In a 1925 article on the post-Revolutionary production of the State Porcelain Factory in Leningrad, the ceramic artist Elena Danko described the factory's wares as "news from a radiant future." This volume is a catalogue of the Art Institute of Chicago's 1992 exhibit of Soviet porcelain from the collection of Craig and Kay Tuber. The essays included in News from a Radiant Future discuss the relationship between Bolshevik propaganda and the state porcelain factory, as well as the larger tradition of Russian imperial ceramics. They also consider porcelain's connection to the Russian folk heritage and specifically to the October Revolution.

One of the major historians of prerevolutionary Russia has collected in this volume some of his most important essays. Written over a number of years, these pioneering works have been revised and updated and are complemented by others being published for the first time. Thematically, they cover major subjects in Imperial Russian history and in historical writing, such as ideas and their role in historical change; the intelligentsia, the nobility, and peasant society; and historiography. The twelve essays raise cardinal questions about current scholarship on Russian history before the upheavals of 1917 and offer original interpretations that are of interest to the educated layman as well as the professional historian.

Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system? Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism. "A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review "A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology "Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology

The advent of modernity, the requirements of development and the high level of poverty, make the struggle for life even more difficult under the tropics. It is a daily strife that goes on in a lifetime, and it is permanent. The situation is even so bad that the black continent is plying under the weight of numerous ailments made up of corruption and embezzlement of public funds; and if we had to add the systematic looting of the continents assets by the western powers, the bowl is full. We now experience a reversal of values, an abandonment of ethical and moral precepts. The degradation thus announced, sinks Africa into an endless hole and compromises its future in the long run. The race to money, material things, becomes the existing requirement. It is the survival of the fittest for poor Africa, throwing its sons in the streets, sacrificing its youth at the altar of promiscuity and vice.

Explores the current and future trajectories of the paradigm of postsocialism. If socialism did not end as abruptly as is sometimes perceived, what remnants of it linger today and will continue to linger? Moreover, if postsocialism is an umbrella term for the uncertain times of various transitions that followed in socialism’s wake, how might the “post” be rendered complicated by the notion that the unfinished business of socialism continues to influence the trajectory of the future? The Future of (Post)Socialism examines this unfinished business through various disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that seek to illuminate the postsocialist future as a cultural and social fact. Drawn from the fields of history, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, education, linguistics, literature, and cultural studies, contributors analyze various cultural forms and practices of the formerly socialist cultural spaces of Eastern Europe. In so doing, they question the teleology of linear transitional narratives and of assumptions about postsocialist linear progress, concluding that things operate more as continued interruptions of a perpetually liminal state rather than as neat endings and new beginnings. “This volume uniquely brings together a range of disciplines, beyond anthropology as the conventional discipline for exploring postsocialism, and a range of cases across post-Soviet space. Most importantly, it refreshingly engages with an exciting framework dealing with time and space. Its talk about futures—the futures of socialism and the futures of postsocialism—is a novel aspect that sets it apart.” — Johanna Bockman, author of Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism