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Terror in My Soul - Igal Halfin

Terror in My Soul

Communist Autobiographies on Trial

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
366 Seiten
2003
Harvard University Press (Verlag)
978-0-674-01032-1 (ISBN)
CHF 123,85 inkl. MwSt
Halfin 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.
In this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the demands of the Party.

Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as helplessly flawed.

Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge.

Igal Halfin is Associate Professor of History at Tel Aviv University.

Preface 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

Erscheint lt. Verlag 11.9.2020
Zusatzinfo 3 line illustrations, 2 tables
Verlagsort Cambridge, Mass
Sprache englisch
Maße 156 x 235 mm
Gewicht 653 g
Themenwelt Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte 1918 bis 1945
Geisteswissenschaften Geschichte Regional- / Ländergeschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung Politische Systeme
Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung Politische Theorie
ISBN-10 0-674-01032-9 / 0674010329
ISBN-13 978-0-674-01032-1 / 9780674010321
Zustand Neuware
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