Preface to the Eighth Edition Acknowledgements Part 1 The Fundamentals of Russian History 1. Prologue 2. The Autocratic State 3. The Nineteenth-Century Crisis 4. The People 5. The Intelligentsia: Strangers in a Strange Land Part 2 The End of the Old Order 6. Capitalism Comes to Russia 7. The Revolutionaries Regroup 8. The Final Years and Last Stand Part 3 Lenin’s Russia 9. 1917: Russia’s Two Revolutions 10. Into the Fire: The Civil War 11. New Policies and New Problems Part 4 Steeling the Revolution 12. Bolshevism Without Lenin 13. The Revolution From Above 14. Trial by Fire: The Great Patriotic War 15. Conservative Stalinism Part 5 The Socialist Superpower 16. Khrushchev: Reforming the Revolution 17. The Brezhnev Era: The Graying of the Revolution 18. Gorbachev: From Restructuring to Deconstruction Part 6 The Russian Federation 19. The Russian Devolution 20. Russia in the Twenty-First Century Chronology Selected Readings
Biography
Michael G. Kort is Professor of Social Science in the College of General Studies at Boston University, USA, and has been a fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, USA. In addition to his work on Soviet history, he is the author of The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (1998), The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (2007), A Brief History of Russia (2008), The Vietnam War Reexamined (2018), and co-author of Modernization and Revolution in China (5th ed. 2018). He has written more than a dozen books for young adults, including biographies of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, a history of the Cold War, and a history of Marxism. The first edition of The Soviet Colossus was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
