Roads to the temple: truth, memory, ideas, and ideals in the making of the Russian revolution, 1987−1991. By Leon Aron. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. 2012. 483pp. Index. £40.00. isbn 978 0 30011 844 5. Available as e-book.

The revolutions of 1989 that swept away communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe started in fact earlier. What Pope John Paul II called an annus mirabilis, a miraculous year, could not have taken place without the radical changes in the USSR initiated and promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev. Leon Aron’s book, a genuine tour de force, is a fascinating chronicle of the main ideas that caused and inspired the revolutionary upheaval in the USSR. A respected student of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, Aron is the author of a major Yeltsin biography and of numerous articles dealing with Russia’s political culture. For him, what happened in the USSR between 1987 and 1991 amounted to the complete disbandment of all political myths that had served as justification for the Leninist Leviathan.

Aron is right to highlight what the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the power of ideas. In other words, material forces, always emphasized by Marxists, matter, but they are not the only and not even the most significant factor that leads to political revolutions. The had long been in terminal crisis, but this agony could have lasted for many other decades had the revolutionary ideas associated with Gorbachevism not come to the fore and imposed a new political vision. Aron contrasts Gorbachev’s ideological revolution with Khrushchev’s half-hearted and inconclusive reforms. The most important distinctions concerned to two areas: the imperial identity of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist legacies. Whereas Khrushchev avoided a radical response to these two challenges, Gorbachev and his supporters moved boldly ahead and engaged in a fundamental overhaul of what historian Martin Malia once called ideocratic partocracy, i.e. a party monopoly on power and ideas. Homo Sovieticus was exposed as ideological bogus, the opposite of classical humanism.

Aron’s main contribution is to retrieve a whole universe of ideas, aspirations, values, emotions and sentiments put forward by the main proponents of historical fairness, political openness and moral frankness. The book is a superb archaeology of what can be called the symbolic matrix of Gorbachev’s revolution. In fact, the of glasnost as a liberation of the mind developed even before 1987 in the writings of banned authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vassili Grossman (about whom Aron writes with intense empathy). Its thrust was the absolute opposite of the long-held set of mendacities that formed the foundation of Soviet ideology.

Many of Gorbachev’s close associates were party intellectuals whose political itineraries moved from early infatuation with Stalin and Stalinism, to disappointments and disgust with the bureaucratic despotism, and finally to the deep desire to change the system. Yes, the Gorbachevites did not say it explicitly, pretended that their goals were intra-systemic, but the more they attacked Stalinism’s legacies, the more the revolutionary impetus gathered momentum.

Often called the architect of glasnost, Aleksandr Yakovlev is the main hero in Aron’s captivating discussion of the myth-breaking endeavours of those years. A Second World War veteran, recruited into the propaganda apparatus during Stalin’s times, Yakovlev was indeed what is called a child of the 20th Congress. This is a reference to the February 1956 party conclave when, during a closed session, dealt a mortal blow to Stalin’s myth. After that shock, Yakovlev could never accept uncritically the official line, though for decades he kept his doubts to himself and very few confidants.

As an opponent of the increasingly nationalist direction of Soviet ideology under Leonid Brezhnev, Yakovlev lost his job at the Party headquarters and was sent as an Ambassador to Canada. Gorbachev met him there and, once in power, brought him to . Yakovlev became the chief ideologue and, in this quality, was instrumental in allowing for an extraordinary relaxation in cultural life. He surrounded himself with other party intellectuals, including many who had worked in Prague at the international journal ‘World Marxist Review’ (the Russian edition was titled ‘Problems of Peace and Socialism’), and who had been contaminated with neo-Marxist, revisionist ideas, especially regarding the dignity of the individual and universality of human rights. Arguably the most anti- Stalinist of all the members of Gorbachev’s entourage, Yakovlev championed the themes of de-Bolshevization, de-ideologization and democratization. He became the nemesis of party conservatives. Later, after the demise of the USSR, he authored several devastating books about the fundamentally criminal nature of Leninism. He prefaced the Russian edition of the Black book of and chaired the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.

Aron’s book is essentially about the democratic ideas that corroded the Soviet edifice during the Gorbachev revolution. Among these, most important were the rediscovery of human freedom as a non-negotiable, universal value. For more than seven decades, the Soviet utopian experiment was based on duplicity, subservience, conformity, fear, suspicion and hypocrisy. This dismal moral situation led to rampant cynicism, demoralization and despair. The book’s title comes from a great film by Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze, ‘Repentance’. The major question in that masterpiece was human salvation. Redemption is impossible without atonement. Democracy and memory are inseparable.

If individuals lost any moral direction, they would not be able to find a road to the temple, to the church. They will be, as Polish poet Aleksander Wat, once put it, children in the fog. The men and women of the Russian revolution, this world-historical event masterfully explored by Leon Aron, looked for a moral and political compass and they found it. All the post-1991 dismay, disenchantment and dereliction notwithstanding, something sublime lay in that rediscovery of freedom, dignity and honour. Leon Aron’s book succeeds marvellously in resurrecting what Hannah Arendt called the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.

Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland (College Park), USA