The examination of Baku during the Revolution highlights the city's national and class conflicts, along with the evolution of Bolshevism. Suny's analysis reveals the complexities of the 1918 Commune's failure, challenging the notion that the Revolution was solely driven by a conspiratorial party imposing its will through terror. Instead, it presents a nuanced view of local dynamics and resistance, reshaping our understanding of revolutionary events in this significant oil center of the Russian empire.
"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenin, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--Provided by publisher
Traces the cultural and social transformations and interventions that created
a sense of Armenian nationality in the 19th and 20th centuries. This book
shows that while the limits of Armenia excluded the diaspora, at a time of
state renewal, the boundaries have been expanded to include Armenians who live
beyond the borders of the republic.
In Becoming National Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, two of the foremost authorities on nationalism, acknowledge these changes by combining a diverse selection of readings with a unifying introduction and instructive headnotes that move the discussion of nationalism onto a new and contemporary level. Each group of readings is introduced by a brief historical essay, and the readings are fully annotated. Emphasizing the recent intellectual advances and influential ideas of Miroslav Hroch, Benedict Anderson, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Lauren Berlant and a host of others, this book underscores the nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist theories to show not only where scholars of nationalism have been but where they are going.
