Two Revolutionaries

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
 

Register

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

Totalitarian regimes evolve from the inside and the outside, from the inner dynamics of societies in decline, and from the imposition of ideologies from without. As opposed to the historical pattern Marx envisioned, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution took place during a period of precipitous social disorganization, producing widespread psychological and moral disorientation accompanied by extremist ideologies.  These revolutions were not the product of the evolution but of the de-evolution of the social-political order.  The systems that replaced this order were intent, therefore, not simply on building on past accomplishments, but on rebuilding amid conditions of social chaos and ambiguity.

I.N. Steinberg and Victor Serge recount the process of this disintegration and rebuilding in ways most appropriate to study today as societies around the world have turned to totalitarian or proto-totalitarian solutions to current social and political problems. We will read Steinberg’s memoir In the Workshop of the Revolution, a deeply personal, brilliant account of the revolution and the evolution of the doomed Soviet experiment, as well as Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941, perhaps his greatest work, which provides unique—often astonishing—insights into the times in which he lived and the movements for which he fought. Their visions of a just and equitable world in a time of extremism and crisis are especially valuable today.

However, the great value of these works is the insight they provide into the psychology of the revolutionaries and the masses which made the Revolution possible.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase a copy of Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Purchase). All other course materials will be provided digitally by the instructor through Canvas.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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