Books: Leon Aron’s book succeeds marvelously in resurrecting what Hannah Arendt called the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.

Breaking Myths: 

The Ideas that Ruined Bolshevism

By Vladimir Tismaneanu

Historian Martin Malia defined the Soviet-type regimes as ideocratic partocracies. Other authors, including celebrated Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, author of the classical book The Captive Mind, called them logocracies. Ideology was the only legitimizing principle for those corrupt, corruptive, and fundamentally mendacious regimes. The revolutions of 1989-1991 that swept away communist regimes in East-Central Europe and the USSR started, in fact, earlier. What Pope John Paul II called anannus mirabilis, a miraculous year, could not have taken place without the radical changes in the USSR that were initiated and promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Leon Aron’s book, Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideas in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1977-1991 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), a genuine tour de force, is a fascinating chronicle of the main ideas that caused and inspired the revolutionary upheaval in the USSR. A respected student of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, Aron is the author of a major Yeltsin biography and of numerous articles dealing with Russia’s political culture. For him, what happened in the USSR between 1987 and 1991 amounted to the complete disbandment of all political myths that had served as justification for the Leninist Leviathan.

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