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“... paid to all philosophical argument.’ So much for dialectical materialism, a philosophy for which Alexander Zinoviev feels a professional scorn. Zinoviev’s academic speciality is logic, and his main work in that field (popularised in a forbidding volume called Logical Physics) is an analysis of the cogency and ...”

“... steel, which originally reads: ‘Long Live Communism – The Radiant Future of All Mankind!’ Zinoviev was trained, apparently, as a Marxist philosopher, and indeed held a research appointment in the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was also a professor of Logic at the University of Moscow. After the publication in the West of ...”

“... empty sack who comes down your chimney to steal everything in the house’: or this passed on from Alexander Zinoviev commenting on glasnost and the crushing of the dissidents: ‘After you’ve gotten rid of your enemies, you’re ready to abolish capital punishment.’ As always with Bellow, the people here have a tangible presence, a thereness; one ...”

“... their history when they cherish the Promethean illusion that they are making it’). Anticipating Alexander Zinoviev, he observed that in the Soviet Union ‘le style de la déstalinisation est resté stalinien.’ Was it just for lack of inclination that he never worked out the implications of these and similar insights? It seems more likely that he ...”

“... Veyne’s Le Pain et le Cirque,2 an analysis of civic giving in Classical Antiquity; the second Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights,3 a satirical and penetrating work about politics and everyday life in the Soviet Union. Veyne is, in my view, the greatest French historian now writing. I believe that his work will come to achieve the same status ...”

“... faces insisted on. I still think so. But I couldn’t escape my own history, and when the face of Zinoviev appeared for a minute I found myself trying, ludicrously, to read an ‘attitude’ into its sleepless and three-quarters-dead stare. I wanted then, and certainly afterwards, to forget the stare, and replace ...”

“... mid-19th century, and the book’s centre-piece is a description of the messy love-affair between Alexander Herzen’s wife and the German revolutionary poet, Herwegh. On a first reading, the book is a brilliant performance, for it treats the affair (and other later ones) with insight and irony. On a second reading, I am not so sure of its quality. It is a ...”

“... origins in deliberate obscurity, especially the ethnic background of his maternal grandfather, Dr Alexander Dmitrievich Blank: ‘Some maintain he was a Jew.’ And he makes the flat assertion: ‘The name of his German wife, Lenin’s maternal grandmother, is never given.’ Never is a short time in biography. The same year, on page 43 of his Life and Death ...”

“... years or decades. They include Anna Akhmatova’s Rekviem (written during and about the Purges), Alexander Tvardovsky’s long-suppressed By Right of Memory, dealing with collectivisation, Anatoly Zhigulin’s cycle of poems about his time in Stalinist prisons and camps, poems by long ignored émigrés or opponents such as Nikolai Gumilyev, Georgy ...”

“... People’s Will, the wing of the Populist revolutionary party responsible for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 – considered the taking of another life justified insofar as they were offering up their own: a philosophy not so different from that of present-day suicide bombers, except for the fact that the Russian public, unlike the contemporary ...”

“... his adjectives for a broad and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and includes s0me Russian and German. It’s a lesser work in every sense than Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which came out first though it deals with a ...”

“... outside Russia in 1919 (with the enthusiastic support of the young Hungarian movie industry under Alexander Korda, Michael Korda’s uncle), the Party had been scattered and reduced by domestic repression, Stalin’s terror and its own internal quarrels, and several times had actually dissolved. Gati claims that by 1940 there were barely more than two hundred ...”

“... the Campbell Case, he had been humiliated by questions surrounding the granting of a baronetcy to Alexander Grant, a director at the biscuit manufacturer McVitie & Price, who had supported him financially. Whatever the reasons, the outcome was a general election fought on the question of Labour’s relationship with communism, and which is now best remembered ...”

“... a New York gallery of Sots Art, an ironic appropriation of ‘socialist’ art by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, into trying to understand the deeper significance of Socialist Realism. This fascinating book swoops and lurches from topic to topic, but the reader’s feeling of disorientation is more than compensated for by the exhilaration of the ...”

“... involvement of young Jews in socialist and revolutionary movements. When a son was born in 1889 to Alexander Helphand (Parvus), ‘world revolutionary, international financier and future German government agent’, he announced ‘the birth of a healthy, cheerful enemy of the state’. It is often suggested that Jewish advancement in Russia was blocked by the ...”