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First published in 1985, this book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of the diverse Communist development strategies that shaped the twentieth century. Robert Bideleux emphasises the appalling human and economic costs of the most widely adopted 'Stalinist' strategies of forced industrialisation and rural collectivisation. He also reconsiders the powerful arguments in favour of the most feasible and cost-effective alternatives to Stalinism, including 'village communisms' and 'market socialisms'. A highly readable and challenging study, this reissue will be of particular value to students.

This essay reviews new books on the fraught relationships between Ukraine, Russia and North Atlatic Treaty Organization countries since 1990, and on comparative studies of quasi-colonial subjugation, the development of anti-imperial nationalism and conflict, and protracted and violent transitions to full national independence in Ireland and Ukraine. There are comparisons of the ways in which four centuries of recurrent tension, conflict and divergence between Ukraine and Russia either resembled or differed from the five centuries of fraught relationships between Ireland and Britain. Ireland's Great Famine (1846–1849) is compared with Ukraine's Holodomor (1932–1933). The essay also assesses conflicting attributions of responsibility for 'squandering' the opportunity to enhance European security and global peace during the 1990s, and for bringing about dramatic escalations of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 – initiating a 'Second Cold War' from 2014 onward.

Far from being uniform and amenable to broad generalizations, the consequences of the international economic crisis of 2008-10 for the post-communist states have been strikingly diverse, and the policy responses of these countries to those crises have been correspondingly varied. The 11 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, and the 10 post-communist states admitted into the EU in 2004 or 2007, were affected in different ways by the economic crisis and offered different responses to it. These widely differing impacts and responses can be satisfactorily explained and conceptualized in terms of relatively concrete and tangible differences in the structures of power, resources, opportunities, incentives and constraints that have emerged in these two broad groupings of countries. The economic systems that have emerged in most of the CIS countries have diverged substantially from those of the post-communist states that joined the EU, with significant cautionary implications for future attempts to integrate or associate CIS countries with the EU. Adapted from the source document.

Post-Communist democratization continues to generate high levels of interest and scholarly debate. The dominant rubrics for the study of post-Communist transformation since the early 1990s have been provided by "democratic transition" and "democratic consolidation" theories and concepts which were mainly developed in endeavors to analyze and explain very different experiences in the Western hemisphere during the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, "the end of communist rule was unthinkingly (but almost universally) identified with the phase of democratic transition," and "transition and consolidation have been the main concepts around which the discussion of democratization has revolved." The books reviewed here offer stimulating changes of approach and challenge widespread "West-centric" assumptions about democracy and democratization.