Russia (USSR) After Stalin: the Last Decades, 1953-1991 (An Old and Rare Book)

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This book is a study of the last decades of the USSR after Stalin under the series, 'Studies on Political History of Mid-20th Century Russia'. The subject in itself is of paramount importance for an adequate assessment of the natures of Soviet rule in the country and its collapse in 1991; indeed this is the starting point for an understanding of on-going developments in Russia today.

Stalin died in March 1953 but it took nearly two years for his successors to settle down. Later, for almost three decades, Soviet society struggled to cope with the legacies of Stalinism, although it moved ahead with its own determined pace. In mid-1980s' Gorbachev came on the scene and he also sought to cope with the legacies of Stalinism by a simply method of precipitating the process of uprooting the entire Soviet system.

However, it would be naive to suggest that the problems of coping with the legacies of Stalinism constituted the only essence of the political history of the USSR after Stalin. On the contrary, the society and its people had moved ahead. Much better fed, lived and breathed, and more educated, Soviet people had vastly changed by the mid-1980s as compared to the mid- 1950s. So had the problems and issues before them as well as their that defied an optimal solution. In other words, the political history of the USSR during the last decades after Stalin was certainly not an uninterrupted slide down to its Nemesis. It had its glories and ignonimities, and hopes and despairs. On balance, Soviet society was not ripe for disintegration in December 1991 and for the ensuing chaos and anarchy. It deserved better as it could have at least survived, like alll others, with a host of problems. Not that there were no serious attempts at reforms. One such effort, the last one, ws Gorbachev's programme of glasnost and perestroika, but, as it turned out. It eventually dismantled the system. The Gorbachev years, the last half decade of the USSR, were thus set apart from the rest. yet they were not entirely divorced from the continuity of the Stalinist system. To cite one example, by the end of 1989, Gorbachev had succeeded to a large measure in dismantling the centralized command system in the functioning of Soviet society, yet the CPSU, the prime Instrument of change then available, was barely restruc-tured.