Volume 24, Number 11 · June 23, 1977
Good for the Populists
By Aileen Kelly
In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia
by Adam B. Ulam
Viking, 418 pp., $15.00
Diary of a Russian Censor
by Aleksandr Nikitenko, abridged, edited, and translated by Helen Satz Jacobson
University of Massachusetts Press, 397 pp., $20.00
To the Russian Marxists, the populism that dominated Russian radical thought for nearly half a century before them was all heart and no head, a movement of high-minded but ineffectual idealists, which formed a sentimental prologue to the real business of revolution. But many Western historians attribute much greater significance to it, arguing that the roots of Soviet despotism are traceable ultimately to revolutionary populism, from which the Bolsheviks took the method, inimical to orthodox Marxism, of enforcing a socialist ideology through the violent action of a professional revolutionary elite.
Review, 5241 words
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