Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
Leonard Schapiro's Russia
By Aileen Kelly
Russian Studies
by Leonard Schapiro, edited by Ellen Dahrendorf, introduction by Harry Willetts
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 400 pp., $24.95
In the introduction to his book The Soviet Political Mind, Robert Tucker remarks that the history of twentieth-century politics can be seen as a process of realizing the dreams of the nineteenth. Few scholars of Soviet history have been so passionately committed to demonstrating the truth of this view as Leonard Schapiro, and few have been more qualified to do so. Over the last decades Russian history and Soviet politics have separated into specializations whose practitioners have no common language. Schapiro never respected this artificial boundary. He is best known for his books The Origins of the Communist Autocracy and The Communist Party of the Soviet Union; but he also published a provocative study of nineteenth-century Russian thought, and one of his last books was a biography of Ivan Turgenev. Russian Studies, a posthumous collection of articles, reviews, and talks (some published here for the first time), reflects both the breadth of his concerns and the overriding vision that inspired and ordered them. From the Slavophiles to Solzhenitsyn, there are few Russian writers and thinkers of significance over the past one and a half centuries whose names do not appear somewhere in this volume—and all of them are measured by one dominant criterion: whether they embodied or opposed the 'dreams' that led to the Soviet reality.
Review, 4069 words
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