03741nam 2200613 450 99624803970331620230617042153.00-674-27330-310.4159/9780674273306(CKB)1000000000548101(dli)HEB05247(SSID)ssj0000084932(PQKBManifestationID)11112727(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000084932(PQKBWorkID)10004104(PQKB)11584477(MiAaPQ)EBC6796254(Au-PeEL)EBL6796254(OCoLC)1154821150(DE-B1597)613934(DE-B1597)9780674273306(EXLCZ)99100000000054810120220720d2003 uy 0engurmnummmmuuuutxtccrTerror in my soul Communist autobiographies on trial /Igal HalfinCambridge, Massachusetts :Harvard University Press,[2003]©20031 online resource (xi, 344 p. )ill. ;Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: MonographIncludes bibliographical references (pages [285]-339) and index.Front matter --Contents --Preface --Introduction --CHAPTER 1 Good and Evil in Communism --CHAPTER 2 A Voyage toward the Light --CHAPTER 3 The Bolshevik Discourse on the Psyche --CHAPTER 4 From a Weak Body to an Omnipotent Mind --CHAPTER 5 Looking into the Oppositionist Soul --Epilogue: Communism and Death --Notes --IndexIn this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the demands of the Party. Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as helplessly flawed. Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge.ACLS Humanities E-Book (Series).Communist autobiographies on trialPolitical purgesSoviet UnionLanguage and languagesPolitical aspectsSoviet UnionPolitics and government1917-1936Soviet UnionPolitics and government1936-1953Political purgesLanguage and languagesPolitical aspects.335.4301Halfin Igal897463American Council of Learned Societies.MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK996248039703316Terror in my soul2835264UNISA