Crossing the boundaries. Modernity, ideology and culture in Russia and the Soviet Union

Was the Soviet system a unique phenomenon for the 20th century or its revolutionary novelty is greatly exaggerated? Was the USSR, despite all the excesses of the communist experiment, only a private example of a modern state? The American historian Michael David Fox seeks to get away from the opposition of the "Special Way" of the Soviet Union and the general modernity. The author considers the history of the USSR in all its diversity, showing how the Soviet system processed the legacy of the Russian Empire and developed into a complex intelligent form of modernity with its inherent set of new practices. Michael David Fox-historian, professor at the University of Georgetown in Washington, Scientific Director of the International Center for History and Sociology of the Second World War and its consequences of the Higher School of Economics, founder of the magazine "Kritika: Explorations in Russian History"