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Moscow And The Global Left In The Gorbachev Era

Edited by Joan Barth Urban
Reviewed by By Robert Legvold
Fall 1992
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Edited by Joan Barth Urban
Cornell University Press
1992
204 pp.
$29.95

Urban, a long-time student of Soviet relations with the Italian Communist Party, and her coauthors ask a significant question: What happened to the left in other parts of the world during the years Gorbachev was pulling the foundation stones from the edifice of socialism? One of his more interesting intellectual and political relationships was with the Italian Communist Party, and Urban explores that deftly. In addition Heinz Timmermann describes the final reconciliation with social democracy, Harry Gelman, the functional reconciliation with the Chinese communists, and Neil MacFarlane, the alienation from the radical left in the Third World. Federigo Argentieri's arresting concluding essay ponders the long-term future of the left in east-central Europe now that state socialism is dead.

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