Overview

Reflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after October, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores the historiographical controversies over 1917, Stalinism, and the end of “Communism” and provides an assessment of the achievements, costs, losses and legacies of the choices made by Soviet leaders. While a quarter century after the disintegration of the USSR, the story usually told is one of failure and inevitable collapse, Suny reevaluates the promises, missed opportunities, achievements, and colossal costs of trying to build a kind of “socialism” in the inhospitable environment of peasant Russia. He ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxism and the alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois democracy.

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9781784785642

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Praise for They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide -Suny is admirably dispassionate in explaining the particular circumstances that led the Ottoman government to embark on a policy of mass extermination.- --Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times -What distinguishes Suny's scholarship is a scrupulous attention to context and the genuine imperial anxiety of the Young Turks. They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else (a title taken from another Talat diktat) is a fair-minded account. Unsparing in-depicting the viciousness of the killing, forced conversions and kidnapping of children and young women, it is rigorous in its choice of language and nuance, generous in its empathy but implacable in its conclusions.- --David Gardner, Financial Times

Praise for They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide -Suny is admirably dispassionate in explaining the particular circumstances that led the Ottoman government to embark on a policy of mass extermination.- --Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times -What distinguishes Suny's scholarship is a scrupulous attention to context and the genuine imperial anxiety of the Young Turks. They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else (a title taken from another Talat diktat) is a fair-minded account. Unsparing in-depicting the viciousness of the killing, forced conversions and kidnapping of children and young women, it is rigorous in its choice of language and nuance, generous in its empathy but implacable in its conclusions.- --David Gardner, Financial Times

Author Information

Ronald Grigor Suny is professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago. His previous books include The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, and A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin.

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