Scorched earth

Baberowski's Scorched earth is a translation into English of his most recent study of the Soviet Union (USSR) and Russia, of what happened from 1917 to date and why it still matters. It discusses Stalin's rule as the trauma that Russia today has yet to confront and heal. It is all the more significant due to the author's revisiting of some of his earlier ideas regarding the relationship between the Bolshevist system, the ideology that was supposed to underpin it, and Stalin's compulsive addiction to violence. Baberowski notes in his preface that ‘the dream of communist salvation was drowned in the blood of millions because the violence became detached from the original motives, and eventually was subject to the purposes of the dictator alone’ (p. viii). Baberowski is not thereby suggesting that Stalinism was a phenomenon without Russian antecedents. The tsars had pursued the ‘project of registering, homogenizing, and subjugating the populations of the empire’ (p. 20), an objective further elaborated by Tsar Peter I and his successors by attempting to Europeanize the country. Baberowski also argues that the blood and terror unleashed by Lenin before, during and after the Russian civil war were also cut from the same cloth as Stalin's measures returning the peasantry in effect to the serf status from which it had slowly begun to emerge after the liberation reforms of Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Scorched earth's account of the subsequent descent of the USSR into a system of slavery whose functional levels were forced into the role of executioners, themselves often in due course becoming victims, makes for compelling as well as harrowing reading

Ancient history · Communism · Dictator · Dream · Economic history · Empire · Ideology · Phenomenon · Political science · Politics · Reign · Soviet union · Spanish Civil War · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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