Introduction: The fate of marxism

2000

Russian Review, 2018

Studies in Soviet thought, 1990

Society

This introduction to four previously untranslated papers of Victor Zaslavsky draws attention to shocks to understandings of the past in times of crisis, and to the light these papers cast upon the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It suggests the need for a long-term perspective on enduring patterns of Russian political culture, censorship, policing, and social psychology that neither originated nor ended with Soviet Communism. Keywords Russian`longue durée`. Russian disinformation campaigns. Russian fascism. Russian nationalities policy. Russian schooling. Social psychology of terror "The axe is right where it always was. The axe will survive the master." Russian proverb "It's difficult to predict the past." Soviet-era joke We are living a moment in which Faulkner's dictum-"The past is never dead. It is not even past."-echoes from all sides. With respect to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in particular, there is incredulity that a nineteenth-century land war, refugee numbers not seen since World War II, forced deportations, and the killing, plunder, and rape of civilians by soldiers of an invading army are taking place in twentyfirst-century Europe! Proclaiming that history is being sent into reverse, some journalists and experts invoke a "Stalinization of Russia" or a "return of the Cold War" or of Czarist imperial wars (Economist 2022:7; Schlögel 2018). Commentary regularly refers to the new Churchill, while seeking to establish who are the true contemporary "Nazis", "fascists", and "liberators" (Snyder 2022). Statesmen, advisors, and citizens scrutinize the past for lessons, hoping to avoid mistakes (of appeasement, open dissent, missed or mistimed flight) that in retrospect proved fatal. Facing the uncertainties of a new war, it is reassuring to compare it to a past one, already rendered into myth, in which the identity of the enemy, righteousness of the cause, and victorious outcome are not subject to question. But efforts to re-establish lost bearings through reference to an ostensibly known past founder as, subject to contemporary conflict, the past itself, or rather the human grasp of it, is destabilized. As cultures of memory, representations of nations, historical calvaries, heroes, and villains are reforged for battle, people scramble to assume new positions and alignments. 1 Fresh actors are cast in familiar roles, and language itself reveals its remarkable propensity for semantic warping and displacements of reference. When we hear from multiple sources that the past is not dead, we have been put on notice that, revivified, it is entering a phase of transformative challenge and change. In the context of tectonic quakes in international legal, diplomatic, military, and economic orders calling paradigmatic understandings of the past and predictions of the future into question, several writings of the late Soviet émigré political sociologist, Victor Zaslavsky, published here for the first time in English, take on fresh interest. Provocative of historically informed insight into times their author did not live to see, affording material for comparative assessments of institutional duration and change, they give rise to questions we can no longer ask him, questions he would have been less prodded than we to entertain. But this-the very test and definition of living work-is as it should be.

GDR bulletin, 1995

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2006

Academic Studies Press, 2023

Roy and Zhores Medvedev, two identical twins with a unique fate, not only lived through a whole century of history, from Stalin to Putin, they wrote and made history. Their research on Stalinism, the first to come out of the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1970s, turned them into famous dissidents overnight, but their criticism of the regime always remained loyal to Soviet power. The story of their lives provides a snapshot into the history of Soviet dissent, from psychiatric hospitalization to forced exile, and from KGB interrogations to collaboration with Western news correspondents. Yet their trajectory was also marred by controversy with fellow dissidents, and in the post-Soviet era active support of authoritarian rulers, including Vladimir Putin. The book is published open access under a CC-BY-NC license. The publication was funded by an open access grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation

South Central Review, 2018