Publisher's Synopsis
The 20th century was an age of revolutions. As the pace of social and economic change quickened and the savagery of technological warfare destabilized societies, intolerable pressures were created which exploded into violent political movements. These overthrew long-standing regimes and radically reshaped social orders, beginning with the monarchies in China and Russia, the latter transformed into a communist society which sought to export its revolution abroad. Towards the century's end, the collapse of the Soviet Union fed new movements, which sought to throw off the choking legacy of earlier revolutions that turned out to have merely replaced one form of oppression with another.
