Word: deutscher
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...UNFINISHED REVOLUTION (1917-1967) by Isaac Deutscher. 115 pages. Oxford University...
...heady and passionate concept of the international socialist revolution is difficult for some men to give up. Isaac Deutscher is one of those who seem to have taken to it as others take to wine and women. He still carries a torch for the Russian Revolution as the guiding light of future world history. A Polish-born Communist, expelled from the party in 1932 for political deviation, Deutscher is now a Britain-based historian and widely considered one of the leading experts on Communism. His three-volume study of Trotsky (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast...
Third Act Coming. To Deutscher, the events of 1917 were but the first act of a continuing international revolutionary happening; the second act was the Chinese Communist takeover of 1948; and the curtain is about to rise on the third. The Russian Revolution really consisted of two revolutions, proletarian and bourgeois, merged into one. The proletariat was represented by the collective-minded industrial urban workers; the bourgeoisie, by economically individualistic peasants. The industrial workers were, of course, the revolutionary elite, "the chief agent of socialism." But in the famines and civil wars that raged into the 1920s, this industrial flower...
Myth v. Reality. Persuasive though he sounds, the fabric of Deutscher's interpretation is thin and full of holes. He is right in accusing nationalism of subverting international revolution; yet it must be remembered that Communism also constantly tries to subvert and take over nationalistic movements, and often succeeds. His insistence on making the industrial working class the driving force behind any modern revolution often leaves him grasping for threads. After all, revolutions have been far more frequently led by bourgeois intellectuals. And the notion that today's workers in Russia and China are demanding their rightful revolutionary...
...Deutscher, now 60, obviously remains caught up in his love affair with the bitch goddess of the left-international socialist revolution. And even though his love has not only been wed but ravaged by all sorts of adventurers, he still regards her as essentially pure, as innocent as she seemed when she first appeared before him in his youth. It is, he believes, her captors who are to blame. But in so often allowing emotion to obscure fact, myth to overwhelm reality, he only proves once more, alas, that no bourgeois gentleman can be as sentimental as a doctrinaire proletarian...