BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS

Richard Abraham.Alexander Kerensky: The First Loveof the Revolution.New York:Columbia UniversityPress, 1987.xiii, 503 pp. $29.95.

In writing about Kerensky, it is impossiblenot to be reminded of Shakespeare'sdictum: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Kerenskyfalls into a blend of categoriestwo and three ("greatness"being understoodin termsof prominence). Richard Abraham has illuminatedthe man's career in an altogether exemplary fashion, though the accumulationof detail and cantaiding personalitiescertainly does not make for easy reading.On the otherhand, to writehistory from the perspectiveof the defeatedbrings a novel insight to analysis. But first Kerensky the man: the current impressionof his sudden emergencein 1917 from obscurityto prominenceis here shown to be unfounded.Not the least valuablesection of the book is the first six chapterswhich uncover the unknownKercnsky of the pre-revolutionaryperiod. They locate him squarely in the ranks of the radical intelligentsia involvedin the practiceof the law. Kerenskyat first had some difficultyin entering theprofession which he explained as follows: "I did not succeed at once in entering the fairly tight-knit organizationof political defenders since in their milieu, linked in the main with the left-wing It partiesI then had no contactsand apartfrom that I bore the label of 'a bureaucraticbackground'." Yet once admitted,he representedseveral groups of workersand peasantsin their clasheswith the authorities,e.g., Estonianand Latvianpeasants in 1905 and 1906,revolutionary Armenians in 1912and, most notableof all, the strikingminers of the LxnaGoldfields. This activitywent hand-in-handwith a periodof temporaryexile, clandestine political activity, and membershipof the TrudovikParty in the FourthDuma. Kerensky also securedthe passageby the St. Petersburg Bar of a motion that denouncedthe Beilis trial. It is interestingto try to reconstructKerensky's political viewsat this time, on the eve of the periodthat was to test him to the ur-ermoslAbraham provides several indications: the need for a just and legal socialsystem and an intelligentsiathat wouldguide the revolutionand avert any declinefrom anarchismto the priority of political values over politicalprinciples; repugnance at the injustice,distress, and hardship endured by the working classe3-all combined with the resolve to remove the authoritariantsarist regime.In positiveterms, Kerensky welcomed the politicalfreedoms promised by the Manifestoof October1905. There is no evidenceto suggestthat his aspirationsever went beyondthis. It is not unfairtherr-fore--4hough perhaps unkind--for Leninto describeKerensky as a balalaikaof the bourgeoisieon whichthey playedto deceivethe workersand peasants. Certainly in 1917 the vague goodwilland sincerehumanitarianism that Kerenskybrought to politicsproved quite inadequate.Even the intuitionon whichhe prided himselfrepeatedly let him down.At one stage Kerenskyrationalized the absenceof state authorityby arguingthat "the democracy"did not need a police force. If one asks thereforewhat broughtKerensky to prominencein 1917,it is not easy to be precise.It seemsthat the only answerremains the conventionalone–that his smse of the theater and rhetorical gifts seized their chance for leadership,as a tribune of the people. Thenceforward,he was bome alongand aloft on the tide of popularsentiment.

Abrahamis a scrupulouslyhonest historian and never seeksto palliatehis hero's inadequacyto match the scale of events.In the final chapters,however, dealing with Kerensky's long exile, there is a touch of rehabilitationand even tenderness.It cannotbe said that Kerenskywas ever one of history'sforgotten men, but he was certainlyunfamiliar. This is no longer the case, thanksto this detailedand fully documentedbiography.

LionelKochan Universityof Oxford 366

Yuri Glazov. The Russian Mind since Stalin's Death. Dordrecht:D. Reidel, 1985.xiv, 256 pp. $39.00.

Yuri Glazovbelongs to the relativelysmall band of Soviet citizensnow residentin the West who have made a significantcontribution to the studyof the systemunder which they were bom. This book, a collectionof studiesof variousaspects af Russian"national character," is dedicatedto reducingthe gap betweenthe understandingby Russiansand Westernersof each others'societies. Glazov argues that "few non-Russiansunderstand what is really going on in the Soviet Union"; his book is intendedto help both studentsand scholarsto do so. Foreigners,admittedly, face difficultiesin studyingSoviet societyof a kindnot experiencedby those who live there. It does not always follow,however, that the perceptionsof those who have spent all their lives in that society are automaticallysuperior. As much of the "third wave" of 6migr6 writing has shown, studies of this kind can be heavily biased, sloppy in their use of evidenceand tediouslyassertive. Glazav escapesthese dangersfor the most part by concentrating upon a series of specific topics, such as the religious beliefs of Russian intellectuals,where personalexperience can cany the argumentsome distanceand where "the Russianmind" can be analyzedby means of a topic of more manageableproportions. The disadvantagesof this method becomeevident elsewherein this collectionof rather looselyrelated papers, some of whichhave already been published in whole or in part (one appears in the very differenttypeface of the original),and all of which taken togetherfall somedistance short of a politicalculture of Soviet societyof the kind promisedin the introduction. In the end this collection is probably best employedas a set of insightfulif disconnected essays, all of which are based on the author'sintimate and sympatheticunderstanding of Soviet societyand supportedby wide readingand felicitousquotation. The best are probablythose on the death of Stalin, the psychology of ordinary Russians, and the intellectual life of the Soviet intelligentsia (some rather lighter essays on Andropovand recent writers and dissidents, by contrast,hardly deserve their place).Glazov points, for instance,to the popularreverence in which Stalin is still held, and to the religious revival which (he believes) the Russian intelligentsiais now experiencing.He draws an amusingbut instructiveanalogy between Soviet societytoday and an unorthodoxfamily: the Soviet authoritiesare likened to a "family man," strong, fleshy and exuberant, married to an "aged, humourless wife of rigid character," the CPSU, with the intelligentsia as an attractiveand intelligentyoung woman, and the man'smother the plain people of Russia, poor and neglected.This is not untypicalof the style of argumentof an unusualbook, short on social scientific rigor but long on insightand sympatheticunderstanding of its subject; the paperbackedition that has now appearedshould draw these virtues to the attentionof a wider audience.

StephenWhite Universityof Glargow

TimothyW. Luke.Ideology and Soviet Indurtrialization.Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1985. xi, 283 pp.

This study utilizes a culturalist approach to Soviet industrializationin an intelligent and realistic effort to examinethe fate of that underlyingstructure of thoughtand actioncommon to both Puritanical Protestantism and Bolshevism. In doing this, the work fairly successfully occupies that treacherous middle ground between extolling Russian Marxismas a totally new vessel of a modernizedNew Jerusalemand condemningit as a batchof hollowslogans dressing up