Research Catalog

Retreat from the Finland Station : moral odysseys in the breakdown of Communism

Title

Retreat from the Finland Station : moral odysseys in the breakdown of Communism / Kenneth Murphy.

Author

Murphy, Kenneth

Publication

New York : Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.
© 1992.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	HX40 .M848 1992	Off-site

Details

Description

xv, 415 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

In 1940, when Marxism seemed at its apex as a moral and political force, Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, his landmark work on the growth of the socialist idea from Vico and Michelet to Lenin's triumphant return to Russia in a sealed train. Picking up where Wilson left off, Kenneth Murphy, in this sweeping historical investigation, follows the decline of Marxism from the beginning of the Revolution in October 1917, through its demise in the myriad revolutions of Eastern Europe in November 1989 and the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev of August 1991. This breakdown, as he shows, arose from the conviction that liberty and state control would be natural partners in the new utopian order. This belief fatally persuaded socialism's adherents that state violence could be tolerated, even managed, in the name of revolutionary change. In examining the lives of leading revolutionaries - Nicolai Bukharin, Milovan Djilas, Imre Nagy, and Alexander Dubcek - and writers - Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and even the young Alexander Solzhenitsyn - who became prisoners rather than masters of the bloodshed their adherence to socialism seemed to unleash, Murphy reveals to us the terrible moral consequences they suffered as their faith in socialism crumbled. He compellingly shows how their idealistic vision spawned a world of want, anger, terror, and death. For blind obedience to the socialist cause allowed the new state to perpetuate, indeed to incarnate, the violence out of which it was born. In so doing, the idea of revolutionary liberty was devoured. Freedom surrendered to Stalinist terror, political innocence to Communist corruption, eloquence to the silence of the gulag. From Bukharin's death cell confession to Koestler's Darkness at Noon, from Dubcek's manacled summons to Moscow to Solzhenitsyn's jeremiads to the convulsions of perestroika and the disintegration of Gorbachev's rule, Murphy's interweaving of political and literary lives reveals not only the tragedy of faith in this century's most seductive ideology, but the folly of grafting abstract theories onto the lives of real people.

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 383-403) and index.

Contents

pt. 1. Lenin decrees the Socialist order ; Bukharin sees Leviathan ; Bukharin embraces Leviathan ; Visions of the future : Vladimir Mayakovsky ; Stalin identifies socialism with violence ; Stalin identifies socialism with himself ; Leviathan devours Bukharin -- pt. 2. The decline of the revolutionary ideal ; The decline of the revolutionary ideal : André Gide ; The decline of the revolutionary ideal : Arthur Koestler ; The decline of the revolutionary ideal : Ignazio Silone -- pt. 3. Enemies of the people ; Enemies of the people : Milovan Djilas ; Enemies of the people : Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution ; Enemies of the people : Khrushchev's secret speech ; Solzhenitsyn : the young prophet ; Solzhenitsyn : poet of the Gulag ; Solzhenitsyn decides to change the world ; Enemies of the people : Alexander Dubcek and the Prague Heresy ; Solzhenitzy : out of the archipelago -- pt. 4. Gorbachev : the young commissar from Privolnoye ; Gorbachev : idealogue and opportunist ; Gorbachev tries to live his history ; Gorbachev : failure of the will ; Gorbachev : ten months that shook the world ; Gorbachev : twilight of Leviathan ; Yeltsin dismantles the Socialist order.

ISBN

0029223156
9780029223154

LCCN

92004707

OCLC

ocm25409243
25409243
SCSB-1964481

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library