Description
Book SynopsisHalfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s and 1930s. Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin provides new insight into the preconditions of the Great Purge.
Trade ReviewIgal Halfin’s book examines the language and ritual of Russia’s communist party in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, the author looks at party discourse and autobiography in order to shed light on the brutal dynamics of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge… The book effectively broadens our understanding not only of the Communist Party but of revolutionary violence in Soviet Russia… His work instead highlights the importance of ideology…for its role in propelling the purges forward. Halfin’s study traces an essential shift in party narratives of the self from the 1920s to the 1930s, and his analysis of how party discourse contributed to Stalinist violence is compelling. The book identifies an important connection between language and terror in Communist Russia. -- Golfo Alexopoulous * American Historical Review *
What compounds the nightmares and killings of the twentieth century are the fervent hopes and strenuous activity of millions of ideological militants who fashioned their souls to be good Communists. In a brilliant argument, Igal Halfin explores the desire to become a Bolshevik and to remake the world, and unravels the ways in which Communists became complicit in their own undoing—and deaths—in the purges of the 1930s. This is a landmark study not only of the Bolshevik soul but of modern subjectivity. -- Peter Fritzsche, author of
Germans into NazisTable of ContentsPreface Introduction 1. Good and Evil in Communism 2. A Voyage toward the Light 3. The Bolshevik Discourse on the Psyche 4. From a Weak Body to an Omnipotent Mind 5. Looking into the Oppositionist Soul Epilogue: Communism and Death Notes Index
