Word: ulam
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...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...
...Ulam explains Lenin's attitude toward terror in purely intellectual terms...
...Perhaps Ulam understands Lenin as a completely intellectual idealist, but this clashes with earlier statements about Lenin's pragmatism. Furthermore, Ulam dehumanizes his subject by denying him any disenchantment or disillusionment, claiming that his ideology would not tolerate...
...issues were as much moral as intellectual, economic, and political. When it comes to handling moral questions, a book need more than a pile of factual truths. The author himself must make an entrance and make some decisions. This is the time for the book to come alive. But Ulam fails to appear, and his book never rises above painstaking historical geology