Abbott Gleason

The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s

Young Russia

Richard Stites

Peter Kenez

In the tumultuous years after the revolution of 1917, the traditional cutlure of Imperial Russia was both destroyed and preserved, as a new Soviet culture began to take shape. This book focuses on the interaction between the emerging political and cultural policies of the Soviet regime and the deeply held traditional values of the worker and peasant masses.

Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution

Bolshevik Culture

Martha C. Nussbaum

Jack Goldsmith

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is among the most widely read books in the world. For more than 50 years, it has been regarded as a morality tale for the possible future of modern society, a future involving nothing less than extinction of humanity itself. Does Nineteen Eighty-Four remain relevant in our new century? The editors of this book assembled a distinguished group of philosophers, literary specialists, political commentators, historians, and lawyers and asked them to take a wide-ranging and uninhibited look at that question. The editors deliberately avoided Orwell scholars in an effort to call forth a fresh and diverse range of responses to the major work of one of the most durable literary figures among twentieth-century English writers. As Nineteen Eighty-Four protagonist Winston Smith has admirers on the right, in the center, and on the left, the contributors similarly represent a wide range of political, literary, and moral viewpoints. The Cold War that has so often been linked to Orwell's novel ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but most of the issues of concern to him remain alive in some form today: censorship, scientific surveillance, power worship, the autonomy of art, the meaning of democracy, relations between men and women, and many others. The contributors bring a variety of insightful and contemporary perspectives to bear on these questions.

Orwell and Our Future

On "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

William Taubman

Sergei Khrushchev

Thanks to Soviet secrecy, little was known about former premier Khrushchev during his career or after his ousting. Since the collapse of the USSR, archives have been declassified, allowing access to his memoirs and those of witnesses.

Nikita Khrushchev

Karl Dietrich Bracher

Thomas J. Dunlap

Turning Points in Modern Times focuses on events after 1917: the rise of Nazism on the Right and authoritarianism on the Left. Bracher provides an incisive framework for understanding the great ideological confrontation of this century--democracy versus totalitarianism in the forms of fascism, Nazism, and communism. His analysis of the outcomes underscores the significance and power of democratic values and governments. The doyen of German political history, Karl Dietrich Bracher extends the argument against dictatorship that runs through his life's work, offers a blueprint for dealing with the recent past of the communist East German State (DDR), looks at the true facts of the Stasi collaboration, and challenges misperceptions of Hitler, Stalin, and others. He demonstrates the kinship between fascism and communism, considers Weimar and liberalism, assesses the legacy of Nazism, and outlines the ethos of democracy. In all this Bracher exposes the twentieth-century threats to the democratic state so that they can never again subvert representative government. A founder of the new history of Germany, which considers the larger context for Hitler and illuminates events through the theories of social science and the values of liberalism and democracy, Bracher writes in the tradition of Acton, Burckhardt, Croce, and Dahrendorf. This is a vital history lesson for our turbulent times, when once more democracy is on the march after a twilight century.

Essays on German and European History

Turning Points in Modern Times

On Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abbott Gleason

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