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Comprendre la Révolution russe (Points histoire)
Voici un ouvrage qui n'est pas un énième récit des événements dramatiques qui ont conduit la Russie d'une monarchie peu éclairée à un régime socialiste autoritaire. L'auteur, spécialiste de la Russie, ne raconte pas. Il raisonne sur le phénomène révolutionnaire soviétique et nous aide à le mieux comprendre en suivant les grandes phases de l'installation de ce qu'il appelle l'idéocratie bureaucratique. A la question soulevée par le XXe Congrès du parti communiste russe, comment Staline a-t-il été possible, Martin Malia répond sans tomber dans les travers du psychologisme, mais en dévoilant les mécanismes d'un processus apparemment irréversible. Comprendre la Révolution russe, c'est comprendre l'URSS d'aujourd'hui, car ce livre est aussi un bilan du régime soviétique.
239 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 1980
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January 4, 2014
I read about half of this book -- and have decided to give it up and move on. There are two thorough reviews of it here: http://www.amazon.fr/product-reviews/...
(Further discussin here, in what is an interesting and quite detailed bibliographical essay by John Mullen. Mullen is an academic and a Trotskyite http://john.mullen.pagesperso-orange....)
This is history written 'from above' - and consists in analytically interesting, but somewhat sweeping and repetitive overgeneralizations. A little bit of this goes a long way, I'm afraid.
His account of the Revolution of 1905 as being in the 'European' mold (English and French -- generally, 'liberal') is interesting and perhaps well-taken. But I do not trust his analysis of the soviet period -- his failure to distinguish Leninism and Stalinism is suspect in my view (the ideological distinctions between not only Leninism and Stalinism, but between these and Bukharin and Trotsky being key); and his view that something unique and unprecedented happened in 1917 -- when the Revolution took an 'Asiatic' turn -- smacks of the sort of mysticism that one finds in the work of that lunatic Alain Besançon (who actually wrote the préface to this volume). Malia is a conservative -- not as bad a nut as Besançon, nor as transparaent an ideologue as Richard Pipes (see 'Team B') -- but it gets wearying reading an historian who has, beneath his empiricism, a 'moral' agenda.
(Further discussin here, in what is an interesting and quite detailed bibliographical essay by John Mullen. Mullen is an academic and a Trotskyite http://john.mullen.pagesperso-orange....)
This is history written 'from above' - and consists in analytically interesting, but somewhat sweeping and repetitive overgeneralizations. A little bit of this goes a long way, I'm afraid.
His account of the Revolution of 1905 as being in the 'European' mold (English and French -- generally, 'liberal') is interesting and perhaps well-taken. But I do not trust his analysis of the soviet period -- his failure to distinguish Leninism and Stalinism is suspect in my view (the ideological distinctions between not only Leninism and Stalinism, but between these and Bukharin and Trotsky being key); and his view that something unique and unprecedented happened in 1917 -- when the Revolution took an 'Asiatic' turn -- smacks of the sort of mysticism that one finds in the work of that lunatic Alain Besançon (who actually wrote the préface to this volume). Malia is a conservative -- not as bad a nut as Besançon, nor as transparaent an ideologue as Richard Pipes (see 'Team B') -- but it gets wearying reading an historian who has, beneath his empiricism, a 'moral' agenda.
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