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The Autobiography of Trotskyism: In Search of Redemption. In 2 Volumes

99.99 €
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The Autobiography of Trotskyism: In Search of Redemption. In 2 Volumes
99.99 €
In basket
Igal Halfin's large-scale research project is devoted to the key ritual of Bolshevism - the critical analysis of one's own "I", the re-forging of the personality with the help of communist ethics. Analyzing the process of this specific form of self-knowledge, reflected in the ego-documents of the era, the author seeks to understand how the Great Terror became possible and why it was perceived by the Bolsheviks themselves as something natural. This book is the second part of the study, which differs from the first ("Autobiography of Bolshevism") in its greater chronological coverage (the narrative goes up to 1937) and is based mainly on materials from Siberian archives. The heroes of this book are oppositionists: ordinary communists, peasants with partisan experience, trained workers, builders of Kuzbass, then expelled from the party and imprisoned in camps as Trotskyists or Zinovievists. Using their ego documents and materials from the control commissions of the 1920s, Halfin traces the internal logic of the thinking of the future victims of the Great Terror, as well as the changes in language and worldview that accompanied the political and ideological transformations of the post-revolutionary era. Igal Halfin is a professor in the Department of History at Tel Aviv University, and a specialist in early Soviet history, literary theory, and cinema.
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