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Russia in Transition
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
258 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1957
About the author
Isaac Deutscher
55 books157 followersIsaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky, in particular, was highly influential among the British New Left.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
April 10, 2011
All but three of these essays I had read in other collections of Isaac Deutscher. Of those I hadn't, I really enjoyed "Khrushchev on Stalin" about Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech on Stalin's crimes. The piece captures what, I think, ultimately was the moral undoing of the Soviet Union:
"The tragedy of contemporary Russia is that the whole 'elite' of the nation, its intelligentsia, its civil service, and all its politically minded elements share in one degree or another in Stalin's guilt. Probably no one in Moscow who would set himself up today as Stalin's accuser and judge could prove his own alibi. Stalin made of the whole nation, at any rate of all its educated and active elements, his accomplices. Those who refused to do his bidding perished, with very, very few exceptions long ago.
"This is the unpropitious background against which de-Stalinization is now carried out. That it is being carried out at all shows to what extent it has become a national necessity for the Soviet Union. But the initiators and the agents of de-Stalinization are themselves inevitably tainted with Stalinism -- no other human material is or can immediately become available. To paraphrase a famous Bolshevik saying, the edifice of post-Stalinist society has to be built with the bricks left over from Stalinist Russia."
"The tragedy of contemporary Russia is that the whole 'elite' of the nation, its intelligentsia, its civil service, and all its politically minded elements share in one degree or another in Stalin's guilt. Probably no one in Moscow who would set himself up today as Stalin's accuser and judge could prove his own alibi. Stalin made of the whole nation, at any rate of all its educated and active elements, his accomplices. Those who refused to do his bidding perished, with very, very few exceptions long ago.
"This is the unpropitious background against which de-Stalinization is now carried out. That it is being carried out at all shows to what extent it has become a national necessity for the Soviet Union. But the initiators and the agents of de-Stalinization are themselves inevitably tainted with Stalinism -- no other human material is or can immediately become available. To paraphrase a famous Bolshevik saying, the edifice of post-Stalinist society has to be built with the bricks left over from Stalinist Russia."
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review