Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin - Hardcover

Hellbeck, Jochen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674021746 ISBN 13: 9780674021747

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Revolution on My Mind is a stunning revelation of the inner world of Stalin's Russia. We see into the minds and hearts of Soviet citizens who recorded their lives during an extraordinary period of revolutionary fervor and state terror. Writing a diary, like other creative expression, seems nearly impossible amid the fear and distrust of totalitarian rule; but as Jochen Hellbeck shows, diary-keeping was widespread, as individuals struggled to adjust to Stalin's regime.

Rather than protect themselves against totalitarianism, many men and women bent their will to its demands, by striving to merge their individual identities with the collective and by battling vestiges of the old self within. We see how Stalin's subjects, from artists to intellectuals and from students to housewives, absorbed directives while endeavoring to fulfill the mandate of the Soviet revolution--re-creation of the self as a builder of the socialist society. Thanks to a newly discovered trove of diaries, we are brought face to face with individual life stories--gripping and unforgettably poignant.

The diarists' efforts defy our liberal imaginations and our ideals of autonomy and private fulfillment. These Soviet citizens dreamed differently. They coveted a morally and aesthetically superior form of life, and were eager to inscribe themselves into the unfolding revolution. Revolution on My Mind is a brilliant exploration of the forging of the revolutionary self, a study without precedent that speaks to the evolution of the individual in mass movements of our own time.

About this title

About the Author

Jochen Hellbeck is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Review

Historian Hellbeck found a cache of diaries in newly opened Soviet archives that overturns easy assumptions about the inner lives of people subjected to totalitarian rule...Their eloquent, self-critical, and affecting diaries reveal how seriously they took the government's exhortations not merely to conform outwardly to communist precepts but also to fully internalize them. Each believed that self-improvement, sacrifice, reeducation, and endurance were intrinsic to the success of the revolution. Loneliness, fear, and an ever-widening divide between ideology and reality made life increasingly harrowing for these determined, sometimes ruthless citizens, and their trust and conviction make Stalin's terror all the more heinous. (Donna Seaman Booklist 2006-05-01)

Hellbeck draws on a cache of Stalin-era diaries found through friends in Russia to paint a dark portrait of how ordinary people bent their individual wills to what they believed was a greater good. (A. Craig Copetas Bloomberg News 2006-05-22)

How do tyrants succeed? Their monstrous ability to secure absolute power over a nation can't be based solely on fear. Ambition and some sort of twisted idealism or romanticism must also be involved. Historian Jochen Hellbeck found striking explanations for this mystery in an astonishing cache of Soviet diaries that radically challenge our notions about totalitarian rule...The humanity expressed in these diaries makes the crimes of Stalin and his followers all the more heinous...[Hellbeck's] thinking is cogent, his command of Russian history fluent, his deductions galvanizing, and his fascination with and empathy for the people he portrays compelling and thought-provoking. (Donna Seaman Speakeasy 2006-06-01)

[A] fascinating book...Hellbeck's analysis of his diarists is first-rate, and his enthusiasm for his subject is infectious...This book helps us to understand a particular Soviet mindset of the 1930s...It suggests an intriguing way of understanding the over-the-top enthusiasm that the Soviet regime inspired among some of its citizens in the 1930s. (Sheila Fitzpatrick The Nation 2006-08-28)

The principal service of Jochen Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind is that it transports us back to that earlier, impassioned revolutionary Soviet Union, a time of epic hope and energy, when the transformation of man and history seemed imminent...Insightful and intelligent...He delivers much that is fresh and useful...This book takes the reader back to those nearly unimaginable times. (Richard Lourie Moscow Times 2006-08-25)

Hellbeck's attempt to situate the Bolshevik project of self-transformation within this wider cultural and historical perspective (a dimension too often lacking in Western studies of the Soviet era) is one of the outstanding virtues of his impressive book. Never overburdening his narrative with theorizing, his sensitive and sympathetic approach allows his subjects to speak for themselves, expressing sometimes a repulsive indifference to the fate of Stalin's victims, sometimes a tragic struggle to rationalize the destruction of friends or family accused of ludicrous crimes...His study adds an important dimension to the work done by other scholars to throw light on the psychological reasons behind the collusion of moral idealists in the extreme violence of the Stalin years...One can hope that Hellbeck will follow the present fine study with a sequel. (Aileen Kelly New York Review of Books 2007-04-26)

The study consists of texts and analysis of diaries written during Stalin's rule in the time of collectivization, purges, and labor camps. The diaries show, if taken at face value, a disturbing compulsion to conform; they show that the Cheka's coercive methods had worked on large numbers of Soviet citizens. (A. Ezergailis Choice 2007-06-01)

Jochen Hellbeck has opened up a new way into the private inner world of the Stalin years, a world to which former schools of Soviet history didn't pay much attention...There can't now be a cultural history of the 20th century that ignores the experience of forging the self under the conditions of Communist--and especially Stalinist--rule. (Karl Schlögel London Review of Books 2007-08-16)

Hellbeck's work is important because it elucidates the joyful, exuberant, often irrational and self-destroying desires to lose oneself in the Soviet project. (Kate Brown Times Literary Supplement 2008-02-08)

Hellbeck’s book makes an important contribution to methodological reflection concerning the historiographical use of autobiography as a source...Revolution on My Mind will figure, rapidly and incontestably, among the standard references in the historiography of the Russian world. (Brigitte Studer Journal of Modern History)

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0674021746
• ISBN 13: 9780674021747
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448