SOURCE: Singer, Daniel. “The Intelligentsia and Soviet Change.” Monthly Review 41, no. 5 (October 1989): 61-4.

In the following excerpt, Singer applauds the thought-provoking nature of Ali's Revolution from Above.

Tariq Ali is no Sovietologist. Born in Pakistan, educated at Oxford, he was one of the leaders of the protest movement in Britain in the 1960s and has been a prominent figure of the New Left ever since. Because he is essentially an activist and not a Kremlinologist, the author conveys the feeling that history is here in the making, that the Soviet Union is at the very beginning of a period of monumental change. A stranger, a visitor, he manages to pass on to the reader the excitement of a country where serious periodicals sell like hot cakes, where books, films, plays are political events, where people simultaneously discover their past and the art of political debate.

The purpose of...