胡適關心談革命的書: Three who made a revolution
1926年他略略訪問莫斯科 談一些新政
1938-39 他在美國關心美州革命 讀些相關的書
1948/49 他讀陳獨秀最後的書信和看法 慶幸陳已非托派
1949.2.26 日記: Dick Smith說新出的Three who made a revolution (胡適記的少"a") 很可讀.....
著名的I. Berlin 在1950作的書評:[PDF]
THREE WHO MADE A REVOLUTION
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25 Feb 2004 – THREE WHO MADE A REVOLUTION. FEW WOULD TODAY wish to deny that the Russian Revolution has, whether by attraction or repulsion, ...
此書有重印本
書名 Three who made a revolution: a biographical history
作者 Bertram David Wolfe
版本 圖解, 重印
出版者 Cooper Square Press, 2001
Three who made a revolution: a biographical history
Bertram David Wolfe
7 書評
Cooper Square Press, 2001/10/1 - 659 頁
The lives of three men who made the Russian Revolution possible Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are the focus of this biographical account of the rise of socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bertram Wolfe, a political scientist and historian of Russia, knew Trotsky and Stalin personally, and here brings his profound insider's knowledge to bear on his subjects. "Three Who Made a Revolution" recounts the early lives and influences of the three leaders, and shows the development of their diverging ideologies as decades gave strength to their cause and brought Russia closer to its turning point, a revolution that would alter the course of the twentieth century.
***紐約時報書介Three Who Made a Revolution
By Felicity Barringer
Published: December 08, 1991
NEW RUSSIA The Mayor of St. Petersburg's Own Story of the Struggle for Justice and Democracy. By Anatoly Sobchak. Illustrated. 191 pp. New York: The Free Press. $22.95.
REINVENTING a country is a heady, romantic business. The moments when men and women harness ideals to create institutions and harness institutions to serve society have an incandescent quality.
It was that kind of moment that Anatoly Sobchak, an obscure Leningrad University law professor, wanted to seize in 1989, when he first made his way onto the Soviet Union's national stage. It is not clear how well he has succeeded; depending on how his country, or what remains of it, turns out, his role in its history may or may not be considered vital. But he was among the first, and among the most dogged, of those leading the legal assaults on the crumbling fortress of Communism. "For a New Russia" is his story of the days when he made his name, and his vision of the country he wants his homeland to become.
At
the beginning of 1989, few people outside of Leningrad University had
heard of Mr. Sobchak. That changed within months, when a colleague
nominated him -- against the wishes of the law department's director --
as a candidate for the newly constituted Congress of People's Deputies.
Elected in April in an upset (his district had almost always been
represented by a factory worker), he went to Moscow that May.
Soon thereafter, he was chosen as a member of the Supreme Soviet, the smaller and more powerful legislative body drawn from the larger Congress. The Supreme Soviet convened in June, with sessions televised daily to a huge national audience. In that forum, it was Mr. Sobchak, perhaps more than any other legislator, who seemed to have the analytic skill to know where to attack the governmental apparat, the legislative acumen to attack it effectively and the inner fire to take it on again and again. From the first, Mr. Sobchak practiced parliamentary politics as a contact sport. When the sheer weight of legal logic would not suffice, he used his knowledge of procedure to finesse his opponents. If Boris N. Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Republic, is the politician- muzhik , the man of the masses, Mr. Sobchak is the politician-professor, the man of parliament.
Concentrating his attacks on the Communist old guard, he took on Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, saying the Government had flouted the laws on cooperatives -- the islands of entrepreneurial effort that threatened, at least in spirit, the institution of state ownership. Mr. Sobchak took on as well the conservative Communist Party stalwart Yegor K. Ligachev. As the head of the parliamentary commission investigating the massacre of civilian demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989, Mr. Sobchak took the step -- small for us, huge for the Russians -- of calling top leaders like Mr. Ligachev and the K.G.B. chief Viktor Chebrikov to account before the commission. In the end, he bluntly accused Mr. Ligachev of lying to evade responsibility for his part in the tragedy.
SOMETIMES Mr. Sobchak even took on his own liberal allies, particularly during slashing arguments over how much power the new Presidency should be accorded, and under what circumstances. When Mikhail S. Gorbachev declared that every person in the Soviet Union should be equal before the law, Mr. Sobchak took him at his word.
In June 1990 he was elected chairman of the Leningrad City Council; later still, he was elected Mayor of the city that would, in September 1991, take back the historic name of St. Petersburg. From that post, Mr. Sobchak played a hero's role during last August's coup and countercoup, becoming one of the most respected men in the country. Early this fall, a national poll showed him to be the Soviet Union's second most popular politician, after Mr. Yeltsin.
This slim memoir was designed to open with his campaign for election to the Congress of People's Deputies in early 1989 and to close in late 1990. But history overtook the author. He added an epilogue after the bloody confrontation with Lithuania in January 1991. And after he and the democratic forces he helped nurture faced down the makers of the coup, an afterword was tacked on.
The result is a rambling, sometimes opaque work, perhaps the inevitable consequence of an impatient man dictating a book on the fly. "For a New Russia" borrows, for better or worse, from genres literary and unliterary: essay, legal brief, elegy, polemic and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Many sections are marred by a lack of essential context, born, apparently, of an assumption that the reader should be up to speed on the events of recent Soviet history. (The translation, though capable and colloquial, is unattributed.)
The irritating hodgepodge of styles, however, does not mask the man's passion or values. Making his career in the most Western of Russian cities, Mr. Sobchak demonstrates a distinctly Western outlook. His first campaign remarks, he tells us, were based on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s triumphant "I have a dream" speech.
Mr. Sobchak likes politics, but he loves law. He speaks of law as a painter might speak of art or a pianist might speak of music. From 1989 to 1991 he lectured his public on it, he tried to craft a new country from it, he sought to have it enshrined as king in a country that had always put men above laws.
"The law must be the same for all," Mr. Sobchak writes near the end of his book, in one of the moments of simple eloquence that redeem its disjointed organization and painfully sketchy narrative. "It must be as unchanging as the standard measure of length or weight. Anything else is an offense against the law and an abuse of civil rights."
At these moments of clarity, the book allows one to feel the excitement of watching a great birth, of seeing democratic ideas brought to life. Its partisan fervor made me root for Mr. Sobchak and his compatriots like Mr. Yeltsin and Moscow's Mayor, Gavriil Popov.
Sadly, Mr. Sobchak does little to help us understand the continuing appeal of the country's conservatives. They are usually presented as one-dimensional: clever, scheming and bad, "treacherous apparatchiks who were ever ready to betray, abandon, or replace any leader who no longer suited them."
Mr. Sobchak is much better when giving capsule sketches of men like Andrei Sakharov and Mr. Gorbachev, though he remains curiously reticent about Mr. Yeltsin -- perhaps because he shrinks from saying what he thinks about the nation's only current political colossus, a man who is both political ally and potential rival, and who is so temperamentally different from himself.
Sakharov he describes adoringly, as "a matchless and idealistic leader marching alone, far in the vanguard." For Mr. Gorbachev he has a more cautious admiration -- though Mr. Sobchak stands apart from his Soviet contemporaries in admiring Mr. Gorbachev at all.
But as always, he is most in his element, and most eloquent, when talking of the struggle to remake Soviet law -- when, for example, he joined Sakharov's crusade to abolish Article 6, the section of the Soviet Constitution enshrining the Communist Party's "leading role" in society. Sakharov didn't live to see the article pass out of existence in 1990, but Mr. Sobchak helped push it into oblivion.
He is more passionate yet in discussing his still-unrealized dream of private property. "Until private property is introduced into urban life," he writes, "we will have to step carefully on the streets of our beautiful cities to avoid treading in some putrid puddle or excrement. 'Nobody's' houses will continue to be covered in graffiti within a week of people moving in, and the heating fail at the first hint of frost. 'Nobody's' children by failed marriages will go to 'nobody's' schools short of teachers." In this section, and in later chapters like "The System Syndrome," Mr. Sobchak helps explain the basic obstacles the liberals faced and continue to face.
He clearly did not intend this account to be read as history, which is a good thing. As history it is full of holes. While he was arguing about Article 6 in Moscow in March 1990, Lithuania was declaring its independence and prompting a constitutional crisis, but we hear little about that. The bitter ethnic rivalry between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Caucasus also goes virtually unnoted. Closer to home, Mr. Sobchak makes no mention of why he joined the Communist Party in 1988, though he takes pains to describe leaving it two years later.
Nonetheless, the reader who is willing to leap the gaps and to find his way through the disorganized thicket of Mr. Sobchak's book will gain an unparalleled perspective on the troubled past, the troubled present and the unknown future of Russia and whatever other republics remain with it.
Soon thereafter, he was chosen as a member of the Supreme Soviet, the smaller and more powerful legislative body drawn from the larger Congress. The Supreme Soviet convened in June, with sessions televised daily to a huge national audience. In that forum, it was Mr. Sobchak, perhaps more than any other legislator, who seemed to have the analytic skill to know where to attack the governmental apparat, the legislative acumen to attack it effectively and the inner fire to take it on again and again. From the first, Mr. Sobchak practiced parliamentary politics as a contact sport. When the sheer weight of legal logic would not suffice, he used his knowledge of procedure to finesse his opponents. If Boris N. Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Republic, is the politician- muzhik , the man of the masses, Mr. Sobchak is the politician-professor, the man of parliament.
Concentrating his attacks on the Communist old guard, he took on Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, saying the Government had flouted the laws on cooperatives -- the islands of entrepreneurial effort that threatened, at least in spirit, the institution of state ownership. Mr. Sobchak took on as well the conservative Communist Party stalwart Yegor K. Ligachev. As the head of the parliamentary commission investigating the massacre of civilian demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989, Mr. Sobchak took the step -- small for us, huge for the Russians -- of calling top leaders like Mr. Ligachev and the K.G.B. chief Viktor Chebrikov to account before the commission. In the end, he bluntly accused Mr. Ligachev of lying to evade responsibility for his part in the tragedy.
SOMETIMES Mr. Sobchak even took on his own liberal allies, particularly during slashing arguments over how much power the new Presidency should be accorded, and under what circumstances. When Mikhail S. Gorbachev declared that every person in the Soviet Union should be equal before the law, Mr. Sobchak took him at his word.
In June 1990 he was elected chairman of the Leningrad City Council; later still, he was elected Mayor of the city that would, in September 1991, take back the historic name of St. Petersburg. From that post, Mr. Sobchak played a hero's role during last August's coup and countercoup, becoming one of the most respected men in the country. Early this fall, a national poll showed him to be the Soviet Union's second most popular politician, after Mr. Yeltsin.
This slim memoir was designed to open with his campaign for election to the Congress of People's Deputies in early 1989 and to close in late 1990. But history overtook the author. He added an epilogue after the bloody confrontation with Lithuania in January 1991. And after he and the democratic forces he helped nurture faced down the makers of the coup, an afterword was tacked on.
The result is a rambling, sometimes opaque work, perhaps the inevitable consequence of an impatient man dictating a book on the fly. "For a New Russia" borrows, for better or worse, from genres literary and unliterary: essay, legal brief, elegy, polemic and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Many sections are marred by a lack of essential context, born, apparently, of an assumption that the reader should be up to speed on the events of recent Soviet history. (The translation, though capable and colloquial, is unattributed.)
The irritating hodgepodge of styles, however, does not mask the man's passion or values. Making his career in the most Western of Russian cities, Mr. Sobchak demonstrates a distinctly Western outlook. His first campaign remarks, he tells us, were based on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s triumphant "I have a dream" speech.
Mr. Sobchak likes politics, but he loves law. He speaks of law as a painter might speak of art or a pianist might speak of music. From 1989 to 1991 he lectured his public on it, he tried to craft a new country from it, he sought to have it enshrined as king in a country that had always put men above laws.
"The law must be the same for all," Mr. Sobchak writes near the end of his book, in one of the moments of simple eloquence that redeem its disjointed organization and painfully sketchy narrative. "It must be as unchanging as the standard measure of length or weight. Anything else is an offense against the law and an abuse of civil rights."
At these moments of clarity, the book allows one to feel the excitement of watching a great birth, of seeing democratic ideas brought to life. Its partisan fervor made me root for Mr. Sobchak and his compatriots like Mr. Yeltsin and Moscow's Mayor, Gavriil Popov.
Sadly, Mr. Sobchak does little to help us understand the continuing appeal of the country's conservatives. They are usually presented as one-dimensional: clever, scheming and bad, "treacherous apparatchiks who were ever ready to betray, abandon, or replace any leader who no longer suited them."
Mr. Sobchak is much better when giving capsule sketches of men like Andrei Sakharov and Mr. Gorbachev, though he remains curiously reticent about Mr. Yeltsin -- perhaps because he shrinks from saying what he thinks about the nation's only current political colossus, a man who is both political ally and potential rival, and who is so temperamentally different from himself.
Sakharov he describes adoringly, as "a matchless and idealistic leader marching alone, far in the vanguard." For Mr. Gorbachev he has a more cautious admiration -- though Mr. Sobchak stands apart from his Soviet contemporaries in admiring Mr. Gorbachev at all.
But as always, he is most in his element, and most eloquent, when talking of the struggle to remake Soviet law -- when, for example, he joined Sakharov's crusade to abolish Article 6, the section of the Soviet Constitution enshrining the Communist Party's "leading role" in society. Sakharov didn't live to see the article pass out of existence in 1990, but Mr. Sobchak helped push it into oblivion.
He is more passionate yet in discussing his still-unrealized dream of private property. "Until private property is introduced into urban life," he writes, "we will have to step carefully on the streets of our beautiful cities to avoid treading in some putrid puddle or excrement. 'Nobody's' houses will continue to be covered in graffiti within a week of people moving in, and the heating fail at the first hint of frost. 'Nobody's' children by failed marriages will go to 'nobody's' schools short of teachers." In this section, and in later chapters like "The System Syndrome," Mr. Sobchak helps explain the basic obstacles the liberals faced and continue to face.
He clearly did not intend this account to be read as history, which is a good thing. As history it is full of holes. While he was arguing about Article 6 in Moscow in March 1990, Lithuania was declaring its independence and prompting a constitutional crisis, but we hear little about that. The bitter ethnic rivalry between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Caucasus also goes virtually unnoted. Closer to home, Mr. Sobchak makes no mention of why he joined the Communist Party in 1988, though he takes pains to describe leaving it two years later.
Nonetheless, the reader who is willing to leap the gaps and to find his way through the disorganized thicket of Mr. Sobchak's book will gain an unparalleled perspective on the troubled past, the troubled present and the unknown future of Russia and whatever other republics remain with it.
Felicity Barringer, who reported from Moscow between 1986 and 1988 for The New York Times, now writes from Washington.
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