580
PAR TI SAN REV I EW
(which, I admit, I read imperfectly) it sounds rather booming and
sometimes curiously Miltonian ; in English it reads like the less inter–
esting paragraphs of Thomas Wolfe.
Hayden Carruth
UNDERSTANDING COMMUN ISM
BOLSHEVI SM. An Introdu ction to Sovi et Communism . By Waldema r
Gu ria n. Unive r$ity of Noire Da me Pros,.
$3 .75.
This, to my knowledge, is the best analytical history of Bol–
shevism.
In
about a hundred pages, it sums up with great precision the
findings of most students of the subject ; and the second part consists
of carefully selected source material, some of it in original translations
from the Russian. The emphasis throughout is on the basic tenets and
ideological implications of the Soviet system.
Brevity is not a common virtue of historians. Wherever it is
achieved, it rests on qualities which come only as the reward of lifelong
study, of complete mastery of the material and an unerring sense of
relevance. These qualities are manifest throughout Gurian's study. But
Gurian's subject is of a kind that presents special difficulties to the
rustorian. All studies of the Soviet system, even when prepared by the
most reliable experts, suffer from a decisive lack of source material.
Russian archives have never been opened, and we do not know whether
the Bolshevik regime will leave behind the usual kind of documentary
evidence without which no factual rustoriography can be written. Under
the influence of the social sciences contemporary historians have unfor–
tunately lost much of their interest in sources as such. This becomes
more and more apparent in the growing literature on the Soviet system,
about which we know so little that we are forced to rely continually on
secondary material. And trus lack of undisputed documentary evidence
has led many scholars to accept Russian government sources and to
succumb to Bolshevik propaganda simply because it appears to them
to be more reputable than the records of personal experience by vic–
tims of the regime or the spectacular confessions of former officials.
Gurian never falls into this trap. His own solution of the problem
is to concentrate on an analysis of the ideology, avoiding factual nar–
rative as much as possible. Trus approach has one major shortcoming:
it does not really account for the events themselves, since even the
more decisive ones, like the Kronstadt rebellion, are treated in a cursory
manner.
