The Red Flag, Priestland, David

Автор: David Priestland
Название: The Red Flag
ISBN: 0713994819 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780713994810
Издательство: Random House - Penguin
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Описание: Communism was one of the most powerful political forces of the twentieth century. At the height of their influence, Communists controlled more than a third of the earth's surface and half the world's population - from the Caribbean in the west to the Pacific in the east, from the Baltic to the South Atlantic. In the 1950s it was the Communist USSR, not the West, that seemed to be winning the race for space, and with it the struggle for technological supremacy.

And as late as the 1970s the Vietnamese Communist guerrillas' victory over the United States convinced many that the future lay with Communism, not capitalism. But more astonishing even than its rapid rise and many triumphs, was, in 1989, Communism's sudden, devastating collapse. In "The Red Flag", the extraordinary story of Communism's rise and fall, David Priestland presents a bold and unorthodox challenge to conventional wisdom.

He insists that Communism was neither merely a system of terroristic totalitarian control - as its harsher critics claim - nor was it simply a tough project of modernization, as its apologists suggest. Communism was primarily an extreme response to the manifold inequalities - political, economic and ethnic - that have divided humanity over the last two centuries. But paradoxically, while destroying one web of inequality, Communism was simultaneously weaving another.

At a time when globalized capitalism is in crisis and Marxist criticisms have renewed appeal, "The Red Flag" is essential reading if we are to comprehend this crucial - and much misunderstood - episode in world history.