Haymarket Books is proud to announce the paperback edition of the Marxist classic Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory, by Kevin Murphy.
Why did the most unruly proletariat of the Twentieth Century come to tolerate the ascendancy of a political and economic system that, by every conceivable measure, proved antagonistic to working-class interests?
Revolution and Counterrevolution is at the center of the ongoing discussion about class identities, the Russian Revolution, and early Soviet industrial relations. Based on exhaustive research in four factory-specific archives, it is universally recognized as the most thorough investigation to date on Russian workers during the revolutionary era. Its direct engagement with the major interpretive questions about the formation of the Stalinist system has forced scholars to re-evaluate long-held assumptions about early Soviet society.
Revolution and Counterrevolution won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for Marxist book of the year in 2005.
"Kevin Murphy has written an important book. It steers a course between the prevailing historical orthodoxy that dismisses the Russian Revolution of October 1917 as a disastrous aberration and the so-called 'revisionists' who have portrayed Stalinism as a phenomenon with strong popular roots."
*Alex Callinicos, Professor of European Studies, King's College London and member of Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize Committee
"The archives have been open now for fifteen years and few historians of revolutionary Russia have tested previously held assumptions and interpretations of the past through systematic studies of primary source material as Murphy has achieved in this study."
*The Russian Review
"The workers of the Hammer and Sickle factory come alive here in an exciting story of struggle, victory, and defeat. Their voices ring out to us across the years, as we join them in their meetings and on the shop floor, at the height of revolutionary hopes and the defeats of the Stalin years. Murphy offers an unprecedented view of dissent and accommodation at the grassroots level."
*Wendy Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University
"Murphy has given us an impeccably researched case study of the vicissitudes of workers politics on the shop floor, which charts the rise and fall of worker activism....This is not a monolithic working class of revolutionary heroes or atomized victims, but a politically and ideologically diverse and contradictory group whose daily struggles and internal battles Murphy charts with subtlety and precision."
*Donald Filtzer, University of East London, UK
[url]http://www.haymarketbooks.org/[/url]
Kevin Murphy teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His current writing projects include _A People's History of the Russian Revolution_ and a study of strikes in the Soviet Union from 1921-1934 (with Dr. Alexey Gusev, Moscow State University).