Stephen Kotkin

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history's most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded--and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies--East Germany, Romania, and Poland--to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class--communism's establishment, or "uncivil society." The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany's pseudotechnocracy to Romania's megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland's cult of Mary to the Kremlin's surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.From the Hardcover edition.

"China shares borders with 20 neighboring countries--more than any other country in the world, by a factor of two. Each of the neighbors has its own national interests, and in some cases, that includes territorial and maritime jurisdictional claims in places that China also claims. Most of these 20 countries have had a history of border conflicts with China; some of them never amicably settled. This book brings together some of the foremost historians, geographers, political scientists, and legal scholars on modern Asia to examine each of China's twenty land or sea borders. The alphabetically arranged chapters cover Afghanistan, Bhutan, Brunei, Indonesia, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Pakistan, The Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. Each chapter details the history and status of boundary setting and the ongoing management of transnational interactions--trade, resource exploitation, fishing rights, and population movements. An introduction and a concluding chapter draw out the implications of the book's twenty case studies. Issues examined include: the early history of setting the border with China; the ways in which China has acquired "new" boundaries as a result of changes in the international law of the sea; the type and intensity of China's border conflicts with its neighbors; successful efforts to delimit official borders; unsuccessful efforts to delimit borders; and areas where future border disputes could arise"--Supplied by publisher.

Published in 1848, at a time of political upheaval in Europe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto for the Communist Party was at once a powerful critique of capitalism and a radical call to arms. It remains the most incisive introduction to the ideas of Communism and the most lucid explanation of its aims. Much of what it proposed continues to be at the heart of political debate into the 21st century. It is no surprise, perhaps, that The Communist Manifesto (as it was later renamed) is the second bestselling book of all time, surpassed only by the Bible. --amazon.com

"Drawing on hitherto unpublished material from the Moscow archives, only recently opened up to Western scholars, and on personal testimonies and private papers gathered from all over Russia, Georgia and Abkhazia, Service challenges the conventional view of the Soviet leader as simply a murderous bureaucrat."--BOOK JACKET.