TRANSFORMATION OF STATE SOCIALISM: FROM COMMUNISM TO CHAOTIC CAPITALISM?

Abstract

Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, £45.00 (£14.95 pbk), 378 pp. (ISBN 0-7456-1312-8).

Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, £40.00 (£14.00 pbk), 298 pp. (ISBN 0-691-01132-X).

Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Privatising the Russian Economy, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997, $42.50 ($16.95 pbk), xix+190 pp. (ISBN 0-8014-8396-4).

Annika Thunborg, Public and Non-Profit Interaction: U.S. Assistance to Eastern European Media 1989-1995, Lund: Lund University Press, 1997, SKr 223 pbk, x+271 pp. (ISBN 911-7966-419-9).

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the state socialist system has put an end to a sub-discipline of political science (communist politics), to the study in sociology of an ‘alternative’ framework of industrial society and it has also led to philosophical speculation about the ‘end of history’. In its train the collapse has generated new sets of problems in the field of ‘transitology’. The distinctive features of the transformation of state socialism are that, unlike in the political movement from autocracy to polyarchy characterising southern European states such as Spain and Greece, the structural elite-induced changes under post-communism involve simultaneously transformations of the value system, forms of integration and legitimacy, types of political management and interest articulation and the economic mechanism, including the ownership of property.