Red Microchip: Technology Transfer, Export Control, and Economic Restructuring in the Soviet Union. By Daniel L. Burghart. Brookfield: Dartmouth Publishing, 1992. x, 250 pp. Index. $59.95, hard bound.

Slavic Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 900-901
Author(s):  
Robert W. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Technology Transfer ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Export Control ◽  
The Soviet Union

The Soviet Blueprint

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Kligman ◽  
Katherine Verdery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Technology Transfer ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Ambitious Program

This chapter discusses the Soviet blueprint, which established the technology of collectivization that East European leaders followed, with variations, during the 1950s. As the first country in the world to be founded on Marxist–Leninist principles, the Soviet Union had myriad problems to solve. The leaders' ambitious program of social engineering required developing a variety of techniques for carrying out specific tasks, such as obtaining food requisitions, collectivizing agriculture, and so on. These techniques formed the basis for creating “replica” regimes in Eastern Europe following World War II, in a process of technology transfer of almost unparalleled scope. This technological package may be called “the Soviet blueprint,” of which collectivization was a major part. Although the results varied considerably, each East European country was pressed into adopting more or less the same package. Nowhere, however, did the blueprint fully succeed against recalcitrant local realities—not even in the Soviet Union itself.

Is the Soviet Present China's Future?

1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance Squires Meaney
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Economic Growth And Development ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Revolutionary Regime

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, scholars in the fields of Soviet politics and comparative communism began to reexamine the political and social character of the Soviet Union and Soviet-type regimes in the wake of more than a decade of de-Stalinization. They questioned the validity of the totalitarian model (at least in its more rigid forms) that suggested a static image of politics and society in communist systems, and proposed concepts more cognizant of the dynamic nature of these systems. A prominent theme in much of this literature was that social differentiation resulting from economic development and the emergence of modern industrial society would prove incompatible with continued dictatorial rule by a “vanguard party” following a militant, Utopian ideology. In particular, the rise of a large elite stratum of skilled technical and professional personnel was expected to militate against the long-term viability of a revolutionary regime. Analysts proposed that, under pressure from this group, whose contributions are indispensable to economic growth and development, the party leadership would eventually be compelled to abandon radical social and economic restructuring through revolutions from above in favor of more legal-rational modes of operation, and see its own role as the balancer of the various interests typical of a modern society.

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