Volume 36, Number 10 · June 15, 1989
Lament for Russia
By Norman Davies
Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e
translated, edited, and introduced by Terence Emmons
Princeton University Press, 513 pp., $39.50
The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad. In the Soviet Union, however, the persecution of nonconformity has been the norm until very recently. In the years of the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the voice of dissent was stifled by universal denunciations, house searches, and preventive arrests. Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible. The discovery in California of exactly such a diary, therefore, covering the period between 1917 and 1922, and written by a prominent Russian historian of the day, is an event of some importance.
Review, 3583 words
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