Vera Zasulich: A Biography

by Jay Bergman

Book by Bergman, Jay

Genres: History, Biography, Russia

277 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[AHW · Rating 3 out of 5]

Serviceable. Bergman sets out to critically evaluate Zasulich’s ideas, but he inappropriately relies on explaining them through her psychological features, and ends up merely insulting Zasulich where more serious criticism is possible. Advances some appropriate criticisms of Lenin, but then whistles past matters of fundamental communist principle - opposition to war between capitalist powers, refusal of collaboration with bourgeois forces, immediate support of and engagement with independent proletarian self-activity in the worker’s councils and elsewhere - that Lenin was far closer to the truth on than Zasulich or Plekhanov were. Particularly revealing is when Bergman takes Edward Bernstein bizarrely seriously - someone whose intellectual edifice may have been more superficially impressive than Zasulich’s but whose ideas were unambiguously false. Bergman is engaging in sexism here. He sets out the evidence for an analysis of the gender dynamics which Zasulich & her organizations were caught up in, but never performs that analysis. Still, worth reading. Zasulich cuts a politically interesting and *personally sympathetic* figure. (That last is harder to say of, say, Lenin or Trotsky.) She was central in the birth of Russian Marxism.