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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2017
A good overview of the subject is Caute, David, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988). Overviews which have a transnational but not necessarily global perspective include Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, Die 68er Bewegung. Deutschland, Westeuropa USA (Munich: Beck, 2001), Horn, Gerd-Rainer, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Berman, Paul, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York and London: Norton, 1996).
There are some very useful edited collections on this subject. The ones with the most global reach are Fink, Carol, Gassert, Philipp and Junker, Detlef (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Gassert, Philipp and Klimke, Martin (eds.), 1968: Memories and Legacies of Global Revolt (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009). Klimke has coedited two other important collections with a European focus: Klimke, Martin and Scharloth, Joachim (eds.), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Klimke, Martin, Pekelder, Jacco and Scharloth, Joachim (eds.), Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). Artières, Philippe and Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle (eds.), 68. Une histoire collective (1962–1981) (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), focuses on France but links into wider themes.
Studies using the oral history of 1968 activists began with Fraser, Ronald et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). A new generation of research, with a mainly European focus, although taking in global influences, is highlighted by von der Goltz, Anna (ed.), “Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation”: Conflicts of Generation Building and Europe’s “1968” (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), and Gildea, Robert, Mark, James and Warring, Anette (eds.), Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). A related series of articles, “Voices of Europe’s 1968,” was published in a special issue of Cultural and Social History 8, 4 (Dec. 2011).
Global connections operating at a national or local level have been explored by Klimke, Martin, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), Slobodian, Quinn, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), and Wolin, Richard, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). An interesting comparative study is Stokes, Sarah, “Paris and Mexico City: 1968 Student Activism,” D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 2012).
Studies that prioritize transnational cultural and countercultural movements include Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Schildt, Axel and Siegfried, Detlef (eds.), Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), and Zolov, Eric, Refried Elvis: The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Among works that deal with questions of violent and peaceful protest are della Porta, Donatella, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Varon, Jeremy, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), Ziemann, Benjamin (ed.), Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA During the Cold War (Essen: Klartext, 2001), Thörn, Håkan, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Davey, Eleanor, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Specialized studies on particular areas with a wide resonance include Bolton, Jonathan, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Kostis, Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013).
Speeches, letters and memoirs by activists themselves may be used to trace global connections. Among these may be highlighted Gerassi, John (ed.), Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), Cohn-Bendit, Dany [Daniel], Nous l’avons tant aimée, la révolution (Paris: Barrault, 1986), Dutschke, Rudi, Écrits politiques, 1967–1968 (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1968), Dutschke, Rudi, Jeder hat sein Leben ganz zu leben. Die Tagebücher, 1963–1979 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003), Passerini, Luisa, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968 (Hannover and London: Weslyan University Press, 1996), Ali, Tariq, Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (London: Collins, 1987), Uhl, Petr, Le socialisme emprisonné (Paris: Stock, 1980), Michnik, Adam, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), and Gorbachev, Mikhail and Mlynář, Zdeněk, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
New political histories of the Vietnam War now appear with regularity, as scholars gain access to more archives of the US State Department, some from the Pentagon and written by official Armed Forces historians, as well as collections of presidential papers and tapes in the libraries of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. A few examples: books by Logevall, Fredrik, The Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), and Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Lawrence, Mark A., Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to the War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), Bradley, Mark Philip, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and Rust, William J., Eisenhower and Cambodia: Diplomacy, Covert Action, and the Origins of the Second Indochina War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), all provide valuable context and multiarchival scholarship on the origins of the US war. Halberstam, David’s The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972) is one of several excellent books by journalists about the failures of US policymaking for Vietnam. Several scholars have utilized Nixon’s White House papers and tapes to write on the final years of the war, including Kimball, Jeffrey in Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
For general US histories of the war, from its origins up to 1975 and beyond, one can single out Herring, George’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979) as a concise and objective study; Young, Marilyn B.’s The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) covers all three Indochina Wars with great thoroughness and a strong critique of US policy. Essential eyewitness accounts of the way the war was fought include the two books by Schell, Jonathan, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half, now combined in one paperback volume entitled The Real War: The Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). For in-depth scholarly research, Elliott, David provides a two-volume work on the communists (known as the Viet Cong by the US military) in the Mekong delta: The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). Elliott, Mai, who worked with David for the Rand Corporation, has contributed a study of Rand in Southeast Asia: A History of Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2010). Rand, a contractor to the US military, was responsible for much of US government analysis, and as Mai Elliott shows, in the early days it was strongly influenced by one analyst who saw the bombing of the DRV as the key to winning the war. His ideas later lost favor.
“International history” of the Vietnam War, covering all the state actors with a major influence on the war, is a genre pioneered by British scholar Smith, Ralph B.. His three-volume An International History of the Vietnam War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984, 1986, 1991) is still the most in-depth work of this type, using the BBC Monitoring service and the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service as basic sources for the communist bloc. His inclusion of economic analysis keeps his study relevant, even though he wrote without the archival information on Soviet and Chinese policies that would become available in the 1990s. His successors include Singaporean scholar Guan, Ang Cheng, who completed the Smith opus with a final volume entitled International History of the Vietnam War: The Denouement, 1967–1975 (London: Routledge, 2011).
More recent international histories using Hanoi archives by Asselin, Pierre, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), and Nguyen, Lien-Hang T., Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), purport to be the final word on Hanoi’s role and thinking regarding the war. However, both authors take a revisionist view that puts strong emphasis on Hanoi’s actions without providing a balanced view of US war planning. The old issue of whether the Vietnamese had the right to fight to unify their country after the failure of the Geneva Agreements goes unaddressed.
Studies based on communist archives: The partial opening of archives in China, Eastern Europe and Russia during the 1990s has provided a deeper understanding of attitudes within the socialist bloc to the Vietnam War. For China, Jian, Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and Zhai, Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), have set the pace with their overviews. Gaiduk, Ilya, a Russian historian, has written two books using the Soviet archives: The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) and Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington, DC, and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2003). Norwegian scholar Olsen, Mari has also contributed a study based on the Soviet Foreign Ministry archive: Soviet–Vietnam Relations and the Role of China, 1949–1964: Changing Alliances (London: Routledge, 2006). All of these studies confirm the reluctance of the USSR to become involved in the second Vietnam War, until 1965.
The anti-war movement, in the United States and worldwide: We recommend the exhaustive bibliography established by Ed Moise on this topic (edmoise.sites.clemson.edu/antiwar.html), but will select a few examples, specifically on the world movement: Ali, Tariq and Watkins, Susan, 1968: Marching in the Streets (London: Bloomsbury/New York: Free Press, 1998), is heavily illustrated and covers protest demonstrations in many countries. Goscha, Christoper and Vaïsse, Maurice (eds.), La guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe (1963–1973) (Brussels and Paris: Bruylant/LGDJ, 2003), is a collection of papers, some in French and some in English. Among the ones dealing with the anti-war movement are: Jost Dülffer, “The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in West Germany,” 287–305; Nadine Lubelski-Bernard, “L’opposition à la guerre du Vietnam en Belgique (1963–1973),” 307–26; and Kim Saloman, “The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in Sweden,” 327–37.
Reports from the sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal (founded by Bertrand Russell) are online at raetowest.org/Vietnam-war-crimes/russell-vietnam-war-crimes-tribunal-1967.html. The complete transcripts of the Winter Soldier Investigation are available at www.wintersoldier.com/index.php?topic=CompletWSI. This includes the introduction by Senator Mark Hatfield, when he presented the testimonies to the Senate on 5 April 1971. The three-day event was organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, on 31 January, 1 February and 2 February 1971.
Two other sources on US war crimes are books by German writer Greiner, Bernd, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 [2007]); and Turse, Nick, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013). Both use the Pentagon’s own investigations into reported war crimes, after the My Lai massacre came to light.
On the anti-war movement within the US armed forces, Cortright, David’s Soldiers in Revolt, 1975 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005) is an excellent source by a participant-observer.
For a deeper understanding of the Soviet Union’s role in the global Cold War, it is worth going back to Lenin, Vladimir’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), which laid out the Bolsheviks’ approach to the colonial question. During the Cold War the question of the Soviet Union’s role in the “Third World” was a topic frequently broached by European and American scholars. Among the most notable analysts were Rubinstein, Alvin Z., whose books include Red Star on the Nile: The Soviet–Egyptian Influence Relationship Since the June War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) and Moscow’s Third World Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Katz, Mark N., The Third World in Soviet Military Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Halliday, Fred, Cold War, Third World: An Essay on Soviet–US Relations (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989); and Golan, Galia, The Soviet Union and National Liberation Movements in the Third World (Boston and London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). A number of scholars have also explored the connection between the Soviet “south” and its policies abroad; notable works include Wilber, Charles K., The Soviet Model and Underdeveloped Countries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969), and Nove, Alec and Newth, J. A., The Soviet Middle East: A Communist Model for Development (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966). Still others focused on how the Soviet Union tried to use the heritage of its Muslim population in reaching out to countries in the Middle East and South Asia; these include Dawisha, Karen and Carrere d’Encausse, Hélène, “Islam in the Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union: A Double-Edged Sword?,” in Dawisha, Adeeb I. (ed.), Islam in Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 160–77, and Ro’i, Yaacov, “The Role of Islam and Soviet Muslims in Soviet Arab Policy,” Asian and African Studies 10, 2 (1974), 157–81, and 10, 3 (1975), 259–80. Although these works have been superseded in many cases, they are nevertheless valuable and insightful for scholars starting their research on these topics. The above list is representative rather than exhaustive.
Soviet writing on the Third World should also be of interest to scholars interested in these questions, for what they reveal about changing notions regarding development, revolution and Moscow’s foreign-policy priorities. Most of this literature remains available only in Russian, but see for example Simonia, Nodari, Synthesis of Traditional and Modern in the Evolution of Third World Societies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992).
The end of the Cold War and the past fifteen years in particular have seen a proliferation of new studies on the Soviet Union and the global Cold War, taking advantage of archival resources in the former USSR and beyond. Many of the works of the 1990s included an explicitly Moscow-centric view, but shone new light on key episodes and problems in the history of Soviet foreign policy. These include Fursenko, Aleksandr and Naftali, Timothy, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), as well as Gaiduk, Ilya V., The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), and Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict 1954–1963 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003). At the same time, works taking a more international and even transnational approach began to appear, often engaging with a broader debate about the history of decolonization, postcolonialism and development in the twentieth century. An early example is Bishop, Elizabeth’s Ph.D. thesis, “Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan High Dam” (University of Chicago, 1997). Westad, Odd Arne’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) helped catalyze the field and remains a crucial reference point.
Since then, the field has continued to expand. Engerman, David’s “The Second World’s Third World,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 1 (Winter 2011), 183–211, remains a very useful guide to the literature, although many new works have appeared since the article came out. Important works on the Soviet Union and China include Luthi, Lorenz, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Radchenko, Sergey, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jersild, Austin, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Friedman, Jeremy, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). On the Soviet Union and the Middle East, see in particular Laron, Guy’s Origins of the Suez Crisis: Postwar Development Diplomacy and the Struggle over Third World Industrialization, 1945–1956 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013); and Ferris, Jesse, Nasser’s Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Daigle, Craig’s The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) is more focused on the US perspective but has valuable insights on Moscow’s point of view, based on Soviet sources. On the USSR and Africa, see Mazov, Sergey, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), as well as Iandolo, Alessandro, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Soviet Model of Development’ in West Africa, 1957–1964,” Cold War History 12, 4 (Nov. 2012), 683–704, and Telepneva, Natalia, “Our Sacred Duty: The Soviet Union, the Liberation Movements in the Portuguese Colonies, and the Cold War, 1961–1975,” Ph.D. thesis (London School of Economics, 2014). On Latin America, see Rupprecht, Tobias, Soviet Internationalism After Stalin: Interaction and Exchange Between the USSR and Latin America During the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Getchell, Michelle Denise, “Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and ‘Hemispheric Solidarity,’” Journal of Cold War Studies 17, 2 (Spring 2015), 73–102; and Vanni Pettina, “Mexican–Soviet Relations, 1958–1964: The Limits of Engagement,” Cold War International History Project e-dossier, www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/mexican-soviet-relations-1958–1964-the-limits-engagement
There is no counterpart for the 1970s of Gott, Richard’s classic survey of guerrilla movements in the 1960s, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (London: Seagull Books, 2008). However, Wickham-Crowley, Timothy, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes Since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and de la Pedraja, René, Wars of Latin America, 1948–1982 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013), are useful.
The most important accounts of Francisco Caamaño’s guerrilla attempt in the Dominican Republic are two books by Hermann, Hamlet: El Fiero. Eberto Lalane José (Santo Domingo: Búho, 2009) and Caamaño, Biografía de una época (Santo Domingo: Búho, 2013). (Hermann was one of the two survivors of Caamaño’s guerrilla group and a gifted historian.) See also Bosch, Brian, Balaguer and the Dominican Military: Presidential Control of the Factional Officer Corps in the 1960s and 1970s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2007); Moquete, Manuel Matos, Caamaño, la última esperanza armada (Santo Domingo: Videocine Palau, 1999).
The two best books on the Tupamaros in Uruguay are Brum, Pablo, The Robin Hood Guerrillas: The Epic Journey of Uruguay’s Tupamaros, 2nd edn. (Middletown, DE: Createspace Independent Pub., 2016), and Sendic (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2000), by former Tupamaro Samuel Blixen. Debray, Régis, Les épreuves du feu (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), vol. II, 125–278, is worth reading, although biased.
On the Sandinistas, see Zimmermann, Matilde, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Nolan, David, The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables, FL: Institute of Inter-American Studies, 1984); Gilbert, Dennis, Sandinistas: The Party and the Revolution (New York: Blackwell, 1988); Christian, Shirley, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1985); Platoshkin, Nikolai, Sandinistskaia revolutsiia v Nikaragua [The Sandanista Revolution in Nicaragua] (Moscow: Russkiii fond sodeiistviia obrazovaniiu i nauke, 2015). The authoritative account of the Reagan administration and Nicaragua is Leogrande, William, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
On the United States and the Allende government, see Kornbluh, Peter, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, rev. edn. (New York: New Press, 2013); Qureshi, Lubna, Nixon, Kissinger and Allende: US Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Haslam, Jonathan, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (London: Verso, 2005).
Turning to Africa, on the war in the Portuguese colonies, see Chabal, Patrick, Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Marcum, John, The Angolan Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969–78); Tali, Jean-Michel Mabeko, Dissidências e Poder de Estado: o MPLA perante si própio (1962–1977), 2 vols. (Luanda: Editorial Nzila, 2001); Isaacman, Allen and Isaacman, Barbara, Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983); Gleijeses, Piero, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
On the Ethiopian revolution, see Ottaway, Marina and Ottaway, David, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution (New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1978); Lefort, René, Éthiopie. La révolution hérétique (Paris: Maspéro, 1981); Tubiana, Joseph (ed.), La révolution éthiopienne comme phénomène de société: témoignages et documents (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1990); Tiruneh, Andargachew, The Ethiopian Revolution 1974–1987: A Transformation from an Aristocratic to a Totalitarian Autocracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Tareke, Gebru, The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). By far the best source on US policy in the Horn is Mitchell, Nancy’s Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Washington, DC, and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2016). On Soviet policy in the Horn, see Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 250–87.
On the role of the two superpowers, Cuba and South Africa in southern Africa, see Mitchell’s masterful Jimmy Carter in Africa; Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions and Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Shubin, Vladimir, The Hot “Cold War”: The USSR in Southern Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2008); du Toit Spies, Francois Jacobus, Operasie Savannah. Angola 1975–1976 (Pretoria: S. A. Weermag, 1989); Westad, Global Cold War, 207–49.
On Scandinavian assistance to African liberation movements, see Sellström, Tor, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, 2 vols. (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999–2002), and Gleijeses, Piero, “Scandinavia and the Liberation of Southern Africa,” International History Review 27, 2 (June 2005), 324–31.
The accessible primary sources for the history of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and the Democratic Kampuchea regime are probably richer than the sources for most other communist parties and regimes, given that the CPK not only was overthrown within four years of coming to power but also became the subject of a United Nations-backed criminal tribunal. Many of its records were preserved by the successor regime or have since come to light.
Other confidential CPK documents came into the hands of its opponents before its 1975 victory. Timothy Carney, a US State Department official in Cambodia during Nol, Lon’s Khmer Republic, published the CPK’s “Short Guide for Application of Party Statutes,” along with 1972–73 eyewitness accounts written by a well-informed defector from the CPK zones, in his collection Communist Party Power in Kampuchea (Cambodia): Documents and Discussion (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1977). Carney, also published the 1973 “Summary of Annotated Party History,” by the Eastern Zone CPK branch, along with three post-1975 DK documents, in Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death, edited by Jackson, Karl D. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). I juxtaposed the 1973 text with Sary, Ieng’s truncated 1974 version in my How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975 (London: Verso, 1985; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 364–67.
The 1965 exchange of documents in Hanoi between the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists appears in three appendices of Engelbert, Thomas and Goscha, Christopher E., Falling out of Touch: A Study on Vietnamese Communist Policy Towards an Emerging Cambodian Communist Movement, 1930–1975 (Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 1995). These discussions are also mentioned in the 1978 DK publications, Livre Noir. Faits et preuves des actes d’agression et d’annexion du Vietnam contre le Kampuchea (Phnom Penh: Département de la presse et de l’information du Ministère des affaires étrangères du Kampuchea Démocratique, 1978), and the slightly different Black Paper: Facts and Evidences of the Acts of Aggression and Annexation of Vietnam Against Kampuchea (Phnom Penh: Department of Press and Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea, 1978).
The Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University published a series of online English translations of DK documents, including “The Khmer Rouge National Army Order of Battle: January 1976” (gsp.yale.edu/khmer-rouge-national-army-order-battle-january-1976); “The Pol Pot Files, 1975–1977” (gsp.yale.edu/pol-pot-files-1975–1977); “The Son Sen Files, 1976–1977” (gsp.yale.edu/son-sen-files-1976–1977); and “Ieng Sary’s Regime: A Diary of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry, 1976–79” (gsp.yale.edu/ieng-sarys-regime-diary-khmer-rouge-foreign-ministry-1976–79). Eight more DK texts in translation may be found in Chandler, David P., Kiernan, Ben and Boua, Chanthou (eds.), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977 (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1988). Tables outlining the CPK’s political and military chain of command can be found in Kiernan, Ben (ed.), Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1993), 14–15.
The August 1979 Phnom Penh trial in absentia of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, while legally invalid, provided much valuable documentary and testimonial information. The documentation, including CPK meeting minutes and victim statements, is collected in Genocide in Cambodia: Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, edited by De Nike, Howard J., Quigley, John and Robinson, Kenneth J., with the assistance of Jarvis, Helen and Cross, Nereida (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Since 2006, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia have tried a number of cases of crimes against humanity and genocide. The ECCC website is a rich source of legal and historical information on the DK era: www.eccc.gov.kh.
Understanding the relationship between human rights and communism properly begins with Marx, Karl’s 1843 “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx and Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, Robert C. (New York: Norton & Co., 1979), 26–46. Only recently have scholars of communism turned attention to the history of human rights. The Soviet Union’s engagement in the UN-based human rights norm-making in the 1940s best emerges in Amos, Jennifer, “Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958,” in Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147–65; and her “Soviet Diplomacy and the Politics on Human Rights, 1945–1964” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2012). On the fraught history of social and economic rights in the Soviet Union, see Smith, Mark B., “Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev,” Humanity 3, 3 (Winter 2012), 385–406. On Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials, see Hirsch, Francine, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,” American Historical Review 113, 3 (June 2008), 701–30.
For the making of the 1940s global human rights movement more broadly, see Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), ch. 2; Winter, Jay and Prost, Antoine, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Bradley, Mark Philip, The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination: A Twentieth-Century Transnational History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), part I. The Soviet and Chinese entanglements with postcolonial state-making and human rights emerge in Burke, Roland, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
On Soviet dissidents, see Nathans, Benjamin, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights Under ‘Developed Socialism,’” Slavic Review 66, 4 (Winter 2007), 630–63; his “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 166–90; and his “The Disenchantment of Socialism: Soviet Dissidents, Human Rights and the New Global Morality,” in Eckel, Jan and Moyn, Samuel (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 33–47. More conventional but still important narratives include Rubenstein, Joshua, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 30–42; and Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).
On Helsinki, see Snyder, Sarah B., Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Thomas, Daniel C., The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For Czech dissent, see Bolton, Jonathan, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
The impact of Soviet and East European dissidents on West European leftist thought and practice in the 1970s emerges in Horvath, Robert, “‘The Solzhenitsyn Effect’: East European Dissidents and the Demise of Revolutionary Privilege,” Human Rights Quarterly 29, 4 (Nov. 2007), 879–907; Christofferson, Michael Scott, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Press, 2004), ch. 2; Pons, Silvio, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” in Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 45–65; Brier, Robert, “Beyond the ‘Helsinki Effect’: East European Dissent and the Western Left in the ‘Long 1970s,’” in Villaume, Poul, Mariager, Rasmus and Porsdam, Helle (eds.), The “Long 1970s”: Human Rights, East–West Détente and Transnational Relations (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 71–86; and Brier, Robert, “Broadening the Cultural History of the Cold War: The Emergence of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee and the Rise of Human Rights,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, 4 (Fall 2013), 104–27.
For Carter-era human rights diplomacy, and its connection to Soviet dissidents, see Keys, Barbara J., Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Parthé, Kathleen, “The Politics of Détente-Era Cultural Texts, 1969–1976,” Diplomatic History 33, 4 (Sep. 2009), 723–33; and Peterson, Christian Philip, “The Carter Administration and the Promotion of Human Rights in the Soviet Union,” Diplomatic History 38, 3 (Jun. 2014), 628–56.
On broader global concern with human rights in the 1970s, see Moyn, Last Utopia, ch. 4; Bradley, United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination, ch. 5; and contributors to Eckel and Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough. For the politics of postsocialist human rights memory, see Gilligan, Emma, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005); and Nalepa, Monika, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Useful starting points for late twentieth-century Chinese human rights history include Foot, Rosemary, Rights Beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Svensson, Marina, Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); and Lizhi, Fang, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).
For histories of twentieth-century communism providing analysis on the problem of reform in communist political culture, see notably Brown, Archie, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Pons, Silvio, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). On revolution and reform in world politics, see Halliday, Fred, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (London: Macmillan, 1999).
Post-Stalin reforms in the Soviet Union are best analyzed by Taubman, William, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (London: Free Press, 2003). On the survival of reform ideas in the USSR and Eastern Europe after 1956, see Falk, Barbara J., The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2003); and Zubok, Vladislav M., Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). On the implications of economic reforms in the 1960s, Lewin, Moshe, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), still offers precious insights. An archetypal testimony of the post-1956 trajectory of Western Marxist intellectuals influenced by the ideals of “humanistic socialism” is Thompson, Edward P., “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski,” in Thompson, Edward P., The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 303–97.
For an overview of the literature on the Prague Spring, see the bibliographical essay related to Kolář, Pavel, “Reform Undercurrents and the Prague Spring,” in Naimark, Norman, Pons, Silvio and Quinn-Judge, Sophie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Communism, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), vol. II, ch. 7. Bracke, Maud A., Which Socialism, Whose Détente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), analyzes the impact of the Czechoslovak experience on Western communists. For a concise overview of Eurocommunism, see Pons, Silvio, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” in Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 45–65. By the same author, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2006) focuses on the Italian communist leadership as the main protagonist of the Eurocommunist experience. Di Donato, Michele, I comunisti italiani e la sinistra europea. Il PCI e i rapporti con le socialdemocrazie (1964–1984) (Rome: Carocci, 2015), investigates the relationship between Eurocommunists and social democrats. For a focus on relations between the Italian and French communists, see Di Maggio, Marco, Alla ricerca della terza via al socialismo. I PC italiano e francese nella crisi del comunismo (1964–1984) (Naples: ESI, 2014). The most recent study of the US response to Eurocommunism is Heurtebize, Frédéric, Le Péril Rouge. Washington face à l’eurocommunisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014). On Eurocommunism and human rights, see Lomellini, Valentine, L’appuntamento mancato. La sinistra italiana e il dissenso nei regimi comunisti (1968–1989) (Florence: Le Monnier, 2010), and Lomellini, Valentine, Les relations dangereuses. French Socialists, Communists, and the Human Rights Issue in the Soviet Bloc (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012). Among several prominent Eurocommunist leaders who have written memoirs, the most significant is Napolitano, Giorgio, Dal PCI al socialismo europeo. Un’autobiografia politica (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2005).
For coeval literature and memoirs witness to reform communism’s endurance after the repression of the Prague Spring, as an underground current within the establishment in the Soviet Union, see particularly the diary of Cherniaev, Anatolii, Sovmestnyi iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epokh, 1972–1991 gody [Joint Exodus: A Diary of Two Epochs, 1972–1991] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); and also his memoirs: Chernyaev, Anatoly, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). On reform communism as a component of left-wing dissent, see as prominent examples Medvedev, Roy, On Socialist Democracy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), and Bahro, Rudolph, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (New York: Verso, 1978). The influence of cosmopolitan reformist officials on the making of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” is analyzed by English, Robert D., Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); see also English, Robert D. and Svyatets, Ekaterina, “Soviet Élites and European Integration: From Stalin to Gorbachev,” European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire 21, 2 (2014), 219–33. For a personal account of the tradition of reform communism and Gorbachev’s political culture, see Gorbachev, Mikhail and Mlynář, Zdeněk, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). More broadly, see also Brown, Archie, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the Soviet leader’s interactions with the Western left, see Pons, Silvio, “Western Communists, Mikhail Gorbachev and the 1989 Revolutions,” Contemporary European History 18, 3 (Aug. 2009), 349–62; and also, though with an excessive tilt toward “social-democratizing” Gorbachev, Archie Brown, “Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?,” Europe-Asia Studies 65, 2 (2013), 198–220.
The economic decline of the Eastern bloc has been examined in various perspectives. The multitude of economic analyses on how Soviet-type economies functioned and their fundamental defects has been expertly summarized by Kornai, János, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Overviews from a general historical perspective which also provide insights into economic processes need not be referred to here as these are already cited in other chapters within this book. For an examination of the long lines of economic change, see Aldcroft, Derek H. and Morewood, Steven, Economic Change in Eastern Europe Since 1918 (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995). A greater emphasis on economic history is also provided by Berend, Ivan T., Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe Since 1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). As both historian and participator in the processes described, the author provides a more essayistic account of economic developments in Central Eastern and Eastern Europe, with the exemption of the case of the GDR. For a more analytical approach, see Morewood, Steven, “The Demise of the Command Economies in the Soviet Union and Its Outer Empire,” in Aldcroft, Derek H. and Oliver, Michael J. (eds.), Economic Disasters of the Twentieth Century (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007), 258–311.
To date, only one publication on Comecon also draws on documents from its internal archives: Stone, Randall W., Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Also worthwhile here is van Brabant, Jozef M., Economic Integration in Eastern Europe: A Handbook (New York, Routledge, 1989). The more recent increase in interest in the foreign relations of Soviet-type economies is particularly reflected in Romano, Angela and Romero, Federico (eds.), “European Socialist Regimes Facing Globalisation and European Cooperation: Dilemmas and Responses,” European Review of History 21, 2 (2014) (special issue).
The comprehensiveness of English-language publications on the economic developments in individual countries varies, as does the access to internal documents in the archives. So the literature listed below includes different approaches. For Czechoslovakia, see Myant, Martin R., The Czechoslovak Economy 1948–1988: The Battle for Economic Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The East German economy is examined in Steiner, André, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 2010). Beyond these, various aspects find analysis in Berghoff, Hartmut and Balbier, Uta Andrea (eds.), The East German Economy, 1945–2010: Falling Behind or Catching Up? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the case of Hungary, see mainly Berend, Ivan T., The Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), as well as Révész, Gábor, Perestroika in Eastern Europe: Hungary’s Economic Transformation 1945–1988 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). Given its marked significance for the overall collapse of the Eastern bloc, economic development in Poland has received more attention. In particular, see Poznanski, Kazimierz Z., Poland’s Protracted Transition: Institutional Change and Economic Growth 1970–1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Simatupang, Batara, The Polish Economic Crisis: Background, Causes, Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1994), and Slay, Ben, The Polish Economy: Crisis, Reform, and Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Finally, for the Soviet Union, Alec Nove’s classic publication, An Economic History of the USSR: 1917–1991, 3rd edn. (London: Penguin Books, 1992), is still relevant. Contemporary insider reports now available have been summarized by Ellman, Michael and Kontorovich, Vladimir (eds.), The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). This and other more recent studies are drawn on in Hanson, Philip, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (London: Longman, 2003).
For contemporary accounts, see Garton Ash, Timothy, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990); Dahrendorf, Ralf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990).
For 1989 in broader transnational or global context, see Engel, Ulf, Hadler, Frank and Middell, Matthias (eds.), 1989 in a Global Perspective (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015); Kosicki, Piotr H. and Kunakhovich, Kyrill (eds.), The Legacy of 1989: Continuity and Discontinuity in a Quarter-Century of Global Revolution (forthcoming); Lawson, George et al. (ed.), The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Rupnik, Jacques (ed.), 1989 as a World Event: Democracy, Europe and the New International System in the Age of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2007). For “1989” as part of the rise of neoliberalism, see Ther, Philipp, Europe Since 1989: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
There are many works on the perspective of different actors. On the importance of communists dismantling their own systems, see Kotkin, Stephen, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009). On the role of Gorbachev, see Brown, Archie, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996). On the rise of the “oligarchs,” see Hoffman, David E., The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002). On “1989” from below, see Kenney, Padraic, Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Brier, Robert (ed.), Transnational Approaches to the History of Dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Osnabrück, Germany: Fibre, 2013).
There are excellent collections that address the causes and meanings of “1989” from multiple perspectives. See Tismaneanu, Vladimir (ed.), The Revolutions of 1989 (London: Routledge, 1999). For the most comprehensive intellectual history of the shifts “around 1989,” see Kopeček, Michal and Wciślik, Piotr (eds.), Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe After 1989 (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2015); Mueller, Wolfgang, Gehler, Michael and Suppan, Arnold (eds.), The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2014).
For a revisionist account that is aware of alternatives, see Bockman, Johanna, “The Long Road to 1989: Neoclassical Economics, Alternative Socialisms, and the Advent of Neoliberalism,” Radical History Review 112 (2012), 9–42. For the “disappointments of 1989,” see Ost, David, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Mark, James, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Almost nobody, at least until 1990, predicted that reforms and instability could lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, however, there were suddenly many confident explanations of its denouement. The discussion of why the communist regime ended became a contested concept, with many competing claims. In Western historiography, the dominant approach draws on the theories of nationalism and decolonization, and this chapter addresses the arguments of this approach, especially in the work of Mark Beissinger. Another approach, one that focuses on the evolution and decomposition of communism per se, its ideology, political and cultural institutions, trails behind in importance, and focuses primarily on the personality of Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms. It is pioneered by the work of Brown, Archie, such as “Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?,” Europe–Asia Studies 65, 2 (Mar. 2013), 198–220. Finally, a relatively new approach, crosscutting cultural history and social anthropology, deemphasizes the political and ideological binaries of communism and anti-communism, and draws on postmodernist theories to explain the sudden dissolution of Soviet power. This approach can be found in Berkeley anthropologist Yurchak, Alexei’s book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Many authors argue that the Soviet Union could not be reformed and “saved” once the communist system and communist political regime were gone. A skeptic can and should challenge this approach. See Cohen, Stephen F., “Was the Soviet System Reformable?,” Slavic Review 63, 3 (Autumn 2004), 459–88.
The social history of the Soviet collapse still has to be written. The focus is on the behavior of Soviet communist elites (party nomenklatura) and their role. The dominant argument is that they had “a run on the bank”: abandoning the Soviet communist regime and leaving its institutions crumbling. See Solnick, Steven L., Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Relatively little is done to explore the role of unionized workers, the divisions within the Soviet military-industrial complex, the KGB, the army and other state institutions. There was a pioneering study of ideational changes within the party elites: English, Robert, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), but very little has been done to study regional and local dimensions of this problem. The study of elite politics remains dominant in the historiography; one recent example is a study of the “coup” in August 1991: Lozo, Ignaz, Der Putsch gegen Gorbatschow und das Ende der Sowjetunion (Cologne: Boehlau Verlag, 2014).
In post-Soviet countries, the historiography of the Soviet collapse has been shaped by politics. Mikhail Gorbachev and his liberal associates and advisors presented their narrative, one of evolutionary and peaceful transition to social democracy and integration into global liberal order, abrogated by the August coup and Yeltsin’s radicalism. The Gorbachev camp published an impressive assortment of accounts and documentary collections. In particular, see Cherniaev, Anatolii, Sovmestnyi iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epokh, 1972–1991 gody [Joint Exodus: A Diary of Two Epochs, 1972–1991] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008); Shakhnazarov, Georgii, Tsena svobody. Reformatsiia Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika [The Price of Freedom: Gorbachev’s Reforms Through the Eyes of His Aide] (Moscow: Rossika, Zevs, 1993); Cherniaev, Anatolii, V Politbiuro TsK KPSS (Moscow: Alʹpina Biznes Buks, 2006). The Yeltsin camp came up with its own interpretation, one not generous to Gorbachev. Separately, Yegor Gaidar and his colleagues were the first to explore the collapse from the economic-financial angle: Gaidar, Yegor, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007). In some other post-Soviet states, most notably Ukraine, the events of 1990–91 became part of the narrative of national tragedy, revival, and destruction of the “empire.”
The end of the Soviet Union does not end the international history of communism. How could it be written without taking China’s evolution into account? The task for future scholarship is to place the Soviet developments of 1989–91 into a broader historical and international context. Among promising ways to do this is to study the impact of global consumerism on communist societies and to study economic transition from the centralized communist-type economies to market economies.
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