Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era

by Stephen Kotkin

Book Overview

No one, not even Mikhail Gorbachev, anticipated what was in store when the Soviet Union embarked in the 1980s on a radical course of long-overdue structural reform. The consequences of that momentous decision, which set in motion a transformation eventually affecting the entire postwar world order, are here chronicled from inside a previously forbidden Soviet city, Magnitogorsk. Built under Stalin and championed by him as a showcase of socialism,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520073541
• ISBN13: 9780520073548
• Release Date: September 1992
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

now dated, but still quite good!

Quite excellent view of the late-Soviet reality through the eyes of one Russian industrial town. Very engaging narrative. Highly recommended, along with the venerable classic THE RUSSIANS by Hedrick Smith. In fact I would recommend this book before I would recommend's Hedrick Smith's follow up book THE NEW RUSSIANS, in all honesty. STEELTOWN, USSR is truer in spirit and kinship to the earlier Smith book...THE NEW RUSSIANS focuses a little too much on Gorbachev to the exclusion of the wider picture. This book gives an effective glimpse of that wider picture thru an effective microcosm...a must read for any student of Russian history.