A Critical History of the USSR. Vol. I: The Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution

A translation of Part I of Rousset's La société eclatée. It is not standard history, but a wide-ranging description of the evolution of classes, institutions and the instruments of power in the Soviet state since the Revolution, as workers' power gave way to "Thermidor" and then to the rule of Stalin and the upper bureaucracy. Written with many Marxist assumptions and interpretations, and with few references, the book makes demands on the reader, but it is a book to be read, pondered and measured against others.