The USSR may no longer exist, but its history remainshighly relevant-perhaps today more so than ever. Yet it is a history which fora long time proved impossible to write, not simply due to the lack ofaccessible documentation, but also because it lay at the heart of anideological confrontation which obscured the reality of the Soviet regime. InThe Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin traces this history in all its complexity,drawing widely upon archive material previously unavailable. Highlighting keyfactors such as demography, economics, culture and political repression, Lewinguides us through the inner workings of a system which is still barelyunderstood. In the process he overturns widely held beliefs about the USSR'sleaders, the State-Party system and the Soviet bureaucracy, the "tentacledoctopus" which held the real power. Departing from a simple linear history, TheSoviet Century takes in all the continuities and ruptures that led, via acomplex route, from the founding revolution of October 1917 to the finalcollapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinistdictatorship and the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years.