If the Bolshevik revolution shook the world, the 74-year reign of socialists in the former Soviet Union certainly changed it. Now that the rule is over--at least for the moment--historians are beginning the process of placing the experience into its political, social and global contexts. Martin Malia, a former history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has contributed mightily to that process with this comprehensive look at the entire period of socialist rule, from its origins to the roots of its collapse. He leaves no conceptual stone unturned, providing lively insights to ideas and ideologies while offering a complete summary of the complex history.


From Publishers Weekly
This shrewd analysis of the failure of the Soviet experiment dismantles the view that the Soviet regime originated in a genuinely popular revolution rather than a conspiratorial coup and that the Bolsheviks' quest for democratic socialism was derailed by pressing circumstances. Malia traces a direct link between Lenin's monolithic one-party state and Stalin's purges, pulverization of civil society and institutionalization of terror. A former professor of history at UC Berkeley, the author contends that Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev oscillated between attempts to reform and to preserve Stalin's legacy, which aggravated Communism's systemic problems. This study closes with a look at post-Communist Russia in near-total economic chaos. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Malia's lengthy postmortem scans the entire sweep of applied socialism in Russia--from the glory days of 1917 to high Stalinism and on to its recent collapse. In an almost archaeological sense, Malia (history, formery Univ. of California-Berkeley) pokes at the various strata of socialism, noting small shifts and subtle changes that become obvious only when he explains them. Yet major observations emerge as well, e.g., that the Communist Party was able to act at will only because of an oppositional void shaped by the atomizing effects of World War I. Unfortunately, Malia energetically smashes and dispenses with any historiographical interpretations that aren't unabashedly anti-Communist. Interesting and frequently illuminating, but don't expect much balance or objectivity; for larger collections.- Mark R. Yerburgh, Fern Ridge Community Lib., Veneta, Ore.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Marshall Shulman
The quality of his prose is . . . quite often as sparkling as a Left Bank conversation. One can almost smell the pungent smoke of a Gauloise drifting up from an ashtray in the Deux Magots cafe.


From Booklist
Analyzing Western Sovietology as much as critiquing the Communist regime, Malia surveys the artificial support lent to the "ideocratic partocracy" that was the Soviet Union. He takes aim at the concepts--both Leninists' political justifications and academic apologias--undergirding the forced creation of the classless society. As its tortured, now completed history proves, the Soviet Union never lacked academic explicators of the supposed deformations of its planned form. After World War II, the expanding social sciences came up with alternative models of Soviet development in order to refute the influential totalitarian one; among these were modernization theories, bureaucratic and interest group politics, and Marxist sociology. Among historians, admiring biographies such as Stephen Cohen's of Bukharin and Isaac Deutscher's of Trotsky implied that, to invigorate itself, Communism need only get back to the humane basics of the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. Malia rejects such views as he reviews Sovietism's course, its Marxist foundation, the quandary its leaders faced when the proletarian revolution failed (initially) to spread abroad, and the zigzag reforms this failure necessitated, of which the NEP was merely the first attempt, Gorbachevism the futility-filled last. A trenchant summary that leaves no conceptual issue untouched. Gilbert Taylor


Book Description
"The Soviet Tragedy is an essential coda to the literature of Soviet studies...Insofar as [he] returns the power of ideology to its central place in Soviet history, Malia has made an enormous contribution. He has written the history of a utopian illusion and the tragic consequences it had for the people of the Soviet Union and the world." -- David Remnick, The New York Review of Books "In Martin Malia, the Soviet Union had one of its most acute observers. With this book, it may well have found the cornerstone of its history." -- Francois Furet, author of Interpreting the French Revolution "The Soviet Tragedy offers the most thorough scholarly analysis of the Communist phenomenon that we are likely to get for a long while to come...Malia states that his narrative is intended 'to substantiate the basic argument,' and this is certainly an argumentative book, which drives its thesis home with hammer blows. On this breathtaking journey, Malia is a witty and often brilliantly penetrating guide. He has much wisdom to impart." -- The Times Literary Supplement "This is history at the high level, well deployed factually, but particularly worthwhile in the philosophical and political context -- at once a view and an overview." -- The Washington Post

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Soviet Tragedy is an essential coda to the literature of Soviet studies...Insofar as [he] returns the power of ideology to its central place in Soviet history, Malia has made an enormous contribution. He has written the history of a utopian illusion and the tragic consequences it had for the people of the Soviet Union and the world."

-- David Remnick, The New York Review of Books

"In Martin Malia, the Soviet Union had one of its most acute observers. With this book, it may well have found the cornerstone of its history."

-- Francois Furet, author of Interpreting the French Revolution

"The Soviet Tragedy offers the most thorough scholarly analysis of the Communist phenomenon that we are likely to get for a long while to come...Malia states that his narrative is intended 'to substantiate the basic argument,' and this is certainly an argumentative book, which drives its thesis home with hammer blows. On this breathtaking journey, Malia is a witty and often brilliantly penetrating guide. He has much wisdom to impart."

-- The Times Literary Supplement