Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment

(Paperback)

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Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal upturning of a peasant society but also by the modernization and industrialization of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism. Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.

Reviews

A towering figure in the field of Soviet history, Ronald Suny is a prolific and engaged scholar, who has opened up new fields of research -- notably of nationalism and empire -- and been himself open to new conceptual approaches, while remaining true to perspectives on the Russian Revolution and Stalinism that have stood the test of time. His work combines trenchant analysis with lucid and large-scale synthesis. -- S A Smith, author of Russia in Revolution
With his lightly-worn erudition, good humour and mastery of the field, Ron Suny is the perfect guide to the big questions in Soviet history. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand Stalinism and its interpreters. -- Sheila Fitzpatrick

Author Bio

Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Soviet Experiment; Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution; and "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide.