Word: alexandrov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHILE I was reading through Adam Ulam's new biography, Stalin, The Man and His Era, one small passage jumped off the pages of history into our own time. It is a quote from a revolutionary journal during the Russian Revolution of 1905-6. One M. Alexandrov wrote he couldn't believe only ten years earlier political apathy among University youth was so widespread that a speaker at a students' meeting could say, "If you are studying to be a doctor then your main duty is to try to become a good doctor, if engineer to be a good engineer...
...oversimplification, but I think a reasonable and permissible one, to say that the mood on campus today reflects the same retreat into political apathy Alexandrov remembered of Russia in the 1890s. His article in 1906 was particularly moving because it reminded me that the mood can shift once again. Perhaps demonstrations are no longer viable forms of political activism, and maybe the shift away from political apathy will not come in the form of revolution, but it can and must come out of personal commitments reaching much deeper than a search for some kind of personal security so characteristic...