Amazing insight to the soviet era government that can only be offered by russian citizens!

Ben Tillet gives a compelling, brilliant portrait of an important man in an important position. This is a must-read for any history major anywhere.

Dostoyevsky is usually regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived. Literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism have been profoundly shaped by his ideas. His works are often called prophetic because he so accurately predicted how Russia's revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.

In 1876-77 Dostoyevsky devoted his energies to Dnevnik pisatelya, which he was now able to bring out in the form he had originally intended. A one-man journal, for which Dostoyevsky served as editor, publisher, and sole contributor, the Diary represented an attempt to initiate a new literary genre. Issue by monthly issue, the Diary created complex thematic resonances among diverse kinds of material: short stories, plans for possible stories, autobiographical essays, sketches that seem to lie on the boundary between fiction and journalism, psychological analyses of sensational crimes, literary criticism, and political commentary. The Diary proved immensely popular and financially rewarding, but as an aesthetic experiment it was less successful, probably because Dostoyevsky, after a few intricate issues, seemed unable to maintain his complex design. Instead, he was drawn into expressing his political views, which, during these two years, became increasingly extreme. Specifically, Dostoyevsky came to believe that western Europe was about to collapse, after which Russia and the Russian Orthodox church would create the kingdom of God on earth and so fulfill the promise of the Book of Revelation. In a series of anti-Catholic articles, he equated the Roman Catholic church with the socialists because both are concerned with earthly rule and maintain (Dostoyevsky believed) an essentially materialist view of human nature. He reached his moral nadir with a number of anti-Semitic articles.

Because Dostoyevsky was unable to maintain his aesthetic design for the Diary, its most famous sections are usually known from anthologies and so are separated from the context in which they were designed to fit. These sections include four of his best short stories--"Krotkaya" ("The Meek One"), "Son smeshnogo cheloveka" ("The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"), "Malchik u Khrista na elke" ("The Heavenly Christmas Tree"), and "Bobok"--as well as a number of autobiographical and semifictional sketches, including "Muzhik Marey" ("The Peasant Marey"), "Stoletnaya" ("A Hundred-Year-Old Woman"), and a satire, "Spiritizm. Nechto o chertyakh Chrezychaynaya khitrost chertey, esli tolko eto cherti" ("Spiritualism. Something about Devils. The Extraordinary Cleverness of Devils, If Only These Are Devils"). These are some rare stories indeed...

I first read this eye-opening history in college back in 1983, in the revolutionary Reagan era. During the '70's it was taboo to talk about the left's enthusiasm for Stalin during the '30's and '40's (that was a form of McCarthyism, you see.) This was one of the first revisionist books to break that taboo and point out the obvious--that during the Great Depression and World War II a large part of the "chattering classes" (maybe even the majority) were enraptured by the vision of "a better world" put forth by the Soviet Union at the height of the bloody Stalinist era. What makes this indictment all the more serious is that Prof. O'Neill was at the time a political moderate; he wasn't even a neo-conservative, let alone a Reaganite (I wonder if his politics have changed in the years since.) My college senior thesis leaned on this book (perhaps too heavily, I liked it so much.) A couple of my professors had a hard time with the idea that the position of the intellectual class had been that bad. And that was at conservative Brigham Young University! Since then of course a lot of information has come out of the Soviet archives about espionage and "agents of influence." For an updated look at these issues, see Arthur Herman's revisionist biography "Joseph McCarthy."

Between the Hammer and the Anvil? Chinese and Russian Policies in Outer Mongolia, 1911-1921 by Thomas E.Ewing

This book is a long awaited,definitive treatment of the AEF intervention in Siberia at the end of WWI. Well written and authoritative, the work is especially relevant to our times, given the state of Russian-American relations. Military readers will recognize in this tale an excellent early example of what has become an increasingly important role for our armed forces to day; strategic deployment of military force where US interests are at stake but no actual declaration of war exists. Between War and Peace is a "must read" for those with an interest in international diplomacy, war powers, the presidency, and military history. Highly recommended.

In following the precepts of revisionist history, Robert Weier avoids the traditional analysis of institutional history of the Knights of Labor. In its place emphasizes in understanding the men, women, and ethnic groups that composed this organization and focuses on the culture it envogued during the Gilded Age era. In which strongly attracted large amounts of workers to the Knights of Labor platform; however, those tools did not reinforce the universal values desired among its membership. The KOL proceeded through five stages during its existence. It began as a fraternal, secretive brotherhood organization to insure the livelihood as an entity. The next ushered in the evolution from a secretive to a public established organization. The third phase, which is the main focus of the book, is the experimentation, modification, and creation of a worker culture defined by the Knights of Labor. Then KOL experiences a period of decline and decentralization allows more flexibility of local KOL taverns initiatives. The dwindling of membership and the leadership witnessing the union die, attempted in a last ditch effort to unify and re-solidify itself it reverted back to its fraternal beginnings. The culture that manifested itself under the KOL leadership encouraged a more cooperative relationship between labor and capital. The songs had motifs of Jesus condemnation of Mammon worship, KOL as the true beholders of true Christianity and patriots. The literature was less direct in nature regarding a clear potential conflict between labor and capital.

Everyone remembers the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Or at least most people do. Like all baby boomers remember about the JFK assassination or Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. Exactly like the other two history altering events, news of the disaster hit the headlines all over the world. All those who read, saw or heard about it heaved a sigh of despair. In brief, for the benefit of those who are challenged on their recall abilities, the Bhopal gas tragedy involved the release of Methyl Isocyanate gas from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, Central India. Forty tonnes of the poisonous cloud, that was released from the factory settled over the low-lying areas of the city. Within minutes innocent people, living in surrounding shanties and squatter camps, were transported into a lethal gas chamber facing a holocaust. It happened around midnight on December the 2nd, 1984. By sunrise of the 3rd over 2000 people lay dead or dying in homes and on the streets.

Morehouse and Subramanium's book on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy is a well-researched study about the Union Carbide and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book starts with the history of Union Carbide, a company that came to colonial India in 1905. The company started the manufacture of "Eveready Flashlight Batteries" in 1926. "Eveready" and portable lighting became synonymous and was remembered with fondness in households across the cities, towns of villages of India. In 1969 the by now huge multinational corporation started a plant in Bhopal, to manufacture pesticides. By 1983, the company had 14 plants in India manufacturing chemicals, pesticides, batteries and other products. In December 1984, Union Carbide brought permanent darkness to the lives of thousands of residents in Bhopal, maimed and injured several hundred thousands more. The events of that fateful night left a swath of destruction and desolation that has only been rivaled by the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima.

What Morehouse and Subramanium have done is to take us backstage to the events that happened at the plant before the release of the gas, and the response of the various agencies after the disaster. The authors help us get a clearer understanding of what led to the disaster, the chaos and confusion that secondarily led to failure of the relief organizations. Later they explore the tangled web of litigation that followed. The authors critically evaluate the plant and point out the defects in the design of the plant, as well as the failures in the safety devices that led to exothermic chain reaction that caused the accumulation of the large quantities of the poisonous gas, and its final release into the atmosphere.

According to the authors, and this has been substantiated by several other publications, besides the failure of the plant management several other factors compounded the tragedy. Relief measures were botched, disaster sirens not blown, orderly evacuation not planned all leading to chaos and confusion. Later, lack of experience in dealing with mass disasters or knowledge on how to treat the suffering significantly influenced the mortality and morbidity. Political considerations paralyzed the Governments relief efforts while well meaning volunteer efforts were perceived as threats to Governmental stability. The post disaster record keeping and documentation was conducted so haphazardly as to prove worthless. Even today we remain with inadequate scientific evaluation of the disaster to develop preventive scenarios.

In later chapters, the authors describe the jurisdictional battles, the attempts by Union Carbide's Corporate lawyers to disown the subsidiary, transfer the case to India and several other legal maneuverings. The last three chapters answer two important questions (a) Can it happens here in the US? Yes, of course it can happen here, it has happened here at a subliminal level but a major tragedy could strike any chemicals factory in say Thailand or New Jersey, any day. The other question gives very creative information on what can we do to prevent future Bhopal's from happening. The book was written with Subramanium covering the first set of chapters about the situation in India and Morehouse writing the latter half. However, the book reads very seamlessly and has an absorbing narrative. It is eminently readable and extremely thought provoking.

The book is a classic study about the cause and effect of environmental disasters. It is also a clarion call for action by concerned activist groups for legislation on the "Right To Know Laws" about hazardous chemicals that are manufactured, stored or utilized in a community. Despite the numerous reassurances from the chemical manufacturers, occurrence of another Bhopal like tragedy cannot be ruled out with certainty. The authors suggest, preventing a future environmental disaster from happening can only be done by concerned public action, effective legislation and efficient enforcement of safety regulations. As they describe it, the calamity in Bhopal could have been used as an opportunity to revamp the existing imperfections in the hazardous chemicals industry.

Unfortunately the legal maneuvering in the Bhopal case precluded the judiciary from giving the chemical industry a sound warning. Those in the know of the turn of events know that the legal settlement failed in this important aspect, adding insult to injury heaped upon the citizens of Bhopal. Ultimately, the judicial failure in censuring the chemical industry absolved it of responsibility in vaporizing a city. Moreover as it did not serve a punitive warning to Multi-national corporations, it condoned the view that it was okay to place corporate greed above interests of the people and, company bottom line above human dignity. This book eloquently reveals that man really is at the mercy of mammon.

Since most studies of Russian industrialization tend to examine the capitalist system as a whole and downplay the role of individual firms, Jonathan Grant's Big Business in Russia fills an important niche. Originating from his Ph.D. dissertation (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), this in-depth study of the St. Petersburg-based Putilov Company, Imperial Russia's largest arms manufacturer, advances our understanding of Russian industrial history at the micro level. The few specialists who have explored business activity in Imperial Russia have focused either on firms established by foreigners or non-industrial firms (e.g. banking, publishing, or insurance). Grant, now an assistant professor of modern Russian history at Florida State University in Tallahassee, poses the question: "Did Russian businessmen conduct their affairs in a unique way based on an essentially different understanding of the market and state, or did they pursue strategies for growth that would have been intelligible to their contemporaries in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States?" (p. 1). Grant concludes that Putilov's market behavior did not differ from that of the key Western arms manufacturers such as Krupp, Skoda, Vickers, and Scneider-Creusot. Thus, Grant maintains, Russian business behavior was not "deviant." The board of directors at the Putilov Company followed expansionist strategies as aggressive as any of its Western counterparts, hesitating neither to jettison old product lines, nor to invent new ones based on market forecasts. Hence Grant's study shows that the state's role in the Putilov Company-still extant today as the Kirovsky Zavod--has been exaggerated.
The book is divided into seven chronological chapters: 1) "The Rise and Fall of a Rail Manufacturing Giant: N. I. Putilov and the Putilov Company, 1868-1885;" 2) "Engineering Growth: Locomotives, Artillery, and Diversification Strategies, 1885-1900;" 3)"The Russian Krupp: Putilov and the Artillery Business, 1900-1907; 4) "Banks, Boards, and Naval Expansion: The Question of Bank Dominance, 1907-1914;" 5) "Putilov at War, 1914-1917; 6) "Conclusion: Between State and Market;" and 7) "Epilogue: Putilov's Successors." Grant's Introduction skillfully reviews the scholarly literature on Russian industrial history.
Because the Putilov factory had experiences typical of other industrial enterprises in Late Imperial Russia, Grant's choice of a case study is ideal. Originally purchased and owned by Nikolai Ivanovich Putilov (1817-1880), the factory was dependent on the tsarist state, then sold out to foreign investors whence it became a joint-stock company (p. 4).
Grant's wide use of foreign archival documents contributes to the book's uniqueness. He draws extensively on the Putilov factory's correspondence with banks and government offices from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg, as well as its correspondence with the tsarist army and navy from the Russian State Archive of the Navy in St. Petersburg and from the Russian State Military-Historical Archive in Moscow. For the discussion of Putilov's armaments production in Chapters Two and Three, Grant used the records of the Main Artillery Administration (Glavnoe Artilleriiskoe Upravleniye), as well as British Admiralty intelligence reports located in the British Public Record Office (Kew, Surrey, United Kingdom). In addition, he found the company's published annual account books, housed at the Moscow-based Lenin Library, to be largely reliable, despite rumors by a Soviet scholar that they may have been falsified (p. 15).
While Grant defends admirably his argument about the Putilov Company, one wishes he had extended it a bit farther. If "the image of Russia as fundamentally exceptional in its economic development should be discarded," and if Russian capitalists before the Bolshevik Revolution were just as astute as their Western counterparts, what made Soviet Russia so vulnerable to the mythology of Marxist economic and political theory?
In any case, serious graduate students interested in Russian and European business history should read Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in conjunction with other key works such as Susan McCaffray's The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Thomas C. Owen's Entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire, 1861-1914 (M.E. Sharpe, 1996); and Ruth A. Roosa's and Thomas Owen's Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: the Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917 (M.E. Sharpe, 1997).---Johanna Granville, Ph.D., Stanford University

If you're one of those people fascinated by the Soviet Union in the 1930s your mind will be blown by this quite fabulous book. Like virtually no other work I've read on the subject it brings home quite how anarchic life was for many people and how the ludicrously inhuman way in which the Soviet Union was run helped crush the population's soul. Anyone interested enough in this topic to probe further should also read "An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia", which is almost as good as this work. Andreev-Khomiakov's greatest talent is his ability to wriggle right into the psyches of the opposers and the opposed to produce a graphic explanation of what was so wrong with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He also produces enough anecdotes to show how some people can retain their most human qualities at a time when everyone around them is descending into brutality. I say again -- this is a quite extraordinary work. Buy it now!