Education to Total Dissent

The Education of Lev Navrozov By Lev Navrozov Harper’s Magazine Press, 628 pp., $12.95 For Lev Navrozov, born after Lenin’s death, and a “product” of the new society from his youth in a genteel family packed into one room of a crowded communal apartment to his relatively affluent maturity in his dacha outside Moscow, the USSR is a madhouse. And, tragically, the madhouse is not simply the work of historical “forces,” but the product of a set of accidents capitalized on by Lenin, who knew what he wanted, and Stalin, who knew how to get more of it.

Russia between 1861 (when Alexander II liberated the serfs, initiated some judicial reforms, and began to lay the groundwork for a revitalization of local government) and 1917 was a nation “on the move,” and the direction, as Navrozov—along with many Western historians, and a growing number of Soviet dissidents—sees it, was that of constitutional monarchy. It drew closer and closer to the possibility of stabilizing such an arrangement in the years before World War I, moving swiftly compared to its Western predecessors, but fitfully, since it is no simple matter to develop a “civic psychology” among a population overwhelmingly peasant in lifeways and thought. The war came too soon—perhaps by only ten years. Instead of tottering through the war weakened but intact, Russia-in-transition fell, to be replaced by an autocracy quite beyond the worst fears of the proletariat, which realized too late that Lenin “could do any harm imaginable to any of them, they no harm to him.”

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Walter Connor

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The Education of Lev Navrozov By Lev Navrozov Harper’s Magazine Press, 628 pp., $12.95 For Lev Navrozov, born after Lenin’s death, and a “product” of the new society from his youth in a genteel family packed into one room of a crowded communal apartment to his relatively affluent maturity in his dacha outside Moscow, the USSR is a madhouse. And, tragically, the madhouse is not simply the work of historical “forces,” but the product of a set of accidents capitalized on by Lenin, who knew what he wanted, and Stalin, who knew how to get more of it.

Russia between 1861 (when Alexander II liberated the serfs, initiated some judicial reforms, and began to lay the groundwork for a revitalization of local government) and 1917 was a nation “on the move,” and the direction, as Navrozov—along with many Western historians, and a growing number of Soviet dissidents—sees it, was that of constitutional monarchy. It drew closer and closer to the possibility of stabilizing such an arrangement in the years before World War I, moving swiftly compared to its Western predecessors, but fitfully, since it is no simple matter to develop a “civic psychology” among a population overwhelmingly peasant in lifeways and thought. The war came too soon—perhaps by only ten years. Instead of tottering through the war weakened but intact, Russia-in-transition fell, to be replaced by an autocracy quite beyond the worst fears of the proletariat, which realized too late that Lenin “could do any harm imaginable to any of them, they no harm to him.”