Prior to May 2015, the oil-rich jurisdiction of Alberta had, for over four decades, been a one-party state. During that time, the rule of the Progressive Conservatives essentially went unchallenged, with critiques of government policy falling on deaf ears and Alberta ranking behind other provinces in voter turnout. Given the province’s economic reliance on oil revenues, a symbiotic relationship also developed between government and the oil industry. Cross-national studies have detected a c...

From fur and fish to oil and minerals, Canadian development has often been understood through its relationship to export staples. This understanding, argues Paul Kellogg, has led many political economists to assume that Canadian economic development has followed a path similar to those of staple-exporting economies in the Global South, ignoring a more fundamental fact: as an advanced capitalist economy, Canada sits in the core of the world system, not on the periphery or semi-periphery.

From December 1995 to summer 1998, Ontario witnessed eleven one-day general strikes and Days of Action across its major cities. These protests were sparked by the so-called Common Sense Revolution associated with Conservative Premier Mike Harris, elected to office in 1995. Written during the twenty-fifth anniversary of this significant social movement, Austerity and Resistance aims to tell its story and draw lessons from it.Paul Kellogg draws on his experiences as a former...

Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independen...

Beginning in 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was divided into opposing sections, one led by Vladimir Lenin, the other by Iulii Martov. Until 1917, both Lenin and Martov were equally prominent figures in Russian politics. Martov, an anti-war socialist intellectual from a Jewish background, wrote prolifically for a number of important publications inside and outside Russia*.* Although the books, articles, and pamphlets written by Lenin during the same period remain readily a...

Modern nationalism in northeastern Europe has often led to violence and then reconciliation between nations with bloody pasts. In this fascinating book, Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationhood over four centuries, discusses various atrocities (including the first account of the massive Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s), and examines Poland’s recent successful negotiations with its newly independent Eastern neighb...

"The Soviet Tragedy is an essential coda to the literature of Soviet studies...Insofar as [he] returns the power of ideology to its central place in Soviet history, Malia has made an enormous contribution. He has written the history of a utopian illusion and the tragic consequences it had for the people of the Soviet Union and the world."-- David Remnick, The New York Review of Books"In Martin Malia, the Soviet Union had one of its most acute observers. Wi...

Through sources and documents, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union by Richard Sakwa places the Soviet experience in historical and comparative context. The author introduces each source in this volume fully and provides commentary and analysis.Using eye-witness accounts, official documents and new materials which have just come to light, Richard Sakwa gives an historical overview of the Soviet Union from the revolution of 1906 to the fall of the regime.

The first volume of The Cambridge History of Communism deals with the tumultuous events from 1917 to the Second World War, such as the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the revolutionary turmoil in post-World War I Europe, and the Spanish Civil War. Leading experts analyse the ideological roots of communism, historical personalities such as Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky and the development of the Communist movement on a world scale against this backdrop of conflict that defined the period. It...

Praise for Paul Le Blanc's Lenin and the Revolutionary Party:"A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin." -Michael LöwyAs a leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin was perhaps the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century. These clearly written essays offer an account of his life and times, a lively view of his per...

For generations, historians of the right, left, and center have all debated the best way to understand V. I. Lenin’s role in shaping the Bolshevik party in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. At their worst, these studies locate his influence in the forcefulness of his personality. At their best, they show how Lenin moved other Bolsheviks through patient argument and political debate. Yet remarkably few have attempted to document the ways his ideas changed, or how they were in ...

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the political thought of Joseph Stalin. Making full use of the documentation that has recently become available, including Stalin's private library with his handwritten margin notes, the book provides many insights on Stalin, and also on western and Russian Marxist intellectual traditions. Overall, the book argues that Stalin's political thought is not primarily indebted to the Russian autocratic tradition, but belongs to a tradition of revolu...