Terror in My Soul : Communist Autobiographies on Trial / Igal Halfin.
2003
DK267
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Title
Terror in My Soul : Communist Autobiographies on Trial / Igal Halfin.
Author
Halfin, Igal, author.
ISBN
9780674273306
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2003]
Copyright
©2003
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (366 p.)
Item Number
10.4159/9780674273306 doi
Call Number
DK267
Dewey Decimal Classification
335.43 01
Summary
In this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the demands of the Party. Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as helplessly flawed. Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge.
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Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Good and Evil in Communism
CHAPTER 2 A Voyage toward the Light
CHAPTER 3 The Bolshevik Discourse on the Psyche
CHAPTER 4 From a Weak Body to an Omnipotent Mind
CHAPTER 5 Looking into the Oppositionist Soul
Epilogue: Communism and Death
Notes
Index
Contents
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Good and Evil in Communism
CHAPTER 2 A Voyage toward the Light
CHAPTER 3 The Bolshevik Discourse on the Psyche
CHAPTER 4 From a Weak Body to an Omnipotent Mind
CHAPTER 5 Looking into the Oppositionist Soul
Epilogue: Communism and Death
Notes
Index