Word: ulam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cannot help admiring Ulam for having accumulated the detail that illuminates sections like those on the February and October revolutions. Unfortunately, he often prefers to combine and compromise conflicting accounts instead of selecting his facts and taking a more definitive stand. For example, there is a minor but interesting disagreement among historians about a man named Roman Malinovsky, who was either a police spy, a Bolshevik agent, or a double agent, depending on whom you read. After digesting all the available evidence, Ulam decides that "Malinovsky himself, it is obvious, was not simply a cold-blooded police agent...
...Bolsheviks is not as big as its title would have you believe. Ulam implicitly assumes that the history of the Bolshevik Party cannot be separated from the history of Lenin. The book is essentially an account of Lenin's life, padded with more general history and laced with occasional hints of animation. The decision to identify the Party with Lenin was in many ways an unfortunate one, because the two were not synonymous. A discussion of dissent within the Party would have made the book more exciting, and probably more balanced...
...Bolsheviks is solid biography which frequently benefits from its pretensions to history of a broader scope. Ulam's discussions of Lenin's youth and the Party in exile are exhaustive, and his treatment of the 1917 revolutions is both thorough and fair-minded. In discussing the February revolution, for example, after giving two pages of "the bare facts," Ulam asks, "What did really happen?" He then summarizes the liberal, non-Bolshevik Socialist, monarchist, Trotskyite, and Leninist positions before adding his own interpretation. Equally impressive are his analyses of Lenin as the ruler of a state. Here he gives a very...
...Ulam's style that keeps his book in the mineral world. He handles mountains of detail as concisely as any man can. Ulam has an engaging way of making his material seem contemporary. To describe the small provincial town where Lenin spent part of his youth. Ulam quotes a contemporary journalist's description of a typical evening and adds "If only nineteenth century Russia had had television!" Or he defines the Kadets, or Constitutional Democrats, with the following sentence...
...Bolsheviks remains inanimate because Ulam refuses to deal with the moral issues of twentieth-century Russian history. Part of his reticence can be attributed to his initial concept of the book as the history of a Party rather than a biography. When he speaks of guilt at all it is in subtly collective terms: "Insofar as the peasant was concerned, no dialectic, no contradiction within Lenin's own thinking could obscure or explain away the essentially repressive and hypocritical policy of the Bolsheviks...