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Drawing on newly available materials from the Soviet archives, this book offers an innovative account of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras. The book traces the authorities' initiation and management of the de-Stalinization process and explores a wide range of popular reactions to the new narratives of Stalinism in party statements and in Soviet literature and historiography. Engaging with the dynamic field of memory studies, this book represents the first sustained comparison of this process with other countries' attempts to rethink their own difficult pasts, and with later Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to Stalinism.

In old Russia, patron/client relations, “clan” politics, and a variety of other informal practices spanned the centuries. Government was understood to be patrimonial and personal rather than legal, and office holding was far less important than proximity to patrons. Using research from previously unused documents from the Communist archives, this book shows how these political practices and traditions from old Russia have persisted throughout the twentieth-century Soviet Union and down to the present day. The book examines a number of case studies of political practices in the Stalin era and after. These include cults of personality, the transformation of Old Bolsheviks into noble grandees, the Communist Party's personnel selection system, and the rise of political clans (“family circles”) after the 1917 Revolutions. Stalin's conflicts with these clans, and his eventual destruction of them, were key elements of the Great Purges of the 1930s. But although Stalin could destroy the competing clans, he could not destroy the historically embedded patron-client relationship, as a final chapter on political practice under Putin shows.

Scholars of British America generally conclude that the early eighteenth-century Anglo-American empire was commercial in economics, liberal in politics, and parochial in policy, somnambulant in an era of “salutary neglect.” However, this book demonstrates that the American provinces, under the spur of war, became capitalist, coercive, and aggressive, owing to the vigorous leadership of career army officers, trained and nominated to American government by the captain general of the allied armies, the first duke of Marlborough, and that his influence, and that of his legates, prevailed through the entire century in America. This work follows the duke, whom an eloquent enemy described as “the greatest statesman and the greatest general that this country or any other country has produced,” his staff and soldiers, through the ten campaigns, which, by defanging France, made the union with Scotland possible and made “Great Britain” preeminent in the Atlantic world. Then the book demonstrates that the duke's legates transformed American colonies into provinces of empire.

Menachem Begin, father of Israel's right wing and sixth prime minister of the nation, was known for his unflinchingly hawkish ideology. And yet, in 1979 he signed a groundbreaking peace treaty with Egypt for which he and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Such a contradiction was typical in Begin's life: no other Israeli played as many different, sometimes conflicting, roles as Begin, and no other figure inspired such sharply opposing responses. Begin was belittled and beloved, revered and despised, and his career was punctuated by exhilarating highs on the one hand, despair and ostracism on the other. This biography provides an answer to the question: Who was Begin? Based on wide-ranging research among archival documents and on testimonials and interviews with Begin's closest advisers, the book presents a detailed new portrait of the founding leader. Among the many topics the book holds up to new light are Begin's antagonistic relationship with David Ben Gurion, his controversial role in the 1982 Lebanon War, his unique leadership style, the changes in his ideology over the years, and the mystery behind the total silence he maintained at the end of his career. Through Begin's remarkable life, the book also recounts the history of the right-wing segment of Israeli society, a story essential to understanding the Israel of today.

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) was one of the most militant and uncompromising abolitionists in the United States. As the editor of the abolitionist paper Liberator and cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison spent most of his life arguing against slavery on strictly moral grounds. This book reevaluates Garrison's legacy, his accomplishments, and his limitations. It reflects on his life as a political activist, an internationalist, an advocate of feminism, and more. It presents a new appraisal of one of America's most challenging, inspiring, and controversial historical figures.

Often dismissed by scholars as an opportunistic politician whose ideas lacked historical import, Theodore Roosevelt has been underestimated as a thinker. But this book states that to disdain his politics is to overlook his important and lasting contributions to the shape of modern America. It examines Roosevelt's political thought more deeply than ever before to arrive at a fully revised understanding of his legacy: Roosevelt galvanized a twenty-year period of national reform that permanently altered American politics and Americans' expectations for government, social progress, and presidents. The book explores the historical context of Roosevelt's politics, its intellectual sources, its practice, and its effect on his era and our own, showing that he developed a coherent political science centered on the theme of righteousness, and that this “warrior republicanism” was what made the progressive era possible. The debates of Roosevelt's era were driven largely by his ideas, and from those debates emerged the grammar of our contemporary politics. Casting new light on the fertility and breadth of Roosevelt's thought, the book reveals the full extent of his achievement in twentieth-century intellectual history.

Mary P. Follett (1868–1933) brought new dimensions to the theory and practice of management and was one of America's pre-eminent thinkers about democracy and social organization. The ideas Follett developed in the early twentieth century continue even today to challenge thinking about business and civic concerns. This biography of Follett illuminates the life of this intriguing woman and reveals how she developed her farsighted theories about the organization of human relations. Out of twenty years of civic work in Boston's immigrant neighborhoods, Follett developed ideas about the group basis of democracy and the foundations of social interaction that placed her among leading progressive intellectuals. Later in her career, she delivered influential lectures on business management that form the basis of our contemporary discourse about collaborative leadership, worker empowerment, self-managed teams, conflict resolution, the value of inclusivity and diversity, and corporate social responsibility.

From the first free elections in post-Soviet Russia in 1989 to the end of the Yeltsin period in 1999, Russia's parliament was the site of great political upheavals. Conflicts between communists and reformers generated constant turmoil, and twice parliamentary institutions broke down in violence. This book offers an account of the inaugural decade of Russia's parliament. It describes in unique detail the parliament of 1989–1991 under Mikhail Gorbachev, the interim parliament of 1990–1993, and the current Federal Assembly. Focusing particularly on the emergence of parliamentary parties and bicameralism, the book explores how the organization of the Russian parliament changed, why some changes failed while others were accepted, and why the current parliament is more effective and viable than its predecessors. It links the story of parliamentary evolution in Russia to contemporary theories of institutional development and concludes that, notwithstanding the turbulence of Russia's first postcommunist decade, parliament has served as a stabilizing influence in Russian political life.