The Dynamics of Soviet Politics is the result of reflective and thorough research into the centers of a system whose inner debates are not open to public discussion and review, a system which tolerates no public opposition parties, no prying congressional committees, and no investigative journalists to ferret out secrets. The expert authors offer an inside view of the workings of this closed system a view rarely found elsewhere in discussions of Soviet affairs. Their work, building as it does on the achievements of Soviet studies over the last thirty years, is firmly rooted in established knowledge and covers sufficient new ground to enable future studies of Soviet politics and social practices to move ahead unencumbered by stereotypes, sensationalism, or mystification.

Among the subjects included are: attitudes toward leadership and a general discussion of the uses of political history; the dramatic cycles of officially permitted dissent; the legitimacy of leadership within a system that has no constitutional provision for succession; the gradual adoption of Western-inspired administrative procedures and "systems management"; a study of group competition, and bureaucratic bargaining; Khrushchev's virgin-lands experiment and its subsequent retrenchment; the apolitical values of adolescents; the problems of integrating Central Asia into the Soviet system; a history of peaceful coexistence and its current importance in Soviet foreign policy priorities, and, finally, an overview of Soviet government as an extension of prerevolutionary oligarchy, with an emphasis on adaptation to political change.

Robert V. Daniels’s book Russia: The Roots of Confrontation, first published in 1985, examines the historical contrasts between East and West and elucidates the Russian enigma. The book springs from the thesis that Russia’s national character and its international relations can be understood only in light of the traumas and triumphs, privation and privileges that the country weathered in its unique past under the tsars and the Soviets. The author lays to rest the mistaken American view that Soviet behavior was simply the application of Marxist revolutionary ideology. The character of the Soviet system as it evolved after the Revolution is shown to be a synthesis of revolutionary rhetoric, dictatorial pragmatism, and traditional Russian kinds of behavior. Daniels points out that no part of the world is more alien to Americans than Russia, and he evokes parallels and contrasts with the American experience to clarify the driving forces behind this ill-understood superpower.

From Paris to Peking, from Saigon to Washington, the pillars of the postwar world tottered on the brink of collapse in 1968. Year of the Heroic Guerrilla is the first global analysis of that universal upheaval.

Daniels vividly depicts the great crises of that era: the Tet offensive and the abdication of Lyndon Johnson; the denouncement of the counterculture; the fissuring of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the student revolt at Columbia University; the May uprising in France that nearly overthrew the Fifth Republic; the "cultural revolution" in China; the chilling of the Prague Spring by the Soviet army; and, finally, the convention and riots in Mayor Daley's Chicago, signaling the downturn of the revolutionary spirit in America.