Planning and socialism are synonymous. However, as Jack Conrad argues in a two-part article, there is planning and planning. The Soviet Union’s first five-year plan owed more to chaos than plan
Russia, that half-barbarous country, whose leaders, be they czars or commissars, Rasputins or Putins, have always treated their own people as if they were a conquered nation, this same Russia, in the course of little more than a century brought forth the greatest body of literature the world has ever known. That is a large but, I believe, not risky generalization. Think only of the dazzling cavalcade of Russian writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov, and then, later, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vasily Grossman, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Neal Ascherson · Kings Grew Pale: Rethinking 1848 · LRB 1 June 2023 lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This book provides first-hand documentation of events in the Soviet Union when the Civil War was ending and Bolshevik regime was consolidating its position. The author was an American anarchist of Russian origin deported to Russia in 1919. The book is based on his diaries written between 1919-21.