:Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928.(Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.)

Abstract

This is Igal Halfin's third analysis of Bolshevik discourse, following From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (1999) and Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (2003). All three books are part of a growing body of scholarship that reasserts the centrality of ideology, in particular of what it meant to “speak Bolshevik,” to our understanding of Soviet history. Like the author's previous book, this work strives to identify the scope and development of what Halfin, in adapting Foucault, calls the “hermeneutics of the soul,” the process by which party members attempted to glean one another's state of consciousness and, ultimately, their true understanding of and underlying loyalty to the revolutionary cause. Halfin boldly asserts that previous accounts of the intraparty conflicts of the 1920s have failed to take seriously the intricate language battles that occurred and have mistakenly ascribed the course of events to (primarily cynical) personal antagonisms. He aims to transcend what he sees as “the reductive understanding of language widespread in current scholarship” (p. 28), although for the most part he does not name names.