Red Rosa

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Rodric Braithwaite

"Rodric Braithwaite was British ambassador to Moscow during the critical years of Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failed coup of August 1991, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin. From the vantage point of the British Embassy (once the mansion of the great nineteenth-century merchant Pavel Kharitonenko) with its commanding views cross the Moscow River to Red Square and the Kremlin, Braithwaite had a ringside seat. With his long experience of Russia and the Russians, who saw him as 'Mrs. Thatcher's Ambassador', on good personal terms with Mikhail Gorbachev, he was in a privileged position close to the centre of Russia's changing relationship with the West.". "But this is not primarily a memoir. It is an intimate analysis of momentous change and the people who drove it, against the background of Russia's long history and its unique but essentially European culture. Braithwaite watched as Gorbachev and his allies struggled to modernise and democratise a system which had already reached the point of terminal decay. Against the opposition of the generals, they forced the abandonment of the nuclear confrontation as the Soviet Union fell apart. The climax of the drama came in August 1991 when a miscellaneous collection of conservative patriots - generals, politicians and secret policemen - attempted to reverse the course of history and succeeded only in accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jonathan C. Valdez

In this timely book Jonathan Valdez explores the role of ideology in the maintenance and subsequent collapse of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. He begins by examining how to define ideology, proposing that it should not be viewed as any specific body of thought but as the interpretation of a body of thought for a political purpose. Valdez then looks at how Marxism-Leninism was used to legitimize Soviet influence. He shows how it was interpreted to rationalize policy actions, to communicate Soviet intent and policy desires to East European elites, and to explain change in socialist systems. Valdez argues that the use of the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism to perform various functions ultimately brought about a change in the basic assumptions of the theory itself. This resulted in the abandonment of the previous insistence on a universal model of socialism and of the idea that the international interests of the socialist bloc must take precedence over individual national interest. Soviet influence in Eastern Europe rested on little else than these ideological principles and consequently stood little chance of surviving their re-interpretation. Finally Valdez assesses the re-interpretation of the fundamental principles of Soviet-East European relations by reformist scholars in the Soviet Union, and the response by conservative members of the party apparatus. . By focusing upon both the political debates between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the political uses of ideology within that relationship, Jonathan Valdez makes an important and innovative contribution to the study of Soviet external relations. Internationalism and the ideology of Soviet influence will be widely read by students and specialists of Soviet and East European studies, international relations and political science.

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T. Michael Holmes

The end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union have spurred historian T. Michael Holmes to look back to the years 1947-1953, when the territory of Hawaii was gripped by the specter of communism. Holmes begins by remembering the U.S. response to communism from the time of the Russian Revolution through the careers of America's most famous anticommunists, Richard M. Nixon and Joseph R. McCarthy; he also provides a brief account of the events that led to Hawaii's "red scare." The focus then shifts to a single critical year, bounded by Governor Ingram M. Stainback's 1947 declaration of war against communism in Hawaii and the 1948 dismissal of school teachers John and Aiko Reinecke. During this year the two primary targets of the anticommunists were revealed: the ILWU and the Democratic party. Finally Holmes looks at the 1949 longshore strike, the Hawaii hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the last major thrust of militant anticommunism in Hawaii, the Smith Act trial of the Hawaii Seven. Based on an extensive record of public testimony, numerous personal interviews and letters, and a thorough examination of the newspapers of the day, The Specter of Communism in Hawaii is the most comprehensive work in print on Hawaii's anticommunist impulse.

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Guenter Lewy

From a height of almost 100,000 members during the Depression, when politicians, workers, and intellectuals were drawn into its orbit, the American Communist Party has descended into irrelevance and isolation, failing even to run a presidential candidate in 1988. Indeed, as Guenter Lewy writes in this critical account of American Communism, despite decades of feverish activity and ferocious discipline, it was a cause doomed to fail from the very beginning. In The Cause that Failed, Lewy offers an incisive narrative of the American Communist Party from the days of John Reed to the advent of glasnost. He traces its origins and development, underscoring how its devotion to Moscow and inflexible Marxist ideology isolated it from the American scene--in fact, most of its first members were Eastern European immigrants. During the left wing tide of the Depression the Communist Party reached the peak of its influence, as it joined labor unions and progressive organizations in a "Popular Front." But Lewy reveals the deceptive, antidemocratic, self-defeating tactics the Communists pursued even then, as they manipulated front organizations, seized control of political parties, peace groups, and labor unions, and enforced political conformity among members and sympathizers. He follows the Party through its inexorable decline in the succeeding decades, up to its current position as one of the last Stalinist parties left in a world of glasnost and perestroika. Lewy also provides a sharply critical discussion of the encounter between Communism and liberal and mainstream America. He examines such groups as the ACLU and SANE, arguing that the years when these organizations were tolerant toward Communists were also the times when they neglected their original purpose in favor of partisan causes. He shows how Communists have manipulated well-meaning citizens in the peace movement and in Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign. One of the great ills Americans suffer, he writes, is an overreaction to McCarthyism--an atmosphere of anti-anticommunism--which blinds them to the wrongs wrought by international Communism and makes them ignore the deceptive role played by the American Communist Party, which even today still keeps eighty percent of its membership secret. The Cause that Failed presents an intensively researched and trenchantly argued historical analysis of Communism in America. Guenter Lewy's provocative account provides a new understanding of Communism's machinations in U.S. politics, and how Americans from across the political spectrum have responded to its challenge.