Description
Describing the elections of Spring 1989, Kagarlitsky assesses candidates like Boris Yeltsin, to whom the Popular Front lent critical support. He outlines the way in which the ensuing People's Congress fed a mounting frustration at the gap between promised and actual change. And he points to the dangers of an emerging 'market Stalinism' which could exacerbate social inequity without delivering political freedom.
Fall 1989 saw governments throughout Eastern Europe tumble before mass mobilizations of peoples no longer afraid of Soviet intervention. The biggest transformation in global politics since 1945 flowed directly from the opening of discussion between the caucuses of the Soviet Communist Party and the masses it claimed to represent, a debate which is described in these pages with a vividness and insight available only to a participant.
Kagarlitsky's testament concludes with a stark account of the escalating difficulties and conflicts facing the government in the early months of 1990 - events signalling, in the author's view, the demise of perestroika itself.
In this dramatic, month-by-month chronicle of a tumultuous period, Boris Kagarlitsky bears witness to the eruption of open political discussion in the Soviet Union during the 'hot summer' of 1988
About the Author
Boris Kagarlitsky is the author of The Thinking Reed, The Dialectic of Hope, and The Mirage of Modernisation. He has been arrested twice for his activism, once in 1982 under Brezhnev, and in 1993 under Yeltsin.
Reviews
Kagarlitsky is clearly ... talented, learned, and committed. * Village Voice *
Book Information
ISBN 9780860915089
Author Boris Kagarlitsky
Format Paperback
Page Count 228
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 434g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 155mm * 19mm