The Russian Intelligentsiais the first single-volume history of a small but tremendously influential group of Russian intellectuals who achieved world renown in a variety of spheres. While previous accounts have addressed the history of individuals within this collective, Christopher Read offers the first explanation of the intelligentsia as a group. Read traces the vast debates that broke out between, and within, a multitude of intellectual factions, and contextualizes the ideas of the group within the framework of cultural, social, political, and economic development from the late 18th century to the present day. This comprehensive yet accessible account demonstrates how the Russian intelligentsia morphed from one incarnation to the next, and effectively situates this change and continuity within a pan-European context. It considers the role of the intelligentsia throughout its origins, its transformation during the Russian Revolution, and since the collapse of communism, and highlights the beliefs of key figures such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mikhail Gorbachev. In doing so, Read provides an essential guide to a fascinating aspect of Russia’s social and cultural history.

Abstract Lenin was one of the most controversial and also influential figures of the twentieth century. Of all the events of that era, the revolution he inspired in the Russian Empire was the most consequential. It turned the Soviet Union into a superpower, shaped the Chinese Revolution, and dominated political and cultural history all round the globe during the Cold War. Desperate resistance to Leninist revolution evolved into extreme forms of fascism and Nazism. On the occasion of the centenary of Lenin’s death, the author examines the key points of Lenin’s views and identifies the main elements that gave them global traction and provoked controversy down to the present, and perhaps into the future. Lenin and his ideas have been written off many times but have they actually had their day?

Abstract An account of the global spread of Leninism and the collapse of the European communist movement shows how Lenin’s ideas and activities were turned into Leninism and became the theory and practice of the Communist Party and its variants. Stalin dominated this process. The Communist International (Comintern) attempted to spread Leninism beyond the USSR. Two aspects of Communist Party ideology and practice derived from Lenin, anti-imperialism and anti-fascism, were the main foundations for its adoption by a variety of radical movements around the world. The decline and fall of European communist parties between 1956 and 1991 is analysed.

Abstract The main points of Lenin’s life, political activity, and ideas are discussed. Lenin’s family background, early years and his radicalisation are presented. With respect to his later career and public life the focus is on the immediate polemical nature of Lenin’s writings as well as their longer term influence as models for a Marxist revolution and outlook. In particular his policies and activism with respect to party structures, imperialism, the revolutionary process with emphasis on the question of political consciousness and world revolution are examined. The stages of revolutionary transformation, that is the expectations in 1917, enshrined in Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ and The State and Revolution, so-called war communism and finally the New Economic Policy, are outlined and analysed.

Russian populism, the belief that the peasantry embodied authentic Russian identity and once liberated from their poverty would lead the country to a brighter future, has animated Russian thought across the political spectrum and inspired much of Russia's world-historical literature, music and art in the 19th century. This book offers the fullest and most authoritative account of the rise, proliferation and influence of populist values and ideology in modern Russia to date.

"The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War." Diplomacy & Statecraft, 32(4), pp. 852–853

Centenaries are times to reflect and assess status. This essay discusses accounts of how the centenary of the Russian Revolution was marked around the globe by governments, national media and civil society in general before going on to examine some of the large number of academic contributions to the debate in the form of books, special editions of journals and so on. As well as reflecting on what was said the article also discusses what the centennial output told us about the standing of the revolution around the world, about its meaning in different contexts and about whether we learned anything new. Among its conclusions are that, with the formidable exception of China, very few claims were made for ownership of and support for the revolution, that western academic contributions tended to repeat rather than expand existing interpretations and that Russian interpretations tended to ignore aspects of the revolution associated with the once dominant official Soviet era discourse.

Silvio Pons has written a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and very useful book on the development and demise of international communism. Starting with the birth of Leninism in 1903, it traces the fate of Russian-oriented communism up to the collapse of 1991. The figure of Stalin looms large throughout the account. For Pons, very quickly after the October Revolution – in some respects in a matter of months – Bolshevism turned away from democracy and fused with the state to defend itself from capitalist onslaught and to organize its own counter-offensive. In the author’s words, ‘The Soviet state became the cohesive factor in the communist movement’ (p. 15). In this way, starting with Brest-Litovsk, defence of Soviet state interest was the first requirement of the communist wherever she or he found heror himself. Quite correctly, Pons emphasizes that this does not equate to abandoning ‘world revolution’ in favour of socialism in one country. It was, he argues convincingly, a viable revolutionary strategy and ‘a political faith’ (p. 48). The whole of Pons’s account is an extended meditation and analysis based on this idea. There are some fine perceptions along the way. He quotes Brecht’s view that it was necessary to be merciless to open the way to the visionary future and concludes that this was the model for generations of communists. It was certainly a key insight about Stalin and Stalinism and helps link the contradictory horrors and achievements so typical of that movement. Pons berates Trotsky for claiming that Stalin had abandoned world revolution in the 1930s (p. 66) and has an excellent reading of Stalin’s complicated attitude in the same decade to the civil war, proposing some interesting links with Soviet internal policies, notably the Great Terror. Stalin is castigated in conventional terms for being bamboozled by Hitler through the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact and for failing to see the invasion date in 1941. In a much more ambiguous sequence, he is also blamed for starting the Cold War and dividing Europe up, even though Pons himself gives numerous examples of Stalin’s preference for universalism and attempted experiments with ‘people’s democracies’ of one kind or another. Interestingly, the author does not consider the Finnish case at any point in this discussion, so the notion that ‘Finlandization’ might have been possible more widely does not appear. It is rather confusing that Pons argues that Stalin favoured ‘spheres of influence’ but that he ‘was not interested in dividing Europe’ (p. 131), and that there was no plan for the Sovietization of Eastern Europe (p. 146). The period after Stalin’s death is more or less seen as a continuous crisis arising from the fact that the Stalinist system was ‘unreformable’ and that, in a way very reminiscent of today, it was not clear whether the USSR was ‘powerful and stable or intrinsically vulnerable’ (p. 201). The complex post-1956 era is covered well but selectively, with discussions of Poland and Cuba and an excellent account of the Sino-Soviet split as stand-out areas. The persistence of ideology in this era is emphasized, especially at the time of the 1956–61 crisis, which saw several secret conferences of international communist parties thrashing out principles. Pons puts the key emphasis on ideology in the split with China, including Mao’s gung-ho assertion that a thermonuclear war would destroy capitalism but not socialism. The idea that ideology was important leads to an uneasy line of argument through the Brezhnev years, by which time, arguably, ideology was dead. But the irony that, under Brezhnev, who minimized the role of ideology, the Soviet Union achieved ‘superpower’ status at the same time as it lost its inner purpose is not fully brought out. Although Pons’s discourse is essentially one of crisis and decline, it overlooks the fact that the widest extent of the USSR’s influence continued as late as 1979, after the collapse of European fascism had led to the rise of Eurocommunism and socialist revolutions in Angola,