https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlQ7eekoS90
I've been engrossed in recent histories of the various battles between Japan
and the U.S. Enough time has passed for important participants on both sides
to grow old, write their memoirs and in some cases give interviews to
historians.
I now see (thanks to Palma) the same sort of thing has been going on in
regard to the Russian revolution. In part-one of the above video, Yuri
Slezkine describes his book House of Government; which covers the beginning
of the Russian revolution up through the great purge of 1928-1932. In part
two William Taubman describes his biography of Mikhail Gorbachev and the
Russian revolution.
At one point Taubman turns to Slezkine, crediting him as the genuine
historian whereas he, Taubman, is a mere political scientist pretending to
be a historian by means of his biography. Slezkine appeared taken aback,
and indeed Slezkine might well say something like that about himself, for he
relates wanting to make his House of Government appear like a novel.
Walt Whitman often drew a number of isolated facts together and called his
collection a poem. As far as I've read House of Government (which isn't
very far) Slezkine seems to be doing something like that, bringing form to
events which to the rest of us seem chaotic.
Slezkine's describes the Russian Revolution as a religion. Some time ago I
was enamored of Marcel Gauchet's The Disenchantment of the World, a
Political History of Religion, which describes the European attempt to
achieve the material goals of Christianity without the religion. Slezkine
will argue (I am assuming) that the Revolution is best understood as a
religion. True believers will have faith in the Communist leadership and
its goals, even as those goals change from time to time. This Revolutionary
religion has (and this is something I had never heard or thought of before)
an apocalyptic eschatology which I look forward to reading about.
Most of the questions in the Q&A portion of the video were directed to
Taubman and pertained to Gorbachev.
Lawrence
