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A New Insight on Soviet History
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10842 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1986 |
2,200 Words |
| Author
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Jean-Pierre Gabriel
Jean-Pierre Gabriel is a free-lance writer residing in Paris. |
When first published in France in 1982, Mikhail Heller's and Aleksandr Nekrich's Utopia in Power gained unanimous praise from the press as well as from academic circles. "A fundamental book," wrote the weekly l'Express, "that dismantles luminously the mechanisms of Soviet power." "Mikhail Heller," wrote historian Pierre Daix in the daily Le Quotidien, "authored the best analysis on the birth of the totalitarian system at the very origins of the Soviet Union." "In the past sixty years," claims leading sovietologist Alain Bsancon, "there has not been a work on Soviet history more intelligent, rigorous, and complete than Heller-Nekrich's."
After a first edition of 20,000 copies, which is quite exceptional in France for a specialized book, a second edition of Utopia in Power was printed in 1986. Besides Russian, German, and Italian editions, three clandestine Polish editions were published, along with many excerpts in the underground press.
What makes Utopia in Power unique is that two professional historians born and raised in the Soviet world had total freedom to write on their country's history--after taking shelter in the West. Although many intellectuals and artists fled to the free world from the Soviet Union, there were very few historians among them.
Born in 1920 in Baku, Dr. Aleksandr Nekrich is recognized as a leading authority on the Second World War. A member of the Communist party and a former officer in the Red Army during the Second World War, he was granted access, during the de-Stalinization era, to archives that few others could consult. During his research work he met with top officials, such as Marshal Golikov, head of the Soviet Army's secret services (GRU), and on the basis of his exclusive information, he wrote a book, June 22, 1941, emphasizing Stalin's personal responsibility in the military disaster that followed the first clashes with Nazi Germany in 1941.
At the beginning of the 1960s, during the short period when the Khrushchev regime allowed a degree of freedom of expression, his book became a fantastic literary and social event. The first edition of 50,000 copies sold out in only two days. But the mood rapidly changed at the highest levels of power, and Nekrich, no more the hero of the day, was expelled from the Communist party and found himself under increasing pressure from the government. Having lost any opportunity to publish his works in USSR, he emigrated to the United States in 1976 and is now a research fellow at the Russian Center at Harvard. His recent books include The Punished
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