This is a collection of essays (with contributors from Britain, Continental Europe and the USA) dealing with the character and aftermath of Stalinism in the USSR. The focus is on the interwar years and on the methodological problems of studying this period, but the volume highlights also the links between Stalinism and the Tsarist past, and the ways in which Stalinism, in its very formation, prepared the ground for its own demise. In this way it contributes to a historical understanding of the current upheavals in the Soviet Union.

Inhalt
Preface; N.Lampert - Notes on the Contributors - Grappling with Social Realities: Moshe Lewin and the Making of Social History; R.Lew - Demons and Devil's Advocates: Problems in Historical Writing on the Stalin Era; V.Andrle - Gorbachev's Socialism in Historical Perspective; R.W.Davies - The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Anatolii Rybakov's Stalin; M.Perrie - The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s; G.T.Rittersporn - Soviet Peasants and Soviet Literature; A.Nove - Masters of the Shop Floor: Foremen and Soviet Industrialisation; L.H.Siegelbaum - Urban Social Mobility and Mass Repression: Communist Party and Soviet Society; H-H.Schr der - Construction Workers in the 1930s; J-P.Depretto - Nationality and Class in the Revolutions of 1917: a Re-examination of Social Categories; R.G.Suny - The Background to Perestroika: 'Political Undercurrents' Reconsidered in the Light of Recent Events; P.Kneen - Legality in Soviet Political Culture: a Perspective on Gorbachev's Reforms; P.H.Solomon Jr - Index