First Published in 1962, A Key to Soviet Politics is the first full scale attempt to analyse the internal struggle for power in Russia since 1957. The changes in the Soviet government after the ‘Crisis’ of June 1957 are probably better documented than perhaps any other political upheaval in Soviet history, because Soviet press and party journals devoted an unusual amount of attention to the June Crisis and because information on the crisis was allowed to leak out slowly in the subsequent fall of Zhukov in 1957 and Bulganin in 1958, and the renewed attack on the ‘Anti-party’ group at the Party Congresses in 1959 and 1961. Roger Pethybridge argues that this crisis of the ‘Anti-party’ group in fact illuminated many other related topics in Soviet politics. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of Soviet history, Soviet politics, European history, Russian history, and comparative politics.
