, Brezhnev, que gobernó el país durante 18 años, no). ¿Gorbachov? Pasaba por allí. Estas omisiones dan una información incompleta de la URSS (aunque no sesgaba pues, como digo, intenta en todo momento ser neutral). At times it is dense with statistical read-outs that would have been better communicated with charts or graphs with accompanying commentary. Additionally, I found the writing style to be overly complex, parenthetical, and oddly self-referential. During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 1936 and 1938 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Cold War The Soviet Century is a great monument to the vanished Soviet world. Rich, witty, and entertaining, the book offers a comprehensive textual museum that is all the more important because no such real-life museum exists in Russia or elsewhere, and I doubt that it will be created anytime soon. The more difficult it is to go to the White Sea Canal, the Lenin Mausoleum, or a Russian dacha, the more enjoyable is this book.”—Alexander Etkind, Central European University

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. Some reread Marx, concluding that all would have been well if Lenin had not been so selective about the great man's message. Many others conclude that the attempt to build Marxist socialism in Europe's least industrialised society was doomed from the start. A few think that Lenin was to blame for what he did to the Bolshevik party before the revolution: forging it into a conspiracy whose natural style of government could only be dictatorship. Ok, a little: Russian archive and a massive wealth of administrative data and statistics based deep dives into the intricacies of Stalin's paranoid and murderous bureaucracy of the 1930s and 40s; Khrushchev's de-Stalinization and state and party apparatus governance reform processes post 1953, the establishment and rise of the KGB under Andropov, dissidents and political opening in the 70s and 80s, Gorbachev and, well, the rest is history.Why, then, a lot of characterizations of Stalin are not sourced? Why is Stalin attributed a quote that potentially doesn't exist? It's baffling to me that citations are that weak in a source that is recommended by academics. There are loads of instances where Lewin says something like "Historians seem agreed" and "In a very gloomy letter" and "In a handwritten note" without attribution of the source. A longtime Communist Party politician, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He inherited a stagnant economy and a crumbling political system. He introduced two sets of policies he hoped would reform the political system and help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. These policies were called glasnost and perestroika. In a work of remarkable range and quality, Karl Schlögel explores the everyday life and material culture of the Soviet Union in ways that show the communist experiment in a compellingly fresh light. One of the most innovative books on Soviet history to appear since the state’s collapse in 1991."—Tony Barber, Financial Times

C. He focuses a lot on the Party- who were its cadres, how were they recruited, to what extent they were veterans of the Revolution and the Civil War, when the terror turned on it. His sympathies are with the Old Bolsheviks, the idealists. They began to be pushed aside in the initial Five-Year Plans, and then were decimated in the terror of the late 1930s. He is sensitive to the erosion of the Bolshevik culture of intraparty debate, but not to the erosion of debate beyond the limits of the Party.Rich in its insights and original in its perspectives, Moshe Lewin’s superb new book provides a master-class in understanding the structures and intricate workings of the Soviet system. Ian Kershaw Weaknesses aside, I believe I did gain information that helps me understand why the Soviet system failed. I also am now able to better refute lame arguments that socialism is bad because COMMUNISISM and THE SOVIET UNION! Hint: the Soviet Union was never socialist and actually never really claimed to be. At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps. This urban metamorphosis was essential to showcasing the Socialist experiment to foreign visitors. Right from the start, journalists, diplomats, intellectuals, anti-colonial activists and professionals came to experience, challenge and participate in the creation of the new state. The symbolic centre of the Soviet universe