Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia

by Walter Laqueur

Vladimir Zhirinovsky's "second Bolshevik revolution" in October 1993 shocked the world with the strength of the Russian Red-Brown alliance and the danger it poses to Russian democracy and world peace. In this book, Walter Laqueur, an expert on Russian and European history, provides a portrait of the leaders and tenets of the Russian extreme right and their attempts to win over public opinion at a time of grave domestic trouble. It is clear that Russia's long-term fate is far from settled, and this book introduces readers to a movement that may have a fateful impact on Russia in the years to come.

Genres: Russia, History, Politics

317 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1993

About the author

Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was an American historian, journalist and political commentator. Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Prussia (modern Wrocław, Poland), into a Jewish family. In 1938, he left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust.

Laqueur lived in Israel from 1938 to 1953. After one year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined a Kibbutz and worked as an agricultural laborer from 1939 to 1944. In 1944, he moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a journalist until 1953, covering Palestine and other countries in the Middle East.

Since 1955 Laqueur has lived in London. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey from 1956 to 1964. He was also founding editor of The Washington Papers. He was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994. From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman (until 2000), of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and University Professor at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988. He has also been a visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University.

Laqueur's main works deal with European history in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Russian history and German history, as well as the history of the Middle East. The topics he has written about include the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism, and the diplomatic history of the Cold War. His books have been translated into many languages, and he was one of the founders of the study of political violence, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. His comments on international affairs have appeared in many American and European newspapers and periodicals.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Richard Laznik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb review of the history of right wing extremist groups in Russia in the latter part of the 20th century. (Published in 1993). It charts the movement through the 70s, 80s and early 90s in particular, while discussing the antecedents of the movement back to the later Tsarist period.

This is the third book by Laqueur that I’ve read and I really like the matter-of-fact language he uses generally and the occasional cutting barb he sinks into both the left and the right in this book. I am constantly amazed by the fact that he was clearly fluent in English, German, Russian, Hebrew and French.

First rate historian (IMO) and having discovered him only in recent years, very sad to hear he passed away late in 2018.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastically thorough, extensively foot noted, well written, and perspicacious. I love a book that constantly has me looking up words I didn’t know before. Laqueur was brilliant and I want to read more of his works.

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rather unusual wealth and diversity of political movements and parties in ex-USSR that are generally regarded as belonging to the far right have recently received sustained academic attention, and even popular, as exemplified by Emmanuel Carrere's Goncourt winning biography of Eduard Limonov. Yet when this book came out following closely the collapse of the union, little if any attention, for understandable reasons, had been given to the subject of the Russian far-right tradition.
The time of the writing of this book allow for a closer look at a variety of movements that are nowadays often eclipsed by more contemporary or at least more relevant elements. Zhironovsky only gets a passing mention, as does Dugin (Eurasianism is dismissed as an intellectual parlour game) and Limonov is nowhere to be seen. Those absences make place for first a good look at pre-revolutionarry nationalism and especially anti-semitism, followed by a number of interesting analyses, later make space for what seems to me, more than the Black Hundred, to be the actual core of the book: an observation (but no analysis, surprisingly) of the rise of nationalism inside and in the periphery of the party itself, and the complex and unique relationship that nationalism entertained for several decades with both the soviet establishment and the dissidence.
Lacqueur's pre-consensus approach circumvent carefully the terminology questions that were being raised elsewhere at the time of his writing and he displays a distance in his judgement of the phenomenon that is all but disagreeable, but one is bound to blame his inefficiently articulated defense of patriotism, and most of the considerations in the conclusion of the book, on his involvement in foreign policy. His generous literary culture, general erudition and a flawless style still fail ushering some generally essentialists judgements, one the "russian people" and "the nationalist mind" that the rabid (post)-modernization of Russia since the publication of his volume has at any rate disproved. Wheras his interpretations of pre-soviet anti-semitism for example, are clearly very perceptive, it seems ultimately that he failed at identifying the authentic leftist drive his homonym Sternhell had already clearly identified.
This by no means makes his book less of a landmark in the field, and a unique work of reference for the post-WWII russian nationalism.

[Kriegslok · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting attempt to document the emergence of the extreme new right in post Soviet Russia. A good historical overview of the influences on new right thinking and ideology and its strange and not so strange bedfellows.