Suchergebnisse

In December 1927 delegates to the XV Party Congress of the Soviet Union adopted the slogan, "Face toward Production." Over the next five years, as the Party embarked on a massive effort to industrialize the country and collectivize agriculture, this slogan came to define policy in every area of life. The Party daily exhorted the people to speed up production, increase the harvest, reconstruct agriculture. Workers erected behemoths of heavy industry as artists emblazoned the image of belching smokestacks everywhere, symbols not of pollution but of the transformative promise of industrialization. Stalin and his supporters purged the unions, the planning agencies and the Party of "rightists" who were seen as obstacles to the new tempos of production and the collectivization of agriculture.

Bob Hayden is the unusual kind of scholar who makes us confront our darker side. Our choice examples of civic culture and democratic functioning seem to emerge less shining as a consequence of his exposition. When put into a perspective that includes contemporary ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, both Steven Spielberg's Hollywoodized Oskar Schindler and Vaclav Klaus's Czech Republic lose some of their luster.