Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

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Alexander (Aleksandr) (Alyaksandr) Bogdanov
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Image
Alexander Bogdanov
Full member of the 4th, 5th Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
In office
June 1906 – June 1909
Prospective member of the 3rd Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
In office
1905–1906
Personal details
Born Alyaksandr Malinovsky
22 August 1873
Sokółka, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire (now Poland)
Died 7 April 1928 (aged 54)
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality Russian
Political party RSDLP (Bolsheviks)
Alma mater Moscow University, Kharkiv University
Occupation Physician, philosopher, writer

Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Богда́нов; born Alyaksandr Malinovsky; Belarusian: Алякса́ндр Алякса́ндравіч Маліно́ўскі; 22 August 1873 [O.S. 10 August] – 7 April 1928) was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer, and revolutionary of Belarusian ethnicity.

He was a key figure in the early history of the Bolshevik majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, (RSDLP - later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU]), originally established 1898, being one of its co-founders in 1903, after the split with the Mensheviks minority faction and a rival to Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), until being expelled in 1909. Following the Russian Revolutions of 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power in the collapsing Russian Empire, during the first decade of the subsequent Soviet Union in the 1920s, he was an influential opponent of the Bolshevik government and Lenin from a Marxist leftist perspective. Bogdanov received training in medicine and psychiatry. His wide various scientific and medical interests ranged from the universal systems theory to the possibility of human rejuvenation through blood transfusion. He invented an original philosophy called "tectology", now regarded as a forerunner of systems theory. He was also an economist, culture theorist, science fiction writer, and political activist. He was one of the Russian Machists.

Early years

Alyaksandr Malinovsky was born in Sokółka, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire (now Poland), into a rural teacher's family, the second of six children. He attended the Gymnasium at Tula, which he compared to a barracks or prison. He was awarded a gold medal when he graduated.[1]

Upon completion of the gymnasium, Bogdanov was admitted to the Natural Science Department of Moscow University. In his autobiography, Bogdanov reported that, while studying at Moscow University, he joined the Union Council of Regional Societies, and he was arrested and exiled to Tula because of it.[2]

The occasion of his arrest and exile is as follows. The head of the Moscow Okhrana used an informant to acquire the names of members of the Union Council of Regional Societies, which included Bogdanov's name. on October 30, 1894, students rowdily demonstrated against a lecture by the famous history Professor Vasily Klyuchevsky who, despite being a well-known liberal, had written a favourable eulogy for the recently deceased Tsar Alexander III of Russia. Punishment of a few of the students was arbitrary and unfair that the Union Council requested a fair reexamination of the issue. That very night, the Okhrana arrested all the students on the list mentioned above - including Bogdanov - who were expelled from the university and banished to their hometowns.[3] Expelled from Moscow State University, he moved to the University of Kharkov where he graduated as a physician in 1899. Bogdanov remained in Tula from 1894 to 1899, where - since his own family was living in Sokółka - he lodged with Alexander Rudnev, the father of Vladimir Bazarov, who became a close friend and collaborator in future years. Here he met and married Natalya Bogdanovna Korsak, who, as a woman, had been refused entrance to the university. She was eight years older than him[4] and worked as a nurse for Rudnev. Malinovsky adopted the nom de plume that he used when he wrote his major theoretical works and his novels from her patronym.[5] Alongside Bazarov and Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov he became a tutor in a workers' study circle. This was organised in the Tula Armament Factory by Ivan Saveliev, whom Bogdanov credited with founding Social Democracy in Tula. During this period, he wrote his Brief course of economic science which was published – "subject to many modifications made for the benefit of the censor" – only in 1897. He later said that this experience of student-led education gave him his first lesson in proletarian culture. In autumn 1895, he resumed his medical studies at the University of Kharkiv (Ukraine) but still spent much time in Tula. He gained access to the works of Lenin in 1896, particularly the latter's critique of Peter Berngardovich Struve. In 1899, he graduated as a medical doctor and published his next work, "Basic elements of the historical perspective on nature". However, because of his political views, he was also arrested by the Tsar's police, spent six months in prison, and was exiled to Vologda.

Bolshevism

Bogdanov dates his support for Bolshevism from autumn of 1903. Early in 1904, Martin Lyadov was sent by the Bolsheviks in Geneva to seek out supporters in Russia. He found a sympathetic group of revolutionaries in Tver. Bogdanov was then sent by the Tver Committee to Geneva, where he was greatly impressed by Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Bogdanov was arrested on 3 December 1905 and held in prison until 27 May 1906. Upon release, he was exiled to Bezhetsk for three years. However he obtained permission to spend his exile abroad, and joined Lenin in Kokkola, Finland. For the next six years, Bogdanov was a major figure among the early Bolsheviks, second only to Vladimir Lenin in influence. In 1904-1906, he published three volumes of the philosophic treatise Empiriomonizm (Empiriomonism), in which he tried to merge Marxism with the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius.

Haeckel, Ostwald, and the Monistic Religion

Another European movement explicitly designed to be an "anti-Christian" path of Lebensreform was the "Monistic Religion" of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). From his post as professor of zoology at the University of Jena, Haeckel dominated German evolutionary biology in the second half of the nineteenth century and was the most prominent proponent of the social implications of Darwinian theory. Over the years Haeckel made many creative departures from Darwin, so many in fact that the tenets of Darwinism were occluded by the renovations of Haeckelism. Since he was a prolific author, and wrote books and articles for both the scholarly and popular presses, it has been said that he dominated the discussion of evolutionary theory in German Europe by providing "the most comprehensive surveys of the Darwinist position authored by a German." [32]

Haeckel published his views on human evolution in 1868, before Darwin did so in 1871 with The Descent of Man. [33] Darwin himself acknowledged Haeckel's priority by several years in formulating the theory of the descent of humans from simian ancestors. Historian of science and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr credits Haeckel for being "perhaps the first biologist to object vigorously to the notion that all science had to be like the physical sciences or to be based on mathematics." [34] Mayr says Haeckel was the first to insist that evolutionary biology was a historical science involving the historical methodologies of embryology, paleontology, and especially phylogeny.

In particular it was Haeckel's influential "Biogenetic Law" -- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- based on the evidence of these historical methods in biology that eventually had profound implications not only for evolutionary biology, but for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, especially Jung's analytical psychology. Haeckel considered this law as a universal truth -- indeed, for much of his early career, perhaps the only universal truth. That the stages of individual development (ontogeny) could be shown to replicate, in order, the states of the development of the human race (phylogeny) was a compelling theory. Each adult human being, then, in both development and structure, was a living museum of the entire history of the species.

Taking this principle as a starting point, as early as 1866 Haeckel proposed a new "natural religion" based on the natural sciences, since "God reveals himself in all natural phenomena." [35] In many later publications he promoted his pantheistic natural religion based on scientific principles -- a philosophy he called "Monism" -- as a way of linking science and religion. Haeckel was interested in theorizing about the driving natural force of life and evolution, which he insisted Darwin left out of his (therefore) incomplete theories. His somewhat quasi-vitalistic descriptions of monism provided that. However, his first specific recommendations for a monistic religion came in 1892 in a speech in Altenburg. He argued fervently for a monism as a new faith founded on a "scientific Weltanschauung," thus going beyond a mere substitution of atheistic materialism for Christianity (as he was generally perceived as doing by his contemporaries and even by many historians today).


As the 1890s in Central Europe were marked by the rise of volkisch utopianism based on a rejection of the Christian myth and an emphasis on the worship of nature (particularly the sun), many took Haeckel's call for the establishment of a monistic religion in his best-selling book of 1899, Die Weltratsel (The Riddle of the Universe), to heart as a way of winning the Kulturkampf ("the struggle for civilization"). [36] Haeckel himself exhibited a messianic zeal in promoting his logical, new pantheistic "nature religion" through lectures during which he would display his own beautiful hand-colored drawings and etchings of cells, embryos, and other natural phenomena that appealed on an emotional level to those seeking a greater meaning in life through the study of its apparent rationality, organization, beauty, and essential unity. It was visual material that had a striking "shock of the new" quality about it in an age without cinema or television.  [37] Haeckel's bizarrely beautiful drawings of radiolarians may have been the source images for a dream Jung had as a teenager that convinced him to study the natural sciences instead of becoming a philologist or archaeologist. [38]

"In the sincere cult of 'the true, the good, and the beautiful,' which is the heart of our new monistic religion, we find ample compensation for the anthropistic ideals of 'God, freedom, and immortality' which we have lost," writes Haeckel, echoing Winckelmann's Apollonianism. [39] In a secular rite of passage, the monist is thus reborn through the rejection of the tenets of organized religion (separation), an initiation into the proof of the essential unity of matter and spirit (a period of liminality), and then participation in local societies promoting monistic ideas (reincorporation).

By 1904 groups all over Central Europe had formed and were known as the Monistenbund (the Monistic Alliance), with some trying out rituals based on this new scientific religion. In Jena in 1906, under the guiding hand of Haeckel himself, they were formally organized under a single administrative umbrella, like cells united within the individual identity of a larger body. The ground in German Europe has long been fertile for such ideas to take root, especially among German Darwinians, for "a large number of them had abandoned the Christian religion" and, like Haeckel, spoke out against organized religion. [40] The Monistenbund attracted many prominent cultural, occultist, and scientific celebrities as members, including physicist Ernst Mach and sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies. It also attracted such luminaries as the dancer Isadora Duncan, [41] then-Theosophist Rudolph Steiner, [42] and psychiatrist August Forel (1848-1931). [43] Forel was a former director of the Burgholzli and a dominant figure in Switzerland and in the French clinical tradition at the turn of the century. Although he is best remembered for his contributions to psychiatry (and his influence on other prominent figures, such as Bleuler, Adolph Meyer, and Jung), his Monistic League affiliation and his active promotion of eugenics and Social Darwinism are rarely discussed in the historical literature of psychiatry. [44]


Although Haeckel himself was not advocating an atheistic and materialistic philosophy at this time -- he preferred the label "monistic" -- this was the professed emphasis of many of his fanatical cultists. Monism was the unity of matter and spirit (Geist). Haeckel's Apollonian ideals soon disintegrated into Dionysian excess in his view, and he soon distanced himself from his own movement. In 1911 Nobel-laureate Wilhelm Ostwald of Leipzig University, a physical chemist, became president of the Monistenbund and founded a "monistic cloister" devoted to initiating Social Darwinian cultural reforms in the areas of eugenics, euthanasia, and economics. An elite devoted to the preservation of the Monistic Religion clustered around the charismatic Ostwald and his volkisch metaphysical works. [45] Indeed, it is these works of speculative philosophy (Ostwald even embraced the term Naturphilosopllie for this exercise) that made him an international figure long before his 1909 Nobel Prize, and many considered him a prophet of the modern age. [46]

We know that Ostwald was a significant influence on Jung in the formation of his theory of psychological types. Jung mentions Ostwald's division of men of genius into "classics" and "romantics" in his very first public presentation on psychological types at the Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich in September 1913 (published in a French translation in December of that year in Archives de Psychologie), [47] The classics and romantics correspond, according to Jung, to the "introverted type" and the "extraverted type" respectively. Long quotations from Ostwald appear in other of Jung's works between 1913 and 1921 -- precisely the period of Ostwald's most outspoken advocacy of eugenics, nature worship, and German imperialism through the Monistenbund. An entire chapter of Jung's Psychological Types is devoted favorably to these same ideas of Ostwald. [48] Except for a one-sentence comment that "the concept of energy in Ostwald's monism" is "an example of the superstitious overvaluation of facts," Ostwald is often cited at length and frequently favorably. [49] We have evidence that Jung read the Annalen der Naturphilosophie that Ostwald founded in 1901 and that contains some of his essays on his vitalistic "modern theory of energetics," which may have influenced Jung's own later theoretical work on "psychic energy." [50]

World War I and Haeckel's death in 1919 reduced the size of the movement's membership. Before his death Haeckel himself was briefly a member of the Thule Society, the secret organization of prominent nationalists that included prominent members of the National Socialist movement of the 1920s, such as Rudolph Hess. However, due to its exaltation of science over religion and the human over the divine, some early members of the German Communist Party (KDP) in places such as Leipzig were also members of the Monistenbund. East German scholars have tended to focus on Haeckel's similarities to Marxism rather than his many fundamental disagreements with it. [51] During the communist reign in East Germany Haeckel was promoted as a great hero and his home, library, and artistic productions were carefully maintained by the communist regime in a museum in Jena. [52]

JUNG'S "HAECKELIAN UNCONSCIOUS" (1909-1912)

Jung read Haeckel copiously during his medical-school years: "I interested myself primarily in evolutionary theory and comparative anatomy, and I also became acquainted with neo-vitalistic doctrines," Jung reveals. [53] Haeckel dominated these sciences. Jung discusses him in his Zofingia lectures, and, given Haeckel's great fame, Jung was certain to know of the promotional efforts of Haeckel and his Monistenbund. Jung read Die Weltriitsel in 1899 and based his own later phylogenetic theories of the unconscious on Haeckel's recommendations for a "phylogeny of the soul." Haeckel proposes a "phylogenetic psychology" as a science of evolutionary research alongside embryology, paleontology, and biological phylogeny. Jung's own comparative method for compiling historical evidence for his hypothesis of the collective unconscious (which he began in October 1909) seems to have been based closely on the methodological suggestions of Haeckel. Haeckel wrote:

The theory of descent, combined with anthropological research, has convinced us of the descent of our human organism from a long series of animal ancestors by a slow and gradual transformation occupying many millions of years. Since, then, we cannot dissever man's psychic life from the rest of his vital functions -- we are rather forced to a conviction of the natural evolution of our whole body and mind -- it becomes one of the main tasks of modern monistic psychology to trace the stages of the historical development of the soul of man from the soul of the brute. Our "phylogeny of the soul" seeks to attain this object; it may also, as a branch of general psychology, be called phylogenetic psychology; or, in contradistinction to biontic (individual), phyletic psychogeny. And, although this new science has scarcely been taken up in earnest yet, and most of the "professional" psychologists deny its very right to exist, we must claim for it the utmost importance and the deepest interest. For, in our opinion, it is its special province to solve for us the great enigma of the nature and origin of the human soul. [54]


Just as Haeckel is responsible for introducing historical methodology to evolutionary biology, Jung introduced an analogous historical approach to the study of the evolution of the human mind and the phylogeny of its unconscious roots in the first part of his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1911). [55] When both parts -- which had originally appeared in the psychoanalytic Jahrbuch -- were published in book form in 1912, while the main title refers to Freud's influence on Jung, the second subtitle added to the volume, "Contributions to the History of the Evolution of Thought," may be an homage a Haeckel. It is somewhat suspect that Jung never mentions Haeckel by name in this seminal volume although he borrows significantly from him. Jung seems to have been put off by Haeckel's scientism and his perception of Haeckel as a strict mechanist.

This is how Jung introduces his "Haeckelian unconscious":

All this experience suggests to us that we draw a parallel between the phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children, between the lower races and the dreams. This train of thought is not a strange one for us, but quite familiar through our knowledge of comparative anatomy and the history of development, which show us how the structure and function of the human body are the results of a series of embryonic changes which correspond to similar changes in the history of the race. Therefore, the supposition is justified that ontogenesis corresponds in psychology to phylogenesis. Consequently, it would be true, as well, that the state of infantile thinking in the child's psychic life, as well as in dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient. [56]


Two pages of digression later, Jung resumes:

We spoke of the ontogenetic re-echo of the phylogenetic psychology among children, we saw that phantastic thinking is characteristic of antiquity, of the child, and of the lower races; but now we know also that our modern and adult man is given over in large part to this same phantastic thinking, which enters as soon as the directed thinking ceases. A lessening of the interest, a slight fatigue, is sufficient to put an end to the directed thinking, the exact psychological adaptation to the real world, and to replace it with phantasies. We digress from the theme and give way to our own trains of thought; if the slackening of the attention increases, then we lose by degrees the consciousness of the present, and the phantasy enters into the possession of the field. [57]


And again, in summary:

Our foregoing explanations show wherein the products arising from the unconscious are related to the mythical. From all these signs it may be concluded that the soul possesses in some degree historical strata, the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the unconscious. [58]


Haeckel thus becomes the key to understanding the biological ideas underlying Jung's hypothesis of a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind circa 1909. In his first published theory to this effect, in 1911, Jung introduces the idea that his phylogenetic layer contains the mythological images and thinking of pagan antiquity: therefore, when Jung's use of language is analyzed to reveal his intent, it is a decidedly pre-Christian layer that has been covered up by centuries of Judeo-Christian sediment. Although initially viewed as, perhaps, "psychosis" or "incipient psychosis" in 1909, by 1916 -- after repudiating the relevance of the Christian myth in his own life in 1912 -- Jung instead advocates deliberately cutting through centuries of strangling Judeo-Christian underbrush to reach the promised land of the "impersonal psyche," a pre-Christian, pagan "land of the Dead," and to thereby be revitalized. The volkisch implications of this will be discussed at length in chapter 5.

BUILDING THE MARXIST GOD

A third movement of secular regeneration with mystery-cult aspects, which I will mention only very briefly here, can be found in the "god-building" movement in fin-de-siecle atheistic Russian Marxism. In the 1890s, a group of Bolsheviks led by Maxim Gorky (1838-1936), a friend and disciple of V. I. Lenin (1870- 1924), and Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933) carried on a search in Russia for spiritual renewal through the promotion of what they called the "god-building movement" (bogostroitel'stvo). The god-building movement was a call for "scientific socialism" to be a religion with a god at its center who was human. Sacred cult sites devoted to a chosen atheistic genius of socialism would be established to remind the populace of the immortal, god-like achievements of a true socialist man and thereby renew the pilgrim's hopes of a better life through socialism. The god-building movement was to be a true deification of mankind and of human potential. Lunacharsky, the primary theorist of god-building, laid out the details of his ideas in 1908 and 1911 in a two-volume work, Religiia i sotsializm (Religion and Socialism). Lunacharsky's model seems to have been the cult of genius surrounding Wagner at Bayreuth (see below), as Lunacharsky was the most important promoter of Wagnerism in Russia at the turn of the century. [59]

Lenin detested the Bolshevik god-building movement, and in a 14 November 1913 letter to his friend and disciple Gorky he argues that the belief in any human god constructed by such a movement would be nothing more than necrophilia. For Lunacharsky, this new human god was to be a Marxist version of Nietzsche's ubermensch, who would be "a co-participator in the life of mankind, a link in the chain which stretches towards the overman, towards a beautiful creature, a perfected organism."
[60] This human god could be a political genius such as Lenin, or a scientific one, such as developed somewhat around the figure of T. D. Lysenko. Ironically, Lenin was made the first socialist deity in the years immediately following his death in 1924, as has been documented by historian Nina Tumarkin. [61]

THE NIETZSCHEAN FANTASY AND SPIRITUAL ELITISM

The logical extension of the hypothetical success of these secular programs for the renewal or rebirth of the individual through ostensibly secular philosophies and methodologies would be the production of a new elite that would revolutionize human culture and lead it to a new utopia. In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche rhapsodized about this fantasy of a new nobility that would be "the adversary of all the rabble" and be godlike, self-creating "procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future."  [62] Psychoanalysis would have its elite of analysts and enlightened analyzed patients; the Monistic Religion, especially under Ostwald, would have its eugenically pure race of scientifically minded natural philosophers; the Marxists of Russia would have their vanguard of the proletariat and Lenin as their first deity.

The Nietzschean fantasy of the creation of a "New Man," a "genius" in the New Order of a revitalized society, was therefore at the root of these and other fin-de-siecle reform movements. Historians Mosse, Jost Hermand, and others have demonstrated that this same fantasy is one of the many mystical or prefascist sources of National Socialism.

-- The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement by Richard Noll


His work later affected a number of Russian Marxist theoreticians, including Nikolai Bukharin.[6] In 1907, he helped organize the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery with both Lenin and Leonid Krasin.

For four years after the collapse of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Bogdanov led a group within the Bolsheviks ("ultimatists" and "otzovists" or "recallists"), who demanded a recall of Social Democratic deputies from the State Duma, and he vied with Lenin for the leadership of the Bolshevik faction. In 1908 he joined Bazarov, Lunacharsky, Berman, Helfond, Yushkevich and Suvorov in a symposium Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism which espoused the views of the Russian Marxists. By mid-1908, the factionalism with the Bolsheviks had become irreconcilable. A majority of Bolshevik leaders either supported Bogdanov or were undecided between him and Lenin. Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism, assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism.[7] In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated by Lenin at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine Proletary and was expelled from the Bolsheviks.

He joined his brother-in-law Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and other Vperedists on the island of Capri, where they started the Capri Party School for Russian factory workers. In 1910, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, and their supporters moved the school to Bologna, where they continued teaching classes through 1911, while Lenin and his allies soon started the Longjumeau Party School just outside of Paris.


Bogdanov broke with the Vpered in 1912 and abandoned revolutionary activities. After six years of his political exile in Europe, Bogdanov returned to Russia in 1914, following the political amnesty declared by Tsar Nicholas II as part of the festivities connected with the tercentenery of the Romanov Dynasty.

During World War I

Bogdanov was drafted soon after the outbreak of World War I, and he was assigned as a junior regimental doctor with the 221st Smolensk infantry division in the Second Army commanded by General Alexander Samsonov. In the Battle of Tannenberg, August 26–30, the Second Army was surrounded and almost completely destroyed, but Bogdanov survived because he had been sent to accompany a seriously wounded officer to Moscow.[8] However following the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes, he succumbed to a nervous disorder, and subsequently became Junior house surgeon at an evacuation hospital.[9] In 1916 he wrote four articles for Vpered which provided an analysis of the World War and the dynamics of war economies. He attributed a central role to the armed forces in the economic restructuring of the belligerent powers. He saw the army as creating a "consumers' communism" with the state taking over ever increasing parts of the economy. At the same time military authoritarianism was also spread to civil society. This created the conditions for two consequences: consumption-led war communism and the destruction of the means of production. He thus predicted that even after the war, the new system of state capitalism would replace that of finance capitalism even though the destruction of the forces of production would cease.[10]

During the Russian Revolution

Bogdanov had no party-political involvement in the Russian Revolution of 1917, although he did publish a number of articles and books about the events that unfurled around him. He supported the Zimmerwaldist programme of "peace without annexations or indemnities". He deplored the Provisional Government's continued prosecution of the war. After the July Crisis, he advocated "revolutionary democracy" as he now considered the socialists capable of forming a government. However, he viewed this as a broad-based socialist provisional government that would convene a Constituent Assembly. In May 1917, he published Chto my svergli in Novaya Zhizn. Here he argued that between 1904 and 1907, the Bolsheviks had been "decidedly democratic" and that there was no pronounced cult of leadership. However, following the decision of Lenin and the émigré group around him to break with Vpered in order to unify with the Mensheviks, the principle of leadership became more pronounced. After 1912, when Lenin insisted on splitting the Duma group of the RSDLP, the leadership principle became entrenched. However, he saw this problem as not being confined to the Bolsheviks, noting that similar authoritarian ways of thinking were shown in the Menshevik attitude to Plekhanov, or the cult of heroic individuals and leaders amongst the Narodniks.

Every organisation, on achieving a position of decisive influence in the life and ordering of society, quite inevitably, irrespective of the formal tenets of the its programme, attempts to impose on society its own type of structure, the one with which it is most familiar and to which it is most accustomed. Every collective re-creates, as far as it can, the whole social environment after its own image and in its own likeness.[11]


After the October Revolution

At the beginning of February 1918, Bogdanov denied that the Bolsheviks' October rise to power had constituted a conspiracy. Rather, he explained that an explosive situation had arisen through the prolongation of the war. He pointed to a lack of cultural development in that all strata of society, whether the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, or the workers, had shown a failure to resolve conflicts through negotiation. He described the revolution as being a combination of a peasant revolution in the countryside and a soldier-worker revolution in the cities. He regarded it as paradoxical that the peasantry expressed itself through the Bolshevik party rather than through the Socialist Revolutionaries.

He analysed the effect of the First World War as creating 'War Communism' which he defined a 'consumer communism', which created the circumstances for the creation of state capitalism. He saw military state capitalism as temporary phenomenon in the West, lasting only as long as the war. However, thanks to the predominance of the soldiers in the Bolshevik Party, he regarded it as inevitable that their backwardness should predominate in the re-organisation of society. Instead of proceeding in a methodical fashion, the pre-existing state was simply uprooted. The military-consumerist approach of simply requisitioning what was required had predominated and could not cope with the more complex social relations necessitated by the market:

There is a War Communist party which is mobilising the working class, and there are groups of socialist intelligentsia. The war has made the army the end and the working class the means.[12]


He refused multiple offers to rejoin the party and denounced the new regime as similar to Aleksey Arakcheyev's arbitrary and despotic rule in the early 1820s.[13]

In 1918, Bogdanov became a professor of economics at the University of Moscow and director of the newly established Socialist Academy of Social Sciences.

Proletkult

Between 1918 and 1920, Bogdanov co-founded the proletarian art movement Proletkult and was its leading theoretician. In his lectures and articles, he called for the total destruction of the "old bourgeois culture" in favour of a "pure proletarian culture" of the future. It was also through Proletkult that Bogdanov's educational theories were given form with first the establishment of the Moscow Proletarian University. At first Proletkult, like other radical cultural movements of the era, received financial support from the Bolshevik government, but by 1920, the Bolshevik leadership grew hostile, and on December 1, 1920, Pravda published a decree denouncing Proletkult as a "petit bourgeois" organization operating outside of Soviet institutions and a haven for "socially alien elements". Later in that month, the president of Proletkult was removed, and Bogdanov lost his seat on its Central Committee. He withdrew from the organization completely in 1921-1922.[14]

Arrest

Bogdanov gave a lecture to a club at Moscow University, which, according to Yakov Yakovlev, included an account of the formation of Vpered and reiterated some of the criticisms Bogdanov had made at the time of the individualism of certain leaders. Yakovlev further claimed that Bogdanov discussed the development of the concept of proletarian culture up to the present day and discussed to what extent the Communist Party saw Proletkult as a rival. He further hinted at the prospect of a new International that might emerge if there were a revival of the socialist movement in the West. He said he envisaged such an International as merging political, trade union, and cultural activities into a single organisation. Yakovlev characterised these ideas as Menshevik, pointing to the refusal of Vpered to acknowledge the authority of the 1912 Prague Conference. He cited Bogdanov's characterization of the October revolution as "soldiers'-peasants' revolt", his criticisms of the New Economic Policy, and his description of the new regime as expressing the interests of a new class of technocratic and bureaucratic intelligentsia, as evidence that Bogdanov was involved in forming a new party.[15]

Meanwhile, Workers' Truth had received publicity in the Berlin-based Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, and they also distributed a manifesto at the 12th Bolshevik Congress and were active in the industrial unrest which swept Moscow and Petrograd in July and August 1923. On 8 September 1923, Bogdanov was among a number of people arrested by the GPU (the Soviet secret police) on suspicion of being involved in them. He demanded to be interviewed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, to whom he explained that while he shared a range of views with Workers' Truth, he had no formal association with them. He was released after five weeks on 13 October; however, his file was not closed until a decree passed by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 16 January 1989. He wrote about his experiences under arrest in Five weeks with the GPU.[16]

Later years and death

In 1924, Bogdanov started his blood transfusion experiments, apparently hoping to achieve eternal youth or at least partial rejuvenation. Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova was among many who volunteered to take part in Bogdanov's experiments. After undergoing 11 blood transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction on the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. His fellow revolutionary Leonid Krasin wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation". In 1925–1926, Bogdanov founded the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions, which was later named after him. But a later transfusion cost him his life, when he took the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis. (Bogdanov died, but the student injected with his blood made a complete recovery.) Some scholars (e.g. Loren Graham) have speculated that his death may have been a suicide, because Bogdanov wrote a highly nervous political letter shortly beforehand. Others, however, attribute his death to blood type incompatibility, which was poorly understood at the time.[17][4]

Legacy

Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings imply that he expected the coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society.[18] This was because the workers lacked the knowledge and initiative to seize control of social affairs for themselves as a result of the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the capitalist production process. However, Bogdanov also considered that the hierarchical and authoritarian mode of organization of the Bolshevik party was also partly to blame, although Bogdanov considered at least some such organization necessary and inevitable.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Bogdanov's theorizing, being the product of a non-Leninist Bolshevik, became an important, though "underground", influence on certain dissident factions in the Soviet Union who turned against Bolshevik autocracy while accepting the necessity of the Revolution and wishing to preserve its achievements.[19]

Writing

Fiction


In 1908, Bogdanov published the novel Red Star, about a utopia set on Mars. In it, he made predictions about future scientific and social developments. His utopia also dealt with feminist themes, which would become more common in later utopian science fiction, e.g., the two sexes becoming virtually identical in the future, or women escaping "domestic slavery" (one reason for physical changes) and being free to pursue relationships with the same freedom as men, without stigma. Other notable differences between the utopia of Red Star and present day society include workers having total control over their working hours, as well as more subtle differences in social behavior such as conversations being patiently "set at the level of the person with whom they were speaking and with understanding for his personality although it might very much differ from their own". The novel also gave a detailed description of blood transfusion in the Martian society.

Tectology

From 1913 until 1922, Bogdanov immersed himself in the writing of a lengthy philosophical treatise of original ideas, Tectology: Universal Organization Science. Tectology anticipated many basic ideas of Systems Analysis, later explored by Cybernetics and Bogdanov attributed some of his ideas on the development of a monistic system to Ludwig Noire.In Tectology, Bogdanov proposed to unify all social, biological, and physical sciences by considering them as systems of relationships and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems. His three volume book anticipated many ideas later popularized by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory. Both Wiener and von Bertalanffy may have read the German translation of Tectology, published in 1928. In Russia, Vladimir Lenin (and later Joseph Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to dialectic materialism. The rediscovery of Tectology occurred only in the 1970s.

Published works

Russian

Non-fiction


• Poznanie s Istoricheskoi Tochki Zreniya (Knowledge from a Historical Viewpoint) (St. Petersburg, 1901)
• Empiriomonizm: Stat'i po Filosofii (Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy) 3 volumes (Moscow, 1904–1906)
• Kul'turnye zadachi nashego vremeni (The Cultural Tasks of Our Time) (Moscow: Izdanie S. Dorovatoskogo i A. Carushnikova 1911)
• Filosofiya Zhivogo Opyta: Populiarnye Ocherki (Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Essays) (St. Petersburg, 1913)
• Tektologiya: Vseobschaya Organizatsionnaya Nauka 3 volumes (Berlin and Petrograd-Moscow, 1922)
• "Avtobiografia" in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar, XLI, pp. 29–34 (1926)
• God raboty Instituta perelivanya krovi (Annals of the Institute of Blood Transfusion) (Moscow 1926-1927)

Fiction

• Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) (St. Petersburg, 1908)
• Inzhener Menni (Engineer Menni) (Moscow: Izdanie S. Dorovatoskogo i A. Carushnikova 1912) The title page carries the date 1913[20]

English translation

Non-fiction


• Essays in Organisation Science (1919) Очерки организационной науки (Ocherki organizatsionnoi nauki) Proletarskaya kul'tura, No. 7/8 (April–May)
• 'Proletarian Poetry' (1918), Labour Monthly, Vol IV, No. 5-6, May–June 1923
• 'The Criticism of Proletarian Art' (from Kritika proletarskogo iskusstva, 1918) Labour Monthly, Vol V, No.6, December 1923
• 'Religion, Art and Marxism', Labour Monthly, Vol VI, No.8, August 1924
• Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization, translated by George Gorelik (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1980)
• The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913/2015)
• A Short Course of Economics Science, (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1923)

Fiction

• Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, edited by Loren Graham and Richard Stites; trans. Charles Rougle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984):
• Red Star (1908). Novel. In English
• Engineer Menni (1913). Novel.
• "A Martian Stranded on Earth" (1924). Poem.

See also

• List of dystopian literature
• 1908 in literature
• Arkady Bogdanov, a character in K.S. Robinson's Mars Trilogy, inspired by Aleksandr Bogdanov

Notes

1. Bogdanov, Alexander (1974), "Autobiography", in Haupt, Georges; Marie, Jean-Jacques, Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, Allen & Unwin
2. Bogdanov, Autobiography
3. White, James (1981), ""Bogdanov in Tula", Studies in Soviet Thought, vol 2, no. 1
4. Huestis, Douglas W. "Alexander Bogdanov: The Forgotten Pioneer of Blood Transfusion". Transfusion Medicine Reviews. 21 (4): 337–340. doi:10.1016/j.tmrv.2007.05.008.
5. Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904 - 1932, University of East Anglia, p. 170
6. Cohen p. 15
7. Woods, Part Three
8. Rogachevskii, Andrei (1995). "'Life Makes No Sense': Aleksandr Bogdanov's Experiences in the First World War". Proveedings of the Annual Conference of the Scottish Society for Russian and East European Studies: 105.
9. Biggart J. (1998) 'the Rehabitation of Bogdanov' in Bogdanov and His Work, Aldershot: Ashgate
10. Biggart, John (1990). "Alexander Bogdanov and the Theory of a "New Class"". Russian Review. 49 (3).
11. Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904 - 1932, University of East Anglia, p. 170
12. Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904 - 1932, University of East Anglia, p. 179
13. Rosenthal, p. 118
14. Rosenthal, p. 162
15. Yakolev, Vasily (January 4, 1923), "Menshevizm v Proletkul'tovskoi odezhde", Pravda, Moscow
16. 'The rehabilitation of Bogdanov' by John Biggart in Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky), 1873-1928, 1998, p. 12
17. Rosenthal, pp. 161–162
18. Sochor, p. ___
19. Socialist Standard, April 2007
20. Biggart, John; Gloveli, Georgii & Yassour, Avraham, Bogdanov and his Work, Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 254

Sources

• Cohen, Stephen F. 1980 [1973]. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502697-7. First published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973. Published 1980 by Oxford University Press with corrections and a new introduction. Google Books preview as of 20101006
• Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer. 2002. New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. The Pennsylvania State University Press. Google Books preview as of 20101006
• Sochor, Zenovia. 1988. Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Cornell University Press.
• Socialist Standard. 2007 April. Bogdanov, technocracy and socialism. 106(1232): 10.
• Souvarine, Boris. 1939. Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism. New York: Alliance Group Corporation; Longmans, Green, and Co. ISBN 1-4191-1307-0
• Woods, Alan. 1999. Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution. Wellred Publications. ISBN 1-900007-05-3 Part Three: The Period of Reaction

Further reading

• Biggart, John; Georgii Gloveli; Avraham Yassour. 1998. Bogdanov and his Work. A guide to the published and unpublished works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873-1928, Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 1-85972-623-2
• Biggart, John; Peter Dudley; Francis King (eds.). 1998. Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 1-85972-678-X
• Brown, Stuart. 2002. Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-06043-5
• Dudley, Peter. 1996. Bogdanov's Tektology (1st Engl transl). Hull, UK: Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull.
• Dudley, Peter; Simona Pustylnik. 1995. Reading The Tektology: provisional findings, postulates and research directions. Hull, UK: Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull.
• Gorelick, George. 1983. Bogdanov's Tektology: Nature, Development and Influences. Studies in Soviet Thought, 26:37–57.
• Jensen, Kenneth Martin. 1978. Beyond Marx and Mach: Aleksandr Bogdanov's Philosophy of Living Experience. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ISBN 9027709289
• Pustylnik, Simona. 1995. Biological Ideas of Bogdanov's Tektology. Presented at the international conference, Origins of Organization Theory in Russia and the Soviet Union, University of East Anglia (Norwich), Jan. 8-11, 1995.
• M. E. Soboleva. 2007. A. Bogdanov und der philosophische Diskurs in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zur Geschichte des russischen Positivismus [The history of Russian positivism.]. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag. 278 pp.

External links

• Alexander Bogdanov Archive at marxists.org
• А. А. Bogdanov Biographic essay (English)
• International Alexander Bogdanov Institute (Russian)
• Short biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• Red Hamlet
• Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History Loren R. Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ISBN 0-521-28789-8 - Russian technocratic influence of engineers, subsequent deaths, trials and imprisonments
• About tectology John A. Mikes, prepared for the [International Conference on Complex Systems] New England Complex Systems Institute, September 21–27, 1997, in Nashua, NH
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Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov, 1901

Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov (Russian: Влади́мир Алекса́ндрович База́ров; 1874–1939) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, journalist, philosopher, and economist, born Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev. Bazarov is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of economic planning in the Soviet Union. He was one of the Russian Machists.

Biography

Early years


Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev was born August 8, 1874 (N.S.) in Tula, Russian Empire.

The son of a doctor, A. M. Rudnev, he enrolled in the Tula classical gimnaziia (high school) in 1884, and graduated in the spring of 1892.

In the autumn of 1892, Rudnev enrolled in the faculty of natural sciences of Moscow University.[1] He became involved in revolutionary politics in 1896, activity which would lead to his expulsion from Moscow the following year.[1] He also adopted the surname "Bazarov" as an underground revolutionary pseudonym taking it from the Comtean positivist character in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.[2] Thereafter, Bazarov returned home to Tula where, together with Alexander Bogdanov and Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, Bazarov organized a secret school for Tula workers.[1] Bogdanov resided at the house of Bazarov's father, and met his wife who worked for Alexander Rudenev. A guiding principle of this group was that the workers' movement should be led by workers themselves, assisted by educated members of the radical intelligentsia.[3]

In exile

Bazarov was expelled from Tula in 1899 and emigrated to Germany, settling in Berlin.[1] In the fall of 1900, Bazarov was instrumental in establishing a political organization called the "Neutral Group of Social-Democrats in Berlin." This organization dedicated itself to helping heal the split between the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad, publishers of Rabochee Delo (The Workers' Cause), and the Emancipation of Labor Group, publishers of Iskra (The Spark). According to Bazarov, the Berlin group sent representatives to Geneva in an attempt to broker a reconciliation between these two groups of Marxist revolutionary groups.[4] Bazarov's Berlin group issued three or four political proclamations before disbanding in the summer of 1901.[4]

Return to Russia

Image
Cover of the first edition of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Notes about One Reactionary Philosophy, published in 1909 against Alexander Bogdanov, Nikolai Valentinov, Vladimir Bazarov, and their co-thinkers.

In the fall of 1901, Bazarov returned to Russia to serve as a member of the Moscow Social Democratic Committee.[1] He was soon again arrested for his political activity, however, this time to be exiled for three years to Siberia.[1] In 1904, Bazarov joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), an organization headed by V.I. Lenin.[1] Over the next several years, Bazarov wrote extensively for the Bolshevik party press, serving on the editorial board of the grouping's primary newspaper, Rabochii put' (The Workers' Path), and sitting as a member of the party's underground leadership in the country, the so-called "Bolshevik Center."[1]

Also in this period Bazarov joined with his old Tula comrades Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov and Alexander Bogdanov in retranslating and publishing a new Russian-language edition of the three volumes of Capital by Karl Marx.[5] This edition of the book gained recognition as the basic Russian translation and was reissued for decades in the Soviet Union, although for political reasons any mention of the participation of Bazarov and Bogdanov in the translation was later avoided.[5]

Bazarov also became interested in philosophy during the first decade of the 20th Century, coming to reject Marx's formulaic dialectical materialism in favor of the use of the scientific method to observe and theorize about human behavior, as espoused by the Austrian Ernst Mach and the German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius.[5] The Bolshevik supporters of the "empirical-criticism" of Mach and Avenarius, including Bazarov, Bogdanov, and Nikolai Valentinov, were soon the target of a bitter polemic by Lenin published in 1909, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Bazarov subsequently moved away from membership and participation in the Bolshevik organization, while remaining politically radical.[1]

In 1911, Bazarov was arrested once again and was deported once more, this time a three-year sentence to Astrakhan.[1] In November 1912, Bazarov joined with Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and Lenin, writing for a new paper in St. Petersburg called Pravda.[6]

First World War

During the years of World War I, Bazarov wrote for various radical publications, including Gorky's radical daily, Novaia zhizn' (New Life).[7]

After the 1917 revolution

Following the October Revolution of 1917, Bazarov moved to Kharkov in the Ukraine, where he wrote for various Menshevik publications.[5] In 1919 he published Na puti k sotsializmu (Khar'kov, 1919), for which he was attacked by Bukharin, who viewed him and Bogdanov as being part of a combined opposition espousing a theory of a "bureaucratic degeneration (the technico-intellectual bureaucracy, the 'organizing' caste)".

In 1922, Bazarov joined the staff of the State Planning Commission, where he met Vladimir Groman, with whom he would work intimately for the next half decade.[5] Bazarov and Groman worked together developing the basics of Soviet industrial planning, setting the foundation stones for the next half century of the Soviet economy. On November 21, 1923, Groman presented the Presidium of Gosplan with a paper entitled "Problems of Planning the National Economy as a Whole," in which Bazarov argued that the adoption of the mixed economy of the New Economic Policy actually accentuated rather than lessened the need for central economic planning.[8]

Together with Groman, Bazarov was influential in developing the idea that a diminishing rate of growth was an earmark of economies such as that of the Soviet Union which were in the process of recovery.[9] Although in retrospect the observation seems obvious, the "theory of the leveling-off curve" espoused by Groman and Bazarov postulated that an economy with substantial reserves of idle capacity would initially show an inordinately rapid pace of growth as productive capital returned to use, with this rate tapering off as available plant approached full capacity.[10]

In 1924 Bazarov published a pamphlet entitled Towards a Methodology for Strategic Planning in which he further expanded his ideas on the development of central planning procedures as the Soviet economy moved from recovery to expansion.[11] Bazarov remained convinced that central direction of economic investment would provide the impetus for accelerated economic growth, speaking in 1926 of the "hope to overtake and surpass in our development the advanced countries of the capitalist world."[12]

Bazarov was a staunch advocate of using material incentives to motivate the peasantry to expand agricultural output, declaring early in 1927 that "only by amply supplying the village with good industrial products at very low prices can we create a real impulse toward the development of our backward agriculture..."[13] In the wake of weak agricultural marketing by the peasantry in 1927 and 1928, Soviet political leaders moved another direction, however, returning to the coercive requisitioning methods first used during the earlier period of War Communism before moving to a radical drive for complete collectivization of agriculture at the end of the decade.

Bazarov was a voice in the Soviet planning apparatus for a rational rate of growth. In response to a draft Five-Year Plan prepared by the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh) which posited industrial growth of 135% over the five economic years 1927/28 to 1932/33, Bazarov deemed the long-term possibilities "fascinating" and "enchanting."[14] Such a pace was soon dismissed as inadequate by those holding more extreme views, however, and Bazarov was sharply criticized for pessimism in underestimating "the advantages inherent in the Soviet system."[15] Ultimately, a growth of 179% over the five-year period was approved by Soviet planning authorities, and Bazarov, Groman, and others holding similar views favoring a less drastic rate of capital accumulation were shunted aside.[16]

1931 Menshevik Trial

Bazarov was arrested by the Soviet secret police during the summer of 1930. At his interrogation of August 15, 1930, he signed a deposition acknowledging his participation in a group with other economists who had been arrested and interrogated by the GPU, including his friend and co-worker Groman and former Socialist Revolutionary Party member Nikolai Kondratiev.[17]

In 1931 the Menshevik Trial was held charging "Mensheviks" in the state planning apparatus with the "wrecking" of Soviet industry through the setting of artificially low planning targets. Although Bazarov was not in the dock among the public defendants in this 1931 Menshevik Trial, his associate Groman was. Groman gave public testimony that he and Bazarov headed a counterrevolutionary group in Gosplan, purportedly organized in 1923, which attempted at "influencing the economic policy of the Soviet authorities so as to hold the position of 1923-25."[18] Historian Naum Jasny has speculated that Bazarov's failure to appear as a defendant at this major public trial was likely a reflection of the fact that "the GPU did not succeed in breaking him completely enough to make him a desirable member of the trial."[19]

Groman, the star figure among the accused, damned himself and his colleagues with testimony that at Gosplan they had spent their time

"Putting into the control figures and into the surveys of current business planning ideas and deliberately distorted appraisals antagonistic to the general Party line (lowering the rates of expansion of socialist construction, distorting the class approach, exaggerating the difficulties), stressing the signs of an impending catastrophe (Groman) or, what is close to this, assigning a negligible chance of success to the Party line directed toward the socialist attack (Bazarov, Gukhman)..."[20]


Although excluded from the public trial which besmirched him, Bazarov was tried in secret and sentenced to a term of prison for his alleged wrecking activities.[21] A December 1931 letter from the USSR published in the Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald) reported that Bazarov was being held at that time in a political "isolator" at Yaroslavl.[22]

Death and legacy

Bazarov died September 16, 1939 in Moscow. He was 65 years old at the time of his death.
In 1999 a two volume collection of documents relating to the 1931 Menshevik Trial was published in Russia. Included were the text of several handwritten depositions collected from Bazarov during the process of his interrogation during the summer of 1930.[23]

Works

In Russian


• (Social Movements of the Middle Ages and Reformation). With I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov. (c. 1898).
• "Авторитарная метафизика и автономная личность" (Authoritarian Metaphysics and Personal Autonomy), in the collection Очерки реалистического мировоззрения (Studies of Realistic Outlook), 1904.
• «Анархический коммунизм и марксизм» (Communist Anarchism and Marxism). 1906.
• «На два фронта» (On Two Fronts). 1910.
• На пути к социализму: Сборник статей (On the Path to Socialism: A Collection of Articles). Kharkov: Prosvieshchenie, 1919.
• "«Ножницы» и плановое хозяйство" ("The Scissors" and Planned Economy). Экономическое обозрение, 1923, № 10.
• "К методологии перспективного планирования (Towards a Methodology for Strategic Planning).
• "К вопросу о хозяйственном плане." (On the Question of an Economic Plan). Экономическое обозрение, 1924, № 6.
• "Темп накопления и «командные высоты»" (The Rate of Accumulation and the "Commanding Heights"). Экономическое обозрение, 1924, № 9-10.
• "О методологии построения перспективных планов. (On the Methodology of Long-Term Planning). Плановое хозяйство, 1926, № 7.
• "Кривые развития» капиталистического и советского хозяйства." (The "Curves of Development" of Capitalist and Soviet Economy). Плановое хозяйство, 1926, № 4.
• Использование бюджетных данных для построения структуры городского спроса в перспективе генерального плана (Using Cost Data to Construct the Structure of Urban Demand in the Perspective of the General Plan), 1927.

Bazarov's translations into Russian

• Karl Marx, Das Kapital. With I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov. General editor, A. Bogdanov. 1905-07.
• Очерки по истории Германии в XIX веке. Т. 1. Происхождение современной Германии. (Studies in the History of Germany in the 19th Century: Vol. 1: The Origin of Modern Germany). With I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov. St. Petersburg, 1906.
• Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy by Émile Boutroux with a Preface by the Translator, St Petersburg: Shipovnik Publishers, 1910).
• Элементы философии биологии 1911 by Felix Le Dantec (Elements de philosophie biologique – Elements of Biological Philosophy)[24]:106

Translations of Bazarov into English

• What is needed for socialism?, Novaya Zhizn, No. 190/184, 1/14 December 1917, p. 1;

Footnotes

1. Naum Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to Be Remembered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972; pg. 124.
2. Polianski, Igor (2012). "Between Hegel and Haeckel: Monistic worldview, Marxist Philosophy, and Biomedecine in Russia and the Soviet Union". In Weir, Todd H. Monism: science, philosophy, religion, and the history of a worldview (1st ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230113732.
3. Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904-1914. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986; pg. 35.
4. Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU, "The Neutral Group of Social Democrats in Berlin," in Lenin, Collected Works: Volume 36: 1900-1923. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966; pg. 624, fn. 82. Direct translation of the same note in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Tom 46: Pisma 1893—1904. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1964; pg. 489, fn. 109.
5. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 125.
6. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, pg. 170.
7. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pp. 124-125.
8. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pp. 125-126.
9. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 127.
10. Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928. [1960] Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; pg. 60.
11. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 126.
12. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 128.
13. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 130.
14. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 133.
15. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pp. 130-131.
16. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 134.
17. "Protokol dopros Bazarova Vladimira Aleksandrovicha ot 15-go avgusta 1930 goda" (Transcript of the Deposition of Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov of August 15, 1920) in A.L. Litvin (ed.), Men'sheviistskiii protsess 1931 goda: Sbornik dokumentov v 2-kh knigakh. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999; vol. 1, pp. 46-48.
18. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 136, citing the transcript of Groman's trial testimony published in Protsess kontrrevoliutsionnoi organizatsii Men'shevikov (1 marta—9 marta 1931): Stenogragramma sudebnogo protsessa. Moscow: Sovetskoe Zakonodatel'stvo, 1931; pg. 69.
19. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 137.
20. Naum Jasny, Soviet Industrialization, 1928-1952. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961; pg. 69, quoting Protsess kontrrevoliutsionnoi organizatsii Men'shevikov, pg. 37.
21. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pg. 137, citing an article in Pravda of December 24, 1938.
22. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties, pp. 137-138.
23. See: Litvin (ed.), Men'sheviistskiii protsess 1931 goda, vol. 1, pp. 46-53.
24. Biggart, John; Peter Dudley; Francis King (eds.). 1998. Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 1-85972-678-X

Further reading

• Naum Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to Be Remembered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• E.B. Koritskii (ed.), Каким быть плану: Дискуссии 20-х годов: Статьи и современный комментарий (How the Plan was Made: The Discussion of the 20s: Articles and Contemporary Commentary). Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989.
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Tue Oct 02, 2018 11:25 pm

Ernst Mach
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

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Image
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach (1838–1916)
Born Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach
18 February 1838
Brno, Moravia, Austrian Empire (present day Czech republic)
Died 19 February 1916 (aged 78)
Munich, German Empire
Residence Austrian Empire, German Empire
Nationality Austrian
Citizenship Austrian
Alma mater University of Vienna
Known for Mach number
Mach's principle
Shock waves
Mach waves
Mach reflection effects
Mach band
Criticism of Isaac Newton's bucket argument[1]
Mach diamonds
Empirio-criticism
Relationism
Scientific career
Fields Physicist
Institutions University of Graz
Charles University (Prague)
University of Vienna
Doctoral advisor Andreas von Ettingshausen
Doctoral students Heinrich Gomperz
Ottokar Tumlirz
Other notable students Andrija Mohorovičić
Influences Andreas von Ettingshausen[2]
Gustav Fechner[3]
Carl Ludwig[4]
Influenced Vienna Circle
Russian Machism
Ludwig Boltzmann
Albert Einstein
Wolfgang Pauli
William James
Wilhelm Kienzl[5]
Pierre Duhem[6]
Signature
Ernst Mach Signature.svg
Notes
He was the godfather of Wolfgang Pauli. The Mach–Zehnder interferometer is named after his son Ludwig Mach, who was also a physicist.

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach (/ˈmɑːx/; German: [ˈɛɐ̯nst max]; 18 February 1838 – 19 February 1916) was an Austrian[7] physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as study of shock waves. The ratio of one's speed to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honor. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism.[8] Through his criticism of Newton's theories of space and time, he foreshadowed Einstein's theory of relativity.

Biography

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was born in Chrlice (German: Chirlitz), Moravia (then in the Austrian empire, now part of Brno in the Czech Republic). His father, who had graduated from Charles University in Prague, acted as tutor to the noble Brethon family in Zlín in eastern Moravia. His grandfather, Wenzl Lanhaus, an administrator of the Chirlitz estate, was also master builder of the streets there. His activities in that field later influenced the theoretical work of Ernst Mach. Some sources give Mach's birthplace as Tuřany (German: Turas, now also part of Brno), the site of the Chirlitz registry-office. It was there that Ernst Mach was baptized by Peregrin Weiss. Mach later became a socialist and an atheist.[9] His theory and life, though, was sometimes compared with Buddhism, namely by Heinrich Gomperz who addressed Mach as the "Buddha of Science" due to the phenomenalist approach of the "Ego" in his Analysis of Sensations.[10][11]

Up to the age of 14, Mach received his education at home from his parents. He then entered a Gymnasium in Kroměříž (German: Kremsier), where he studied for three years. In 1855 he became a student at the University of Vienna. There he studied physics and for one semester medical physiology, receiving his doctorate in physics in 1860 under Andreas von Ettingshausen with a thesis titled "Über elektrische Ladungen und Induktion", and his habilitation the following year. His early work focused on the Doppler effect in optics and acoustics. In 1864 he took a job as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Graz, having turned down the position of a chair in surgery at the University of Salzburg to do so, and in 1866 he was appointed as Professor of Physics. During that period, Mach continued his work in psycho-physics and in sensory perception. In 1867, he took the chair of Experimental Physics at the Charles University, Prague, where he stayed for 28 years before returning to Vienna.

Mach's main contribution to physics involved his description and photographs of spark shock-waves and then ballistic shock-waves. He described how when a bullet or shell moved faster than the speed of sound, it created a compression of air in front of it. Using schlieren photography, he and his son Ludwig were able to photograph the shadows of the invisible shock waves. During the early 1890s Ludwig was able to invent an interferometer which allowed for much clearer photographs. But Mach also made many contributions to psychology and physiology, including his anticipation of gestalt phenomena, his discovery of the oblique effect and of Mach bands, an inhibition-influenced type of visual illusion, and especially his discovery of a non-acoustic function of the inner ear which helps control human balance.

One of the best-known of Mach's ideas is the so-called "Mach principle," concerning the physical origin of inertia. This was never written down by Mach, but was given a graphic verbal form, attributed by Philipp Frank to Mach himself, as, "When the subway jerks, it's the fixed stars that throw you down."

Image
Ernst Mach’s historic 1887 photograph (shadowgraph) of a bow shockwave around a supersonic bullet[12]

Mach also became well known for his philosophy developed in close interplay with his science.[13] Mach defended a type of phenomenalism recognizing only sensations as real. This position seemed incompatible with the view of atoms and molecules as external, mind-independent things. He famously declared, after an 1897 lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann at the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna: "I don't believe that atoms exist!"[14] From about 1908 to 1911 Mach's reluctance to acknowledge the reality of atoms was criticized by Max Planck as being incompatible with physics. Einstein's 1905 demonstration that the statistical fluctuations of atoms allowed measurement of their existence without direct individuated sensory evidence marked a turning point in the acceptance of atomic theory. Some of Mach's criticisms of Newton's position on space and time influenced Einstein, but later Einstein realized that Mach was basically opposed to Newton's philosophy and concluded that his physical criticism was not sound.

In 1898 Mach suffered from cardiac arrest and in 1901 retired from the University of Vienna and was appointed to the upper chamber of the Austrian parliament. On leaving Vienna in 1913 he moved to his son's home in Vaterstetten, near Munich, where he continued writing and corresponding until his death in 1916, only one day after his 78th birthday.

Physics

Most of Mach's initial studies in the field of experimental physics concentrated on the interference, diffraction, polarization and refraction of light in different media under external influences. From there followed important explorations in the field of supersonic fluid mechanics. Mach and physicist-photographer Peter Salcher presented their paper on this subject[15] in 1887; it correctly describes the sound effects observed during the supersonic motion of a projectile. They deduced and experimentally confirmed the existence of a shock wave of conical shape, with the projectile at the apex.[16] The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound vp/vs is now called the Mach number. It is a critical parameter in the description of high-speed fluid movement in aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. Mach also contributed to cosmology the hypothesis known as Mach's principle.

Philosophy of science

Image
Bust of Mach in the Rathauspark (City Hall Park) in Vienna, Austria

Empirio-criticism

From 1895 to 1901, Mach held a newly created chair for "the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences" at the University of Vienna.[17] In his historico-philosophical studies, Mach developed a phenomenalistic philosophy of science which became influential in the 19th and 20th centuries. He originally saw scientific laws as summaries of experimental events, constructed for the purpose of making complex data comprehensible, but later emphasized mathematical functions as a more useful way to describe sensory appearances. Thus scientific laws while somewhat idealized have more to do with describing sensations than with reality as it exists beyond sensations.[18]

The goal which it (physical science) has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.

When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations.

Suppose we were to attribute to nature the property of producing like effects in like circumstances; just these like circumstances we should not know how to find. Nature exists once only. Our schematic mental imitation alone produces like events.


Mach's positivism also influenced many Russian Marxists, such as Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928). In 1908, Lenin wrote a philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism (published 1909), in which he criticized Machism and the views of "Russian Machists" (Lenin also cited in this work the concept of the 'Ether', as the medium through which light waves propagated, and the concept of time as an absolute). Empirio-criticism is the term for the rigorously positivist and radically empirical philosophy established by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and further developed by Mach, which claims that all we can know is our sensations and that knowledge should be confined to pure experience.[19]

In accordance with empirio-critical philosophy, Mach opposed Ludwig Boltzmann and others who proposed an atomic theory of physics. Since one cannot observe things as small as atoms directly, and since no atomic model at the time was consistent, the atomic hypothesis seemed to Mach to be unwarranted, and perhaps not sufficiently "economical". Mach had a direct influence on the Vienna Circle philosophers and the school of logical positivism in general.

To Mach are attributed a number of principles that distill his ideal of physical theorisation—what is now called "Machian physics":

1. It should be based entirely on directly observable phenomena (in line with his positivistic leanings)[20]

2. It should completely eschew absolute space and time in favor of relative motion[21]

3. Any phenomena that would seem attributable to absolute space and time (e.g., inertia and centrifugal force) should instead be seen as emerging from the large scale distribution of matter in the universe.[22]
The last is singled out, particularly by Albert Einstein, as "the" Mach's principle. Einstein cited it as one of the three principles underlying general relativity. In 1930, he stated that "it is justified to consider Mach as the precursor of the general theory of relativity",[23] though Mach, before his death, would apparently reject Einstein's theory.[24] Einstein was aware that his theories did not fulfill all Mach's principles, and no subsequent theory has either, despite considerable effort.

Phenomenological constructivism

According to Alexander Riegler, Ernst Mach's work was a precursor to the influential perspective known as constructivism.[25] Constructivism holds that all knowledge is constructed rather than received by the learner. He took an exceptionally non-dualist, phenomenological position. The founder of radical constructivism, von Glasersfeld, gave a nod to Mach as an ally.

Image
Spinning chair devised by Mach to investigate the experience of motion

Physiology

In 1873, independently of each other[26] Mach and the physiologist and physician Josef Breuer discovered how the sense of balance (i.e., the perception of the head’s imbalance) functions, tracing its management by information which the brain receives from the movement of a fluid in the semicircular canals of the inner ear. That the sense of balance depended on the three semicircular canals was discovered in 1870 by the physiologist Friedrich Goltz, but Goltz did not discover how the balance-sensing apparatus functioned. Mach devised a swivel chair to enable him to test his theories, and Floyd Ratliff has suggested that this experiment may have paved the way to Mach's critique of a physical conception of absolute space and motion.[27]

Psychology

Image
Exaggerated contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of gray, appears as soon as they touch

In the area of sensory perception, psychologists remember Mach for the optical illusion called Mach bands. The effect exaggerates the contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of gray, as soon as they contact one another, by triggering edge-detection in the human visual system.[28]

More clearly than anyone before or since Mach made the distinction between what he called physiological (specifically visual) and geometrical spaces.[29]

Mach's views on mediating structures inspired B. F. Skinner's strongly inductive position, which paralleled Mach's in the field of psychology.[30]

Eponyms

In homage his name was given to:

• Mach, a lunar crater
• Mach bands, an optical illusion
• 3949 Mach, an asteroid
• Mach number, the unit for speed relative to the speed of sound

Mach's principal works in English

• The Science of Mechanics (1883)
• The Analysis of Sensations (1897)[31]
• Popular Scientific Lectures (1895)
• Space and Geometry from the Point of View of Physical Inquiry (October 1903) In The Monist, Vol. XIV, No. I
• History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy (1911)
• The Principles of Physical Optics (1926)
• Knowledge and Error (1976)
• Principles of the Theory of Heat (1986)
• Fundamentals of the Theory of Movement Perception (2001)

See also

• Mach disk
• Mach bands
• Mach's principle
• Mach reflection
• Mach–Zehnder interferometer
• Visual space
• Woodward effect

References

1. Mach, E. (1960 [1883]), The Science of Mechanics, LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, p. 284.
2. whonamedit.com, Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach
3. Jagdish Mehra, Helmut Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, page 47
4. stanford.edu, Ernst Mach First published Wed May 21, 2008; substantive revision Tue Apr 28, 2009, Mach interest in physiology, Johannes Peter Müller and his students, Ernst Brüke and Carl Ludwig, started a new school of physiology in 1840s.
5. John T. Blackmore, Ernst Mach: His Work, Life, and Influence, 1972, p. 44.
6. John T. Blackmore, Ernst Mach: His Work, Life, and Influence, 1972, p. 196.
7. "Ernst Mach". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2016. Retrieved January 6, 2016.
8. John T. Blackmore (1972), Ernst Mach; his work, life, and influence, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0520018494, OCLC 534406, 0520018494
9. R. S. Cohen; Raymond J. Seeger (1975). Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher. Springer. p. 158. ISBN 978-90-277-0016-2. And Mach, in personal conviction, was a socialist and an atheist.
10. Cf. Ursula Baatz: "Ernst Mach – The Scientist as a Buddhist?" In: John Blackmore (ed.): Ernst Mach — A Deeper Look. Documents and New Perspectives (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 143). Springer, Dordrecht 1992, pp. 183–199.
11. John T. Blackmore (1972). "Chapter 18 - Mach and Buddhism". Ernst Mach, His Work, Life, and Influence]. University of California Press. p. 293. ISBN 0520018494. Mach was logically a Buddhist and illogically a believer in science.
12. John D. Anderson, Jr. "Research in Supersonic Flight and the Breaking of the Sound Barrier -- Chapter 3". history.nasa.gov. p. 65. Retrieved 5 September 2016.
13. On this interdependency of Mach's physics, physiology, history and philosophy of science see Blackmore (1972), Blackmore (ed.) 1992 and Hentschel 1985 against Paul Feyerabend's efforts to decouple these three strands.
14. Yourgrau, P. (2005). A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein. Allen Lane
15. Mach, Ernst; Salcher, Peter (1887). "Photographische Fixirung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge". Sitzungsber. Kaiserl. Akad. Wiss., Wien, Math.-Naturwiss. Cl. (in German). 95 (Abt. II): 764–780. Retrieved 24 October 2015.
16. Scott, Jeff (9 November 2003). "Ernst Mach and Mach Number". Aerospaceweb.org. Retrieved 24 October 2015.
17. On Mach's historiography, cf., e.g., Hentschel (1988); on his impact in Vienna, see Stadler et al. (1988), and Blackmore et al. (2001).
18. Selections are taken from his essay The Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry, excerpted by Kockelmans and slightly corrected by Blackmore. (citation below).
19. "empirio-criticism": entry in The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy.).
20. Barbour, J. The End of Time, p. 220: "In the Machian view, the properties of the system are exhausted by the masses of the particles and their separations, but the separations are mutual properties. Apart from the masses, the particles have no attributes that are exclusively their own. They — in the form of a triangle — are a single thing. In the Newtonian view, the particles exist in absolute space and time. These external elements lend the particles attributes — position, momentum, angular momentum — denied in the Machian view. The particles become three things. Absolute space and time are an essential part of atomism."
21. Penrose, R., The Road to Reality, p. 753: "Mach’s principle asserts that physics should be defined entirely in terms of the relation of one body to another, and that the very notion of a background space should be abandoned"
22. Mach, E. The Science of Mechanics. "> [The] investigator must feel the need of ... knowledge of the immediate connections, say, of the masses of the universe. There will hover before him as an ideal insight into the principles of the whole matter, from which accelerated and inertial motions will result in the same way.
23. Quoted in Pais, Subtle is the Lord, 2005, OUP
24. The preface of the posthumously published Principles of Physical Optics explicitly rejects Einstein's relativistic views but it has been argued that the text is inauthentic; see Gereon Wolters, Mach and Einstein, or Clearing Troubled Waters in the History of Science. "Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics". Birkhäuser, Boston, 2012. 39-57.
25. Riegler, A. (2011) "Constructivism". In: L'Abete, L. (Ed.) Paradigms in Theory Construction, pp. 235–255 (doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-0914-4_13).
26. Hawkins, J.E. and Schacht, J. "The Emergence of Vestibular Science" (Part 8 of "Sketches of Otohistory") in Audiology and Neurotology, April 2005.
27. Ratliff, Floyd (1975). "On Mach's Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations". In Seeger, Raymond J.; Cohen, Robert S. Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher.
28. Ratliff, Floyd (1965). Mach bands: quantitative studies on neural networks in the retina. Holden-Day.
29. Mach, E. (1906) Space and Geometry. Chicago: Open Court Publishing.
30. Mecca Chiesa (1994). Radical Behaviorism: The Philosophy and the Science. Authors Cooperative. ISBN 0-9623311-4-7.
31. See Mach, Ernst (1897). Williams, C.W., ed. Contributions to the Analysis of Sensation (1 ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Retrieved 13 July 2014. via Archive.org

Further reading

• Erik C. Banks: Ernst Mach's World Elements. A Study in Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer (now Springer), 2013.
• John T. Blackmore: Ernst Mach. His Life, Work, and Influence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972.
• John Blackmore and Klaus Hentschel (eds.): Ernst Mach als Außenseiter. Vienna: Braumüller, 1985 (with select correspondence).
• John T. Blackmore (ed.): Ernst Mach – A Deeper Look. Documents and New Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, 1992.
• John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka (eds.): Ernst Mach's Vienna 1895–1930. Or Phenomenalism as Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Springer, 2001.
• John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka (eds.): Ernst Mach's Science. Kanagawa: Tokai University Press, 2006.
• John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka: Ernst Mach's Influence Spreads. Bethesda: Sentinel Open Press, 2009.
• John T. Blackmore, Ryoichi Itagaki and Setsuko Tanaka: Ernst Mach's Graz (1864–1867), where much science and philosophy were developed. Bethesda: Sentinel Open Press, 2010.
• John T. Blackmore: Ernst Mach's Prague 1867–1895 as a human adventure, Bethesda: Sentinel Open Press, 2010.
• William Everdell: The First Moderns. Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• Rudolf Haller and Friedrich Stadler (eds.): Ernst Mach – Werk und Wirkung. Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1988.
• Klaus Hentschel: "On Paul Feyerabend's version of 'Mach's theory of research and its relation to Albert Einstein'", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 16 (1985): 387-394.
• Klaus Hentschel: "Die Korrespondenz Duhem-Mach: Zur 'Modellbeladenheit' von Wissenschaftsgeschichte'", Annals of Science 45 (1988): 73-91 (with their complete correspondence).
• Klaus Hentschel: "Ernst Mach", in Arne Hessenbruch (ed.): Reader's Guide to the History of Science. London: Routledge, 2013, p. 427f.
• D. Hoffmann and H. Laitko (eds.): Ernst Mach – Studien und Dokumente. Berlin, 1991.
• Joseph J. Kockelmans: Philosophy of science. The historical background. New York: The Free Press, 1968.
• Jiří Procházka: Ernst Mach /1838–1916/ Genealogie, 3 vols. Brno, 2007–2010. ISBN 80-903476-3-0, 80-903476-7-3, 978-80-903476-0-1.
• V. Prosser and J. Folta (eds.): Ernst Mach and the development of Physics – Conference Papers, Prague: Universitas Carolina Pragensis, 1991.
• Joachim Thiele: Wissenschaftliche Kommunikation – Die Korrespondenz Ernst Machs", Kastellaun: Hain, 1978 (with select correspondence).

External links

• Ernst Mach bibliography of all of his papers and books from 1860 to 1916, compiled by Vienna lecturer Dr. Peter Mahr in 2016
• Various Ernst Mach links, compiled by Greg C Elvers
• Klaus Hentschel: Mach, Ernst, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 15 (1987), pp. 605-609.
• Works by Ernst Mach at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Ernst Mach at Internet Archive
• Works by Ernst Mach at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Pojman, Paul. "Ernst Mach". In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Short biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• Vladimir Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-criticism
• Ernst Mach: The Analysis of Sensations (1897) [translation of Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886)]
• Ernst Mach at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• "The critical positivism of Mach and Avenarius": entry in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia
• From Galileo's Law of Inertia to Einstein's and Mach's Conjecture Principle of Inertia
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:08 am

Jay Lovestone
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


-- Fritz Kramer and Jay Lovestone – Lovestone ran the CIA projects for the AFL-CIO. Kramer is Kissiner’s rabbi (who is somehow connected to Lovestone – this needs further exploration with Colson).

-- Approved for Release 2004/10/28: CIA-RDP88-01314R0003000180002-2


Image
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone circa 1917
Born Jacob Liebstein

December 15, 1897
Moǔchadz, Grodno gubernia, Lithuania (then Russian Empire)
Died March 7, 1990 (aged 92)
Manhattan, New York City, United States
Alma mater City College of New York
Occupation political activist
Years active 1919-1982
Political party Socialist Party of America, Communist Party USA, AFL-CIO
Opponent(s) Joseph Stalin, William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon
Partner(s) Louise Page Morris

Jay Lovestone (December 15, 1897 – March 7, 1990) was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions within it.

Although the CIA had been widely funding foreign labor unions for more than fifteen years and some of the agency's labor activities were revealed in Tom Braden's Saturday Evening Post article, the Katzenbach committee did not specify unions as the type of organizations the CIA was barred from financing. At the 1968 Council on Foreign Relations meeting at which Bissell spoke, Meyer Bernstein, the Steelworkers Union's Director of International Labor Affairs, commented:

the turn of events has been unexpected. First, there hasn't been any real problem with international labor programs. Indeed, there has been an increase in demand for U.S. labor programs and the strain on our capacity has been embarrassing. Formerly, these foreign labor unions knew we were short of funds, but now they all assume we have secret CIA money, and they ask for more help.

Worse yet, Vic Reuther, who had been alleging that others were receiving CIA money, and whose brother's receipt of $50,000 from CIA in old bills was subsequently disclosed by Tom Braden, still goes on with his charges that the AFL-CIO has taken CIA money. Here again, no one seems to listen. "The net result has been as close to zero as possible. We've come to accept CIA, like sin." So, for example, British Guiana's [Guyana] labor unions were supported through CIA conduits, but now they ask for more assistance than before. So, our expectations to the contrary, there has been almost no damage.


-- The CIA and The Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks


Biography

Background and early life


Lovestone was born Jacob Liebstein into a Litvak family in a shtetl called Moǔchadz in Grodno Governorate (then part of the Russian Empire, now in Grodno Region, Belarus).

Shtetlekh (Yiddish: שטעטל‎, shtetl (singular), שטעטלעך, shtetlekh (plural))[1] were small towns with large Jewish populations, which existed in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Shtetlekh were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia (Ukraine) and Romania. In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, was called a shtot (Yiddish: שטאָט‎, German: Stadt); a village was called a dorf (דאָרף‎).[2] In official parlance the shtetl was referred to as "(Jewish) miasteczko" (Ukrainian: мiстечко, Polish: miasteczko, Belarusian: мястэчка, Russian: местечко).[3]

-- Shtetl, by Wikipedia


The territory of present-day Belarus was considered a "Lithuanian" area at the time. [1] His father, Barnet, had been a rabbi, but when he emigrated to America he had to settle for a job as shammes (caretaker). Barnet came first, then sent for his family the next year. Lovestone arrived with his mother, Emma, and his siblings, Morris, Esther and Sarah at Ellis island on September 15, 1907. They originally settled on Hester Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, but later moved to 2155 Daly Avenue in the Bronx. The family did not know their dates of birth precisely, but they assigned Jacob the date of December 15, 1897.[1]

Young Liebstein was attracted to socialist politics from his teens. While imbibing all the ideological currents in the vibrant New York Yiddish and English radical press, he was particularly attracted to the ideas of Daniel De Leon. It is not known whether he ever joined de Leon's Socialist Labor Party, but he was one of the 3,000 mourners who attended his funeral on May 11, 1914.[2]

Liebstein entered City College of New York in 1915. Already a member of the Socialist party, he joined its unofficial student wing, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He became secretary and then president of the CCNY chapter. He also met William Weinstone and Bertram Wolfe in ISS, who would go on to become his factional allies in the Communist Party. He graduated in June 1918. On February 7, 1919 he had his name legally changed to Jay Lovestone. That year he also began studying at NYU Law School, but dropped out to pursue a career as a full-time Communist party member.[3]

The Communist years (1919–1929)

His first foray into what would become the American Communist movement began in February 1919, when the left wing elements in the Socialist Party in New York began to organize themselves as a separate faction. Lovestone was on the original organizing committee, the Committee of 15, with Wolfe, John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. That June he attended the National Conference of the Left Wing.[4] He sided with the Fraina/Ruthenberg faction that opted to create a National Left Wing Council that would attempt to take over the Socialist Party. He stayed with this group after it reversed its stance, and joined the National Organizing Committee in founding the Communist Party of America on September 1, 1919, at a convention in Chicago.

In 1921, Lovestone became editor of the Communist Party newspaper, The Communist, and sat on the editorial board of The Liberator, the arts and letters publication of the Workers Party of America. Upon the death of Charles Ruthenberg in 1927 he became the party's national secretary. From about 1923, the CP developed two main factions, the Pepper–Ruthenberg group and the Foster–Cannon group. Lovestone was a close adherent of the Pepper–Ruthenberg tendency, which was to be centered in New York City and to favor united-front political action in a "class Labor Party", as opposed to the Foster–Cannon group, which tended to be centered in Chicago and were most concerned with building a radicalized American Federation of Labor through a boring from within policy.

In 1925 the leader of the Pepper–Ruthenberg faction, John Pepper, returned to Moscow for work in the apparatus of the Communist International, raising Lovestone's status to that of a chief lieutenant in a new Ruthenberg–Lovestone pairing.
Foster and Cannon, on the other hand, parted ways, with Alexander Bittelman assuming the mantle as Foster's chief factional ally, while Jim Cannon built his power base in the party's legal defense mass organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD).

With the Soviet Bolshevik party riven by a succession struggle following Lenin's death in January 1924, the factions in the US eventually corresponded with factions in the Soviet leadership, with Foster's faction being strongly supportive of Joseph Stalin and Lovestone's faction sympathetic to Nikolai Bukharin. As a result of his trip to the Comintern Congress in 1928 where James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector accidentally saw Leon Trotsky's thesis criticizing the direction of the Comintern, Cannon became a Trotskyist and decided to organize his faction in support of Trotsky's position. Cannon's support for Trotsky became known before he had fully mobilized his supporters. Lovestone led the expulsion of Cannon and his supporters in 1928.

The Communist opposition years (1929–1941)

Image
Jay Lovestone with David Dubinsky speaking at a union rally in the 1930s

When Stalin purged Bukharin from the Soviet Politburo in 1929, Lovestone suffered the consequences. A visiting delegation of the Comintern asked him to step down as party secretary in favor of his rival William Z. Foster. Lovestone refused and departed for the Soviet Union to argue his case. Lovestone insisted that he had the support of the vast majority of the Communist Party and should not have to step aside. Stalin responded that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".[5]

When he returned to the US, Lovestone was forced to pay for his insubordination and was expelled from the party – ostensibly not for challenging Stalin, but for his support of Bukharin and the Right Opposition and for his theory of American exceptionalism, which held that capitalism was more secure in the United States and thus socialists should pursue different, more moderate strategies there than elsewhere in the world. That contradicted Stalin's views and the new Third Period policy of ultra-leftism promoted by the Comintern. Lovestone and his friends had thought that they commanded the following of the mass of party members and, once expelled, optimistically named their new party the Communist Party (Majority Group). When the new group attracted only a few hundred members it changed its name to the Communist Party (Opposition). They were aligned with the International Communist Opposition, which had sections in fifteen countries. The CP(O) later became the Independent Communist Labor League and then, in 1938, the Independent Labor League of America before dissolving in 1941. The party published the periodical Workers' Age (originally The Revolutionary Age), which was edited by Bertram Wolfe, along with a number of pamphlets.

Union and anti-communist activities

Lovestone had, while within the Communist Party, played an active role in the Party's labor activities, primarily within the United Mine Workers, where the party supported the revolt led by John Brophy against John L. Lewis's leadership. His allies within the party, particularly Charles S. Zimmerman, had a great deal of power within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union prior to the debacle of 1926. After his expulsion, Lovestone formed a base within ILGWU Dressmakers Local 22, to which Zimmerman had returned after his expulsion from the CPUSA. Lovestone and Zimmerman worked their way into the good graces of ILGWU President David Dubinsky, who had been their fiercest enemy before their expulsion.

With Dubinsky's support, Lovestone went to work for Homer Martin, the embattled President of the United Auto Workers, who was attempting to drive his political rivals out of the union by charging them with being communists. Martin's and Lovestone's tactics, however, only succeeded in unifying all of the disparate groups in the leadership of the union at that time into a single coalition opposed to Martin and, unintentionally, enhancing the reputation of CP members within the union. The UAW's Executive Board, with the support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), proceeded to oust Martin, who left to form his own rump version of the UAW. Lovestone followed him for a time.

Lovestone had maintained his relationship with Dubinsky throughout this period; Dubinsky helped finance Martin's new union and worked for its affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1943, Lovestone became the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU) International Affairs Department. Dubinsky also helped Lovestone find work in 1941 with an organization favoring the United States' entry into World War II. Dubinsky had concerns that Lovestone's past role in the Communist Party would taint him and suggested that Lovestone change his name; Lovestone declined to do so.

In 1944, Dubinsky arranged to place Lovestone in the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee, where he worked out of the ILGWU's headquarters. Along with Irving Brown he led the activities of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization sponsored by the AFL which worked internationally, organizing free labor unions in Europe and Latin America which were not Communist-controlled.

Some causes which have been supported by NED largesse were the following:

• Over $400,000 to the Center for Democracy, a New York-based foundation run by Soviet emigres which has used the Soviet human rights network, tourists, and "experienced" travelers to gather political and military information on the U.S.S.R. The Center has also smuggled American films with anti-Soviet themes (White Nights, Red Dawn and The Assassination of Trotsky) into the Soviet Union. [1]

• Several hundred thousand dollars since 1985 to La Prensa, the anti-Sandinista newspaper in Nicaragua, which can only be viewed as part of the Reagan administration's campaign to overthrow the government; several million more has been allocated to support organizations opposing the Sandinistas in elections scheduled for 1990. [2]

• Newspapers in other developing countries, including Grenada, Guyana, and Botswana. [3]

• Translation into Polish of a book that accuses the Soviet Union of a World War II massacre of Polish Army officers. The book was to be smuggled into Poland. [4]

• $400,000 a year to the Solidarity trade union in Poland, to clandestinely print underground publications, as well as funds for other political organizations, youth groups, and churches. This is in addition to several million dollars allocated to Solidarity by the U.S. Congress. [5]

• $830,000 to Force Ouvriere, the French anti-communist trade union which the CIA began funding in the 1940s.

• $575,000 to an extreme rightwing French group of paramilitary and criminal background, the National Inter-University Union. The funding of this group as well as Force Ouvriere was secret and is known of only because of its exposure by French journalists in November 1985. [6]

• $3 million to the Philippines, "quietly being spent to fight the communist insurgency ... and to cultivate political leaders there." Some of this money was channeled to the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections, which was set up by the CIA in the 1950s to support the presidential campaign of Ramon Magsaysay. [7]

The National Endowment for Democracy, like the CIA before it, calls this supporting democracy. The governments and movements against whom the financing is targeted, call it destabilization. The NED was not an aberration of an otherwise legal, accountable, non-interventionist Reagan foreign policy. Among the other stories of international intrigue and violence of the Reagan era worth noting are:

South Africa: Working closely with British intelligence, the U.S. provided South Africa with intelligence about the banned and exiled African National Congress, including specific warnings of planned attacks by the group and the whereabouts and movements of ANC leaders. [8] As part of South Africa's reciprocation, it sent 200,000 pounds of military equipment to contra leader Eden Pastora. [9]

Fiji: The coup of May 1987 bore all the fingerprints of a U.S. destabilization operation -- the deposed prime minister, Timoci Bavadra, in office only a month after being elected over the conservative former Prime Minister Ratu Mara, was intent upon enforcing the ban upon nuclear vessels in Fiji ports; two weeks before the coup, Gen. Vernon Walters, he of extensive CIA involvement over the years, visited Fiji and met with the army officer who staged the coup; at the same time, Ratu Mara was visiting U.S. military headquarters (CINCPAC) in Hawaii; the AFL-CIO/CIA labor mafia was well represented, working against the nuclear-free Pacific movement; and several other similar components of a now all-too-familiar scenario. [10]

-- Ronald Reagan's Legacy: Eight Years of CIA Covert Action, by William Blum*


In connection with that work he cooperated closely with the CIA, feeding information about Communist labor-union activities to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, in order to undermine Communist influence in the international union movement and provide intelligence to the US government. He remained there until 1963 when he became director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department (IAD), which quietly sent millions of dollars from the CIA to aid anti-communist activities internationally, particularly in Latin America.[6]

Braden served in the CIA for five years, from 1949 to 1954, rose to a division chief, and later became well known as a newspaper columnist, television host (of CNN's Crossfire), and author. As chief of the agency's International Organizations division, he channeled CIA money to a broad range of anti-Communist cultural groups overseas, and, through the AFL-CIO, into labor unions in Europe. Later, a book he wrote about his large family, Eight Is Enough (New York: Random House, 1975), became the basis for a television series in the 1970s and 1980s.

-- Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered The CIA, by David Wise


In 1973, AFL-CIO president George Meany discovered that Lovestone was still in contact with Angleton of the CIA, who was conducting illegal domestic spying activities, despite being told seven years earlier to terminate this relationship.[7]

Labour Operations

Agency labour operations came into being, like student and youth operations, as a reaction against the continuation of pre-World War II CPSU policy and expansion through the international united fronts. In 1945 with the support and participation of the British Trade Unions Congres (TUC), the American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Soviet Trade Unions Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was formed in Paris. Differences within the WFTU between communist trade-union leaders, who were anxious to use the WFTU for anti-capitalist propaganda, and free-world leaders who insisted on keeping the WFTU focused on economic issues, finally came to a head in 1949 over whether the WFTU should support the Marshall Plan. When the communists, who included French, Italian and Latin American leaders as well as the Soviets, refused to allow the WFTU to endorse the Marshall Plan, the TUC and CIO withdrew, and later the same year the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU ‡) was founded as a noncommunist alternative to the WFTU, with participation by the TUC, CIO, American Federation of Labor (AFL) and other national centres. Agency operations were responsible in part for the expulsion of the WFTU headquarters from Paris in 1951 when it moved to the Soviet sector of Vienna. Later, in 1956, it was forced to move from Vienna to Prague.

The ICFTU established regional organizations for Europe, the Far East, Africa and the Western Hemisphere, which brought together the non-communist national trade-union centres. Support and guidance by the Agency was, and still is, exercised on the three levels: ICFTU, regional and national centres. At the highest level, labor operations congenial to the Agency are supported through George Meany, ‡ President of the AFL, Jay Lovestone, ‡ Foreign Affairs Chief of the AFL and Irving Brown, ‡ AFL representative in Europe -- all of whom were described to us as effective spokesmen for positions in accordance with the Agency's needs. Direct Agency control is also exercised on the regional level. Serafino Romualdi, ‡ AFL Latin American representative for example, directs the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (ORIT) ‡ located in Mexico City. On the national level, particularly in underdeveloped countries, CIA field stations engage in operations to support and guide national labour centres. In headquarters, support, guidance and control of all labour operations is centralized in the labour branch of the International Organizations Division.

General policy on labour operations is similar to youth and student operations. First, the WFTU and its regional and national affiliates are labelled as stooges of Moscow. Second, local station operations are designed to weaken and defeat communist or extreme-leftist dominated union structures and to establish and support a non-communist structure. Third, the ICFTU and its regional organizations are promoted, both from the top and from the bottom, by having Agency-influenced or controlled unions and national centres affiliate.

A fourth CIA approach to labour operations is through the International Trade Secretariats ‡ (ITS), which represent the interests of workers in a particular industry as opposed to the national centres that unite workers of different industries. Because the ITS system is more specialized, and often more effective, it is at times more appropriate for Agency purposes than the ICFTU with its regional and national structure. Control and guidance is exercised through officers of a particular ITS who are called upon to assist labour operations directed against the workers of a particular industry. Very often the CIA agents in an ITS are the American labour leaders who represent the US affiliate of the ITS, since the ITS would usually receive its principal support from the pertinent US industrial union. Thus the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ‡ serves as a channel for CIA operations in the Public Service International, ‡ which is the ITS for government employees headquartered in London. And the Retail Clerks International Association, ‡ which is the US union of white-collar employees, gives access to the International Federation of Clerical and Technical Employees, ‡ which is the white-collar ITS. Similarly, the Communications Workers of America ‡ is used to control the Post, Telegraph and Telephone Workers International ‡ (PTTI) which is the ITS for communications workers. In the case of the petroleum industry the Agency actually set up the ITS, the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers ‡ (IFPCW) through the US union of petroleum workers, the Oil Workers International Union. Particularly in underdeveloped countries, station labour operations may be given cover as a local programme of an ITS. Within the Catholic trade-union movement similar activity is possible, usually channelled through the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions ‡ (IFCTU). [12] And for specialized training within the social-democratic movement, the Israeli Histadrut ‡ is used.

Labour operations are the source of considerable friction between the DDP area divisions and the stations, on the one hand, and the International Organizations Division (IOD) on the other. The problem is mainly jurisdiction and coordination. The labour operations agents on the international and regional level (ICFTU, ORlT, ITS, for example) are directed by officers of IOD either in Washington or from a field station such as Paris, Brussels or Mexico City. If their activities in a particular country, Colombia, for example, are not closely coordinated with the Bogota station, they may oppose or otherwise interfere with specific aims of the Bogota station's labour operations or other programmes. Whenever IOD labour assets visit a given country, the Chief of Station who is responsible for all CIA activities in his country, must be advised. Otherwise the IOD agent, lacking the guidance and control that would ensure that his activities harmonize with the entire station operational programme, not just in the labour field, may jeopardize other station goals. Continuing efforts are made to ensure coordination between IOD activities in labour and the field stations concerned, but this is also hampered at times by the narrow view and headstrong attitudes of the agents themselves.

On the other hand, IOD agents can be enormously valuable in assisting a local station's labour programme. Usually the agent has considerable prestige as a result of his position on the international or regional level, and his favour is often sought by indigenous labour leaders because of the travel and training grants and invitations to conferences that the agent dispenses. He accordingly has ready access to leaders in the local non-communist labour movement and he can establish contact between the station and those local labour leaders of interest. Such contact can be established through third parties, gradually, so that the IOD agent is protected when a new operational relationship is eventually established. Field stations may call on IOD support in order to obtain the adoption of a particular policy or programme in a given country through the influence that an IOD agent can bring to bear on a local situation, again without the local labour leader, even if he is a station agent, knowing that the international or regional official is responding to CIA guidance.

Measuring the effectiveness of labour operations against their multi-million-dollar cost is difficult and controversial, and includes the denial-to-the-communists factor as well as the value of indoctrination in pro-Western ideals through seminars, conferences and educational programmes. In any case, free-world affiliation with the WFTU has been considerably reduced, even though several leading national confederations in non-communist countries still belong.

-- Inside the Company: CIA Diary, by Philip Agee


Meany chose to force Lovestone out by issuing an instruction with which he knew Lovestone would not comply. On March 6, 1974, he informed Lovestone that he wanted to close his New York office, stop publication of Free Trade Union News, and transfer Lovestone and his library and archives to Washington, D.C. When Lovestone argued he could not relocate his library of 6,000 books, he was dismissed, effective July 1.[8] Lovestone's successor, Ernie Lee, maintained a low profile during his tenure from 1974 through 1982 and significantly scaled back the AFL-CIO's aggressive advocacy of a hawkish, anti-détente foreign policy.[8]

Death and legacy

Lovestone died on March 7, 1990, at the age of 92.[9]

Jay Lovestone's massive accumulation of papers, today encompassing more than 865 archival boxes,[10] were acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in 1975, where they remained sealed for 20 years.[11] The material was opened to the public in 1995 and was a source for author Ted Morgan, who published the first full-length biography of Lovestone in 1999.[11] An associate, Louise Page Morris, later supplemented the collection with her correspondence—according to other reports, Morris "spent 25 years as Lovestone's lover."[12][13]

Lovestone's Federal Bureau of Investigation file is reported to be 5,700 pages long.[14]

Works

Communist Party years


• The Government — Strikebreaker: A Study of the Role of the Government in the Recent Industrial Crisis. New York: Workers Party of America, 1923.
• Blood and Steel: An Exposure of the 12-Hour Day in the Steel Industry. New York: Workers Party of America, n.d. [1923]
• What's What About Coolidge? Chicago, Workers Party of America, n.d. [c. 1923] alternate link
• The La Follette Illusion: As Revealed in an Analysis of the Political Role of Senator Robert M. La Follette. Chicago: Literature Department, Workers Party of America, 1924.
• American Imperialism: The Menace of the Greatest Capitalist World Power. Chicago: Literature Department, Workers Party of America, n.d. [1925]
• The Party Organization. (Introduction.) Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing Co., n.d. [1925]
• Our Heritage from 1776: A Working Class View of the First American Revolution. With Wolfe, Bertram D. and William F. Dunne, New York: The Workers School, n.d. [1926] alternate link
• The Labor Lieutenants of American Imperialism. New York: Daily Worker Publishing Co., 1927
• The Coolidge Program: Capitalist Democracy and Prosperity Exposed. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1927 (Workers library #2)
• Ruthenberg, Communist fighter and leader (Introduction) New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1927
• 1928: The Presidential Election and the Workers. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. (Workers library #4) Yiddish
• America Prepares the Next War. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. (Workers library #10)
• Pages from Party History. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. [February 1929].

Communist opposition years

• "Twelve Years of the Soviet Union," The Revolutionary Age, Vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1, 1929), pp. 7–8.
• The American Labor Movement: Its Past, Its Present, Its Future. New York: Workers Age Publishing Association, n.d. [1932].
• What Next for American Labor? New York: Communist Party of the United States (Opposition), n.d. [1934]
• Marxian classics in the light of current history. New York City, New Workers School 1934
• Soviet Foreign Policy and the World Revolution. New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1935 alternate link
• People's Front Illusion: From "Social Fascism" to the "People's Front." New York: Workers Age Publishers, n.d. [1937].
• New Frontiers for Labor. New York: Workers Age Publishers, n.d. [1938]

Post-radical years

• The Big Smile: An Analysis of the Soviet "New Look." With Matthew Woll. New York: Free Trade Union Committee, American Federation of Labor, 1955
• Communist and Workers' Parties' manifesto adopted November-December, 1960; Testimony of Jay Lovestone, January 26, February 2, 1961 Washington, D.C. United States Government Printing Office, 1961

Footnotes

1. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999; pp. 4-6.
2. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 8-10.
3. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 10-13.
4. Fanny Horowitz, "Minutes of the National Left Wing Conference," Department of Justice/Bureau of Investigation files, NARA M-1085, reel 936. Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2007.
5. Stalin, Joseph (1931). "Stalin's Speeches on the. American Communist Party: Delivered in the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, May 6, 1929 and In the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, May 14th, 1929". Originally published by Central Committee, Communist Party USA, New York.
6. Victor Reuther The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; pgs. 411-427.
7. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 350-351.
8. Morgan, A Covert Life, pg. 351.
9. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/09/obit ... -dies.html
10. Grace M. Hawes, "Register of the Jay Lovestone Papers, 1906-1989," Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.
11. Elena Danielson, "A Fierce, Freedom-Loving Man," Archived 2008-07-05 at the Wayback Machine. Hoover Digest, issue 1999#1, January 30, 1999.
12. Berman, Paul (28 March 1999). "Under the Beds of the Reds". New York Times. Retrieved 27 February2013.
13. Powers, Thomas (11 May 2000). "The Plot Thickens". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
14. Random House, Publisher description for A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster

Further reading

• Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.
• Victor G. Devinatz, "Reassessing The Historical UAW: Walter Reuther's Affiliation with the Communist Party and Something of Its Meaning — A Document of Party Involvement, 1939", Le Travail, 2002.
• Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America or Under the Covers with the CIA.San Jose, CA: F. Hirsch, 1974.
• Paul LeBlanc and Tim Davenport (eds.), The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940: Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume 1. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2015.
• Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist & Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999.

External links

• Grace M. Hawes (ed.), "Register of the Jay Lovestone Papers, 1906-1989," Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, 2008.
• Obituary from The New York Times

See also

• Communist Party of the USA (Opposition)
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Image
Daniel De Leon
Daniel De Leon in 1902.
Born December 14, 1852
Curaçao, Colony of Curaçao and Dependencies
Died May 11, 1914 (aged 61)
New York, New York
Nationality American
Occupation
EditorPolitician
Marxist theoretician
Trade union organizer

Daniel De Leon (/də ˈliːɒn/; December 14, 1852 – May 11, 1914) was an American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. He is regarded as the forefather of the idea of revolutionary industrial unionism and was the leading figure in the Socialist Labor Party of America from 1890 until the time of his death.[1]

Biography

Early life and academic career


Daniel De Leon was born December 14, 1852 in Curaçao, the son of Salomon de Leon and Sarah Jesurun De Leon. His father was a surgeon in the Royal Netherlands Army and a colonial official. His family ancestry is believed to be Dutch Jewish of the Spanish and Portuguese community; "De León" is a Spanish surname, oftentimes toponymic, in which case it can possibly indicate a family's geographic origin in the Medieval Kingdom of León.

His father lived in the Netherlands before coming to Curaçao when receiving his commission in the military. Salomon De Leon died on January 18, 1865, when Daniel was twelve and was the first to be buried in the new Jewish cemetery.[2]

De Leon left Curaçao on April 15, 1866 and arrived in Hamburg on May 22. In Germany he studied at the Gymnasium in Hildesheim and in 1870 began attending the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He studied medicine at Leiden and was a member of the Amsterdam student corps, but did not graduate. While in Europe he had become fluent in German, Dutch, French, English, ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to his first language Spanish.[3][4] Sometime between 1872 and 1874 he emigrated to New York, with his wife and mother. There he found work as an instructor in Latin, Greek and mathematics at Thomas B. Harrington's School in Westchester, New York. In 1876 he entered Columbia College, now Columbia University, earning an LLB with honors 1878.[5]

From 1878 to 1882, he lived in Brownsville, Texas as a practicing attorney, then returned to New York. While he maintained an attorney's office until 1884 he was more interested in pursuing an academic career at his alma mater, Columbia. A prize lectureship had been created in 1882. To be eligible a candidate had to be a graduate of Columbia, a member of the Academy of Political Science and read at least one paper before the academy. The three year appointment came with a $500 annual salary and required the lecturer to give twenty lectures a year, based on original research, to the students of the School of Political Science. De Leon devoted his lectures to Latin American diplomacy and the interventions of European powers in South American affairs. He received his first term in 1883 and his second term in 1886. In 1889 he was not kept on. Some allege that the University officials denied him a promised full professorship because of his political activities,[6] while other believe that his subject was too esoteric to be a permanent part of the curriculum.[7]

De Leon published no papers about Latin America during this period, but he did contribute an article to the debut issue of the Academy's Political Science Quarterly on the Berlin West Africa Conference.[8] He also wrote reviews on Franz von Holtzendorff's Handbuch des Völkerrechts in June 1888 and its French translation in March 1889 for the same publication.

Personal life

De Leon traveled back to Curaçao to marry the 16-year-old Sarah Lobo from Caracas, Venezuela. The Lobo were a prominent Jewish family in the area that lived in both the Dutch Antilles and Venezuela. After a traditional Jewish wedding in Caracas the family moved to a Spanish speaking area of Manhattan, at 112 West 14th street where their first son, Solon De Leon would be born on September 2, 1883. By the mid to late 1880s the family was living in the Lower East Side. In 1885 or 1886 another child, Grover Cleveland De Leon was born but only lived a year and a half. On April 29, 1887 Sarah Lobo De Leon died in childbirth while delivering stillborn twins; it was the same year that Grover had died. After this the De Leons left the Lower East Side and moved in with their housekeeper Mary Redden Maguire at 1487 Avenue A.[9]

In 1891, while on a speaking tour around the country for the SLP, De Leon found himself in Kansas when he learned that a planned speaking engagement in Lawrence had been canceled. He decided to head to Independence, Kansas where he had been advised there was some sympathy for the socialist movement. He arrived on April 23 and was hosted by a 26-year-old school teacher, Bertha Canary, who was the head of a local Bellamyite group, the Christian Socialist Club. Canary was familiar with De Leon, having read some of his articles in the Nationalist Club movement press, and the two apparently became infatuated with each other. In 1892 they were married in South Norwalk, Connecticut.[10] They had five children: Florence, Gertrude, Paul, Donald and Genseric. He named the latter, according to Solon De Leon, after the medieval king Genseric, a Vandal who made the Pope kiss his toes.[11]

Political career

De Leon settled in New York City, studying at Columbia University. He was a Georgist socialist during the 1886 Mayoral campaign of Henry George and in 1890 joined the Socialist Labor Party, becoming the editor of its newspaper, The People. He quickly grew in stature inside the party and in 1891, 1902, and 1904 he ran for the governorship of the state of New York, winning more than 15,000 votes in 1902, his best result.

De Leon became a Marxist in the late 1880s, and argued for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, trying to divert the SLP away from its Lassallian outlook. Some argue that his famous polemic with James Connolly showed him to have been an advocate of Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages.[12] Others question this assertion because by the same logic Marx and Engels could be described as advocates of the Iron Law because language in The Communist Manifesto and Value, Price and Profit pertaining to the level of wages and temporary effect of union activity on working conditions is similar to the language used by De Leon in his answer to Connolly, and the 'iron law of wages' is a Malthusian theory which De Leon did not indicate any support for.

De Leon was highly critical of the trade union movement in America and described the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor as the "American Separation of Labor". At this early stage in De Leon's development, there was still a considerable remnant of the general unionist Knights of Labor in existence, and the SLP worked within it until being driven out. This resulted in the formation of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (ST&LA) in 1895, which was dominated by the SLP.

By the early 20th Century, the SLP was declining in numbers, with first the Social Democratic Party and then the Socialist Party of America becoming the leading leftist political force in America (as these splinter groups embraced capitalist reforms). De Leon was an important figure in the US labor movement, and in 1904 he attended the International Socialist Congress, held in Amsterdam. Under the influence of the American Labor Union (ALU), he changed his politics around this time to put more focus on industrial unionism, and the ballot as a purely destructive weapon, in contrast to his earlier view of political organization as 'sword' and industrial union as 'shield'. He worked with the ALU in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. His participation in this organization was short-lived and acrimonious.

De Leon later accused the IWW of having been taken over by what he called disparagingly 'the bummery'. De Leon was engaged in a policy dispute with the leaders of the IWW. His argument was in support of political action via the Socialist Labor Party while other leaders, including founder Big Bill Haywood, argued instead for direct action. Haywood's faction prevailed, resulting in a change to the Preamble which precluded "affiliation with any political party." De Leon's followers left the IWW to form a rival Detroit-based IWW, which was renamed the Workers' International Industrial Union in 1915, and collapsed in 1925.[13]

Death and legacy

De Leon was formally expelled from the Chicago IWW after calling proponents of that organization "slum proletarians".[13] He died in New York on May 11, 1914. His Socialist Labor Party has remained influential, largely by keeping his ideas alive.

Daniel De Leon proved hugely influential to other socialists, also outside the US. For example, in the UK, a Socialist Labour Party was formed. De Leon's hopes for peaceful and bloodless revolution also influenced Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution.[14] George Seldes quotes Lenin saying on the fifth anniversary of the revolution, "... What we have done in Russia is accept the De Leon interpretation of Marxism, that is what the Bolsheviki adopted in 1917."[15]

Electoral history

De Leon ran in 1891 for Governor of New York and received 14,651 votes. He ran in 1893 for Secretary of State of New York and received 20,034 votes. He ran again in 1902 for Governor and received 15,886 votes. He ran in 1903 for the New York Court of Appeals. He ran again in 1904 for Governor and received 8,976 votes.

Works

• Reform or Revolution?, speech, 1896.
• What Means This Strike?, speech, 1898.
• Socialism vs Anarchism, speech, 1901.
• Two Pages from Roman History
• The Burning Question of Trade Unionism
• Preamble of the IWW, later renamed The Socialist Reconstruction of Society.
• DeLeon Replies ... (short essay, 1904)

Notes

1. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed. (1995-09-26). "DeLeon, Daniel". The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. p. 324.
2. Carl Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon. New York: Humanities Press, pp. 2-3.
3. Stephen Coleman, Daniel De Leon. Manchester, England: University of Manchester Press, 1990; pg. 8.
4. Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon, pg. 4.
5. Seretan, L. Glen Daniel DeLeon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979; p. 6
6. Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon, pp. 19-20.
7. Lewis Hanke, "The First Lecturer on Hispanic American Diplomatic History in the United States," The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Aug. 1936), pp. 399-402.
8. Daniel De Leon, The Conference at Berlin on The West-African Question
9. Reeve op cit. pp.4-5
10. Coleman, op. cit. p.9
11. Reeve op cit. pp.6
12. Daniel De Leon (1904). "DeLeon Replies". Retrieved February 22, 2007.
13. Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin, The IWW: Its First Seventy Years, 1905-1975, 1976; pg. 39.
14. Dan Jakopvich, "Revolution and the party in Gramsci’s thought." IV Online magazine (IV406, Nov. 2008), [1], See section: "The dialectics of consent and coercion."
15. Seldes, George (1987). Witness to a Century. New York: Ballantine Books. pp. 191–192. ISBN 0345331818.

Further reading

• Stephen Coleman, Daniel De Leon, Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
• W.J. Ghent,"Daniel De Leon" in Dictionary of American Biography. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.
• Lewis Hanke The first lecturer on Hispanic American diplomatic history. Durham, N.C., 1936 (Reprinted from The Hispanic American historical review, vol. XVI, no. 3, August, 1936)
• Frank Girard and Ben Perry, Socialist Labor Party, 1876-1991: A Short History. Philadelphia: Livra Books, 1991.
• David Herreshoff, "Daniel De Leon: The Rise of Marxist Politics," in Harvey Goldberg ed. American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1957.
• American Disciples of Marx: From the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.
• Olive M. Johnson, Daniel De Leon, American Socialist Pathfinder. New York: New York Labor News Company, 1923.
• Olive M. Johnson and Henry Kuhn, The Socialist Labor Party: During Four Decades, 1890-1930.Part 1. Part 2. New York: New York Labor News Company, 1931.
• Charles A. Madison, "Daniel De Leon: Apostle of Socialism," Antioch Review, vol. 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1945), pp. 402–414. In JSTOR
• Arnold Petersen, Daniel DeLeon: Social Architect. New York: New York Labor News Company, 1942.
• Leonid Raiskii, Daniel De Leon; the struggle against opportunism in the American labor movement, New York: New York Labor News Co., 1932.
• Carl Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon. New York:AIMS/Humanities Press, 1972.
• L. Glen Seratan, Daniel DeLeon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist, Cambridge, MA: [Harvard University Press, 1979.
• "Daniel De Leon as American," Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 61, no. 3 (Spring 1978), pp. 210–223. In JSTOR.
• Daniel De Leon: The Man and his Work: A Symposium. New York: National Executive Committee, Socialist Labor Party, 1919.
• Golden jubilee of De Leonism, 1890-1940: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Socialist labor party. New York: National Executive Committee, Socialist Labor Party, 1940.
• Fifty years of American Marxism, 1891-1941: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Weekly People. New York: National Executive Committee, Socialist Labor Party, 1940.
• The Vatican in Politics: Ultramontanism, New York Labor News Company 1962

External links

• Socialist Labor Party official website.
• Daniel De Leon Internet Archive at the Marxists Internet Archive.
• Deleonism.org
• Works by Daniel De Leon at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Daniel De Leon at Internet Archive
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:31 am

William Weinstone
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

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Will Weinstone, 1927.

William Wolf "Will" Weinstone (1897–1985) was an American Communist politician and labor leader. Weinstone served as Executive Secretary of the unified Communist Party of America, the forerunner of today's Communist Party USA, from October 15, 1921 to February 22, 1922 and was an important figure in the party's activities among the auto workers of Detroit during the 1930s.

Biography

Early years


William Weinstone was born December 15, 1897 in Vilnius, then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Will was the son of Jewish parents who emigrated from Russia to escape that nation's pervasive anti-semitism during the late Tsarist period. His original surname was "Weinstein," a name which Will Americanized when he was older.

Political career

Weinstone was elected as an alternate delegate to the Left Wing National Conference held in New York City in June 1919, at which he was seated to replace a regular delegate on the last day of the gathering.

Weinstone was elected as a delegate to the founding convention of the Communist Party of America, called to order in Chicago on September 1, 1919.

During the first years of the 1920s the Communist Party of America was forced underground by the mass operation of the U.S. Department of Justice remembered as the Palmer Raids. During this interval, Weinstone served as Executive Secretary of the secret party organization from October 15, 1921 to February 22, 1922, under the pseudonym "G. Lewis."[1]

Following the removal of Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow from the leadership of the Communist Party in the summer of 1929, Weinstone was added to the ranks of a new collective leadership called the Secretariat.[2] Although he had aspirations of permanent leadership, he was ultimately unable to retain the top leadership, which soon fell to Earl Browder, a longtime factional rival.[2]

Weinstone ran for Mayor of New York City in 1929.[3] Following the campaign, Weinstone was selected by the Communist Party as its representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow, a post which he occupied until 1931.[2]

He ran for U.S. Senator from New York in 1932.

As an executive officer of the Communist Party in Michigan during a wave of Great Depression union activity during the mid-1930s, Weinstone played a significant role in the founding of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) in May 1935, pressing the unionized workers to make use of the sit-down strike, a tactic first employed by the Industrial Workers of the World union.[4] The union's wave of successful sit-down strikes culminated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-1937, in which the striking UAW workers occupied several General Motors plants for over forty days – repelling the efforts of the police and National Guard to drive them from the auto plant's premises.

A member of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party during the same period, Weinstone concurrently worked on the party's cause on behalf of oppressed African Americans in the segregated southern states. Writing for such Communist publications as The International Communist, he was a strong champion of the defense of the falsely-accused Scottsboro Boys, whose successful legal defense was organized by the Communist-funded International Labor Defense, as was the famous case of young African American organizer Angelo Herndon.

In 1938 Weinstone was named Director of the New York Workers School, the Communist Party's ideological training school located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.[5]

Later years

Still publishing material for the communist cause into the twilight of his life, Winestone, together with Theodore Bassett and Philip A. Bart, was also co-editor of Highlights of a Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party, USA, a broad selection of speeches, essays, and documents from the party's history; his recollection of organizing work during the autoworkers' sit-down strike was published in The Great Sit-Down Strike, a work produced by the party-organized Workers Library Publishers in 1937.

In 1953, he and 12 other Communist leaders were convicted in Federal District Court in Manhattan under the Smith Act of conspiracy to advocate the violent overthrow of the Government. His role in the conspiracy was the writing of two newspaper articles, in 1948 and 1950, reviewing the party's educational work and plans to raise membership. He served two years in a Federal prison and was fined $4,000.[6] Weinstone remained a loyalist to the Communist Party throughout his entire life, remaining in the organization even after its bitter factional struggle of 1956 to 1958, brought about by the so-called "Secret Speech" of Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956.

In 1959, Weinstone was among the first American Communists to visit the Soviet Union again, following a protracted break in direct contacts with the outside world. Weinstone traveled at that time without portfolio and was reported by high-ranking party member and FBI informant Morris Childs to have been considering seeking employment and staying in the USSR on a long-term basis.[7] Childs persuaded Weinstone to return to the United States, however, and he returned to America on November 1, 1959.[7]

Death and legacy

Will Weinstone died on October 26, 1985. His papers reside with the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.[8]

Weinstone was immortalized in film as one of the "witnesses" in Warren Beatty's film, Reds, sharing his personal recollections of radical journalist John Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant.

Footnotes

1. "The Communist Party of America (1919-1946): Party Officials," Early American Marxism website, http://www.marxisthistory.org/ Retrieved June 6, 2011.
2. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia. New York: Viking Press, 1960; pg. 431.
3. "Communists Name Municipal Ticket: Weinstone Chosen to Run for Mayor," New York Times, July 15, 1929.
4. Berger, Michael L. The Automobile in American History: A Reference Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001; pg. 76; the Industrial Workers of the World union's role in the founding of the sit-down strike is retold by Bruce Watson in Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. New York: Penguin Books, 2005; pg. 54.
5. Marvin E. Gettleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944: Communist Education in American Society," in Michael E. Brown et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993; pg. 271.
6. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/26/nyre ... ditor.html
7. Morris Childs, "Information Concerning William Weinstone," December 3, 1959. Published in "FBI SOLO Files - March 1958 to August 1960." Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation, August 2011; part 15, pdf page 12.
8. Laura J. Kells, William W. Weinstone Papers: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 2009.

Works

• How the Auto Workers Won. (with William Z Foster) New York: The Daily Worker, 1937.
• The Great Sit-down Strike. New York: Workers Library Pub., 1937.
• Factionalism — The Enemy of the Auto Workers. (with Boleslaw Gebert) Detroit, Communist Party of Michigan 1938.
• The Case against David Dubinsky. New York: New Century Publishers, 1946
• The Atom Bomb and You. New York: New Century Publishers, 1950.
• Our Generation Will Not Be Silent: Statement of the Labor Youth League in Answer to the Attorney General's Charges under the McCarran Act. New York: The League, 1953.
• Against Opportunism: For a Marxist-Leninist, Vanguard Party of the American Working Class. New York: Waterfront Section, Communist Party, U.S.A., 1956.
• Study Outline on the History of the Communist Party, USA. New York: National Education Dept., Communist Party, U.S.A., 1969.

External links

• Laura J. Kells, William W. Weinstone Papers: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 2009.
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Communist Party USA

Nominees Presidential

• 1924: Foster
• 1928: Foster
• 1932: Foster
• 1936: Browder
• 1940: Browder
• 1968: Mitchell
• 1972: Hall
• 1976: Hall
• 1980: Hall
• 1984: Hall

Vice Presidential

• 1924: Gitlow
• 1928: Gitlow
• 1932: Ford
• 1936: Ford
• 1940: Ford
• 1968: Zagarell
• 1972: Tyner
• 1976: Tyner
• 1980: Davis
• 1984: Davis

Leaders

• C. E. Ruthenberg (1919–1920; 1922–1927)
• Alfred Wagenknecht (1919–1921)
• Charles Dirba (1920–1921)
• Louis Shapiro (late 1920)
• L. E. Katterfeld (1921)
• William Weinstone (1921–1922)
• Jay Lovestone (1922; 1927–1929)
• James P. Cannon(1921–1922)
• Caleb Harrison (1921-1922)
• Abram Jakira (1922–1923)
• William Z. Foster(1929–1934)
• Earl Browder (1934–1945)
• Eugene Dennis (1945–1959)
• William Z. Foster(1945–1957)
• Gus Hall (1959–2000)
• Sam Webb (2000–2014)
• John Bachtell (2014–present)

Litigation

• Albertson v. Subversive Activities Control Board
• Aptheker v. Secretary of State
• Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board
• De Jonge v. Oregon
• Dennis v. United States
• Kent v. Dulles
• Keyishian v. Board of Regents
• Noto v. United States
• Scales v. United States
• Smith Act trials
• Watkins v. United States
• Yates v. United States

Related articles

• Bill of Rights socialism
• Communist Labor Party
• English-language press
• Non-English press
• International Publishers
• Language federation
• National conventions
• People's World
• Relations with African-Americans
• Young Communist League USA
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:37 am

Bertram Wolfe
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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Bert Wolfe as he appeared in 1929 as National Agit-Prop director of the Workers (Communist) Party.

Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe (January 19, 1896 – February 21, 1977) was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.

Biography

Early life


Bertram Wolfe was born January 19, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a native-born American and his father was an ethnic Jewish immigrant from Germany who had arrived in the United States as a boy of 13.[1]

Wolfe studied to teach English literature and writing and received degrees from the College of the City of New York, Columbia University, and the University of Mexico.[1]

Communist Party

Wolfe was active with the Socialist Party of America in his youth and was an active participant in the Left Wing Section which emerged in 1919. Wolfe attended the June 1919 National Conference of the Left Wing and was elected by that body to its nine-member National Council.[1] He helped draft the manifesto of that organization, together with Louis C. Fraina and John Reed.[1]

In 1919 Wolfe became a founding member of the Communist Party of America (CPA). Together with Maximilian Cohen, Wolfe was responsible for The Communist World, the CPA's first newspaper in New York City.[2]

During the period of repression of leading Communists in New York conducted by the Lusk Committee, Wolfe fled to California. In 1920 he became a member of the San Francisco Cooks' Union.[2] He also edited a left wing trade union paper called Labor Unity from 1920 to 1922.[2] Wolfe was a delegate to the ill-fated August 1922 convention of the underground CPA held in Bridgman, Michigan, for which he was indicted under Michigan's "criminal syndicalism" law.[1]

In 1923, Wolfe departed for Mexico, where he became active in the trade union movement there.[2] He became a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Mexico and was a delegate of that organization to the 5th World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1924.[1] Wolfe was also a leading member the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) from 1924 to 1928, sitting on that body's Executive Committee.[2]

Wolfe was ultimately deported from Mexico to the United States in July 1925 for activities related to a strike of Mexican railway workers.[2] Upon his return to America, Wolfe took over as head of the Party's New York Workers School, located at 26 Union Square and offering 70 courses in the social sciences to some 1500 students.[2]

After his return to the United States, Wolfe became a close political associate of factional leader Jay Lovestone, who became the leader of the American Communist Party following the death of C.E. Ruthenberg in 1927. He was editor of The Communist, the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, in 1927 and 1928.[2]

Wolfe was chosen as a delegate of the American Communist Party to the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928.[1]

In 1928, Wolfe was made the national director of agitation and propaganda for the Workers (Communist) Party of America.[2] He also ran for U.S. Congress as a Communist in the 10th Congressional District of New York.[3]

Late in December 1928, with the election campaign at an end, Wolfe was dispatched by the Lovestone-dominated Central Executive Committee of the American Communist Party to serve as it delegate to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), where he replaced J. Louis Engdahl.[4] In that capacity, he became involved in the attempt of Jay Lovestone to maintain control of the American organization over the growing opposition of Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, who ultimately supported the rival faction headed by William Z. Foster and Alexander Bittelman.

According to Benjamin Gitlow's 1940 memoir, I Confess, Wolfe was directed by the Comintern in April 1929 to be removed from his post in Moscow and to instead accept a dangerous assignment to Korea - at the time under Japanese rule - as part of the campaign against the Lovestone group in the American Communist Party.[5] Wolfe refused the assignment, providing a long statement of his reasons to ECCI for this decision, according to Gitlow.[5]

In June 1929, Wolfe was expelled from the Communist Party, USA for refusing to support the Comintern's decisions regarding the American Communist Party, which effectively removed Lovestone from power.[1]

Communist Party (Opposition)

Upon returning to the United States, he and Lovestone, who had also been expelled from the party, formed the Communist Party (Opposition) to further their views. Having expected a majority of American Communists to join them, they were disappointed at only being able to attract a few hundred followers. Wolfe became editor of the CP(O)'s newspaper Worker's Age and its chief theorist. Initially, Lovestone and Wolfe hoped to eventually be welcomed back into the Communist movement but when changes in the Comintern's line failed to result in a rapprochement, the CP(O) moved further and further away from communism. Wolfe and Lovestone were sympathisers of Nikolai Bukharin and helped found the International Communist Opposition (also known as the International Right Opposition) which for a time had some influence before petering out.

In the 1930s, Wolfe and his wife, Ella Goldberg Wolfe, travelled around the world visiting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Mexico City in 1933 and spending time in Spain prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. By 1940, the Wolfes were living in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they befriended Alfred Kazin and introduced him to Mary McCarthy and the writers of the Partisan Review.[6]

The CP(O) meanwhile moved further away from the left and went through several name changes finally becoming the Independent Labor League of America in 1938 before dissolving at the end of 1940 in part because of a break between Lovestone and Wolfe on their interpretation of World War II - with Lovestone favoring American intervention and Wolfe opposing support for what he argued was an imperialist war.

Cold War

Wolfe's political perspective changed with time, however, and during the Cold War was a leading anti-Communist. In the 1950s, he worked as ideological advisor to the State Department's International Broadcasting Office which was in charge of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. He then joined Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace's library as senior fellow in Slavic studies and, in 1966, became a senior research fellow at the institution. He also served as a visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of California. In 1973 Wolfe was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.[7]

Death and legacy

Wolfe died February 21, 1977, from burns he suffered when his bathrobe caught fire. He was 81 years old at the time of his death.

See also

• New York Workers School
• New Workers School

Footnotes

1. Branko Lazitch with Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern: New, Revised, and Expanded Edition. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986; pp. 514-515.
2. "Wolfe Starts Campaign Tour: Communist Candidate to Speak in Many Cities," Daily Worker, vol. 5, no. 235 (October 4, 1928), pp. 1, 3.
3. "Red Ticket Goes on Ballot in NY State," Daily Worker, vol. 5, no. 241 (October 11, 1928), pg. 3.
4. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia. New York: Viking Press, 1960; pg. 392.
5. Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess: The Truth About American Communism. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940; pp. 547-548.
6. Kazin, Alfred (1965). Starting Out In The Thirties. Little, Brown and Company. pp. 151-155.
7. "Humanist Manifesto II". American Humanist Association. Retrieved October 9, 2012.

Works

• Our Heritage from 1776: A Working Class View of the First American Revolution. With Jay Lovestone and William F. Dunne, New York: The Workers School, n.d. [1926] alternate link
• How class collaboration works Chicago: Daily Worker, 1926 (Little red library #9)
• Revolution in Latin America New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928
• The Trotsky opposition: its significance for American workers New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928 (Workers library #5)
• Economics of present day capitalism New York: New Workers school 1930s
• The nature of capitalist crisis New York: New Workers school 1930s
• What is the communist opposition? New York: Workers Age Pub. Ass'n. 1933
• Marx and America New York: John Day Co. 1934
• Things We Want to Know New York: Workers Age Pub. Association. 1934
• Marxian Economics: An Outline of Twelve Lectures. New York: New Workers school 1934
• Economics of Present Day Capitalism. New York: New Workers School, n.d. [1930s].
• Portrait of America (with Diego Rivera) New York: Covici, Friede 1934
• Portrait of Mexico (with Diego Rivera) New York: Covici, Friede 1937
• Civil war in Spain (with Andrés Nin) New York: Workers Age Publishers 1937
• The Truth about the Barcelona events by Lambda (Introduction) New York: Workers Age 1937
• Keep America out of war, a program (with Norman Thomas) New York: Frederick A. Stokes 1939
• Diego Rivera: his life and times New York: A.A. Knopf 1939
• The Russian Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg Intro. and trans. by Bertram D. Wolfe. New York: Workers Age 1940
• Poland, acid test for a people's peace New York: Polish Labor Group 1945
• Diego Rivera Washington: Pan American Union 1947
• Three who made a revolution, a biographical history Washington: Dial Press 1948
• Operation rewrite; the agony of Soviet historians New York, N.Y.?: Council on Foreign Relations?, 1948
• An exclusive radio interview with Stalin on peace and war: based on a series of three broadcasts by the Voice of America, October, 1951(with Catharine de Bary) S.l. : Distributed by the United States Information Service, 1951
• Six keys to the Soviet system Boston: Beacon Press 1956
• Khrushchev and Stalin's ghost; text, background, and meaning of Khrushchev's secret report to the Twentieth Congress on the night of February 24-25, 1956. New York: Praeger 1957
• The durability of despotism in the Soviet system; Changes in Soviet Society, conference under the auspices of St. Anthony's College in association with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (June 24-29, 1957) Oxford: St. Anthony's College 1957
• The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism? by Rosa Luxemburg (new introduction) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1961
• The fabulous life of Diego Rivera - Stein and Day Publishers New York 1963
• Leninism Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace 1964
• Strange Communists I have known New York: Stein and Day 1965
• Marxism, one hundred years in the life of a doctrine New York, Dial Press 1965
• The bridge and the abyss; the troubled friendship of Maxim Gorky and V.I. Lenin New York, Published for the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. by F.A. Praeger 1967
• An ideology in power; reflections on the Russian revolution New York: Stein and Day 1969
• Lenin: notes for a biographer by Leon Trotsky (introduction) New York: Capricorn Books 1971
• Revolution and reality: essays on the origin and fate of the Soviet system Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1981
• A life in two centuries: an autobiography New York: Stein and Day 1981
• Lenin and the twentieth century: a Bertram D. Wolfe retrospective Stanford, Calif.:Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University 1984
• Breaking with communism: the intellectual odyssey of Bertram D. Wolfe edited and with an introduction by Robert Hessen Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University 1990

External links

• Bertram Wolfe Archive at marxists.org
• Life of the Party article on Ella Wolfe
• Bertram D. Wolfe materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
• Bertram Wolfe's FBI files:
• HQ-1
• HQ-2
• HQ-EBF32
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:46 am

Philosopher's stone
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

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This article is about the legendary substance. For other uses, see Philosopher's Stone (disambiguation).

Image
The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.

The philosopher's stone, or stone of the philosophers (Latin: lapis philosophorum) is a legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold (chrysopoeia, from the Greek χρυσός khrusos, "gold", and ποιεῖν poiēin, "to make") or silver. It is also called the elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and for achieving immortality; for many centuries, it was the most sought goal in alchemy. The philosopher's stone was the central symbol of the mystical terminology of alchemy, symbolizing perfection at its finest, enlightenment, and heavenly bliss. Efforts to discover the philosopher's stone were known as the Magnum Opus ("Great Work").[1]

History

Ancient Greece


Mention of the philosopher's stone in writing can be found as far back as Cheirokmeta by Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300 AD).[2] Alchemical writers assign a longer history. Elias Ashmole and the anonymous author of Gloria Mundi (1620) claim that its history goes back to Adam who acquired the knowledge of the stone directly from God. This knowledge was said to be passed down through biblical patriarchs, giving them their longevity. The legend of the stone was also compared to the biblical history of the Temple of Solomon and the rejected cornerstone described in Psalm 118.[3]

The theoretical roots outlining the stone’s creation can be traced to Greek philosophy. Alchemists later used the classical elements, the concept of anima mundi, and Creation stories presented in texts like Plato's Timaeus as analogies for their process.[4] According to Plato, the four elements are derived from a common source or prima materia (first matter), associated with chaos. Prima materia is also the name alchemists assign to the starting ingredient for the creation of the philosopher's stone. The importance of this philosophical first matter persisted throughout the history of alchemy. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Vaughan writes, "the first matter of the stone is the very same with the first matter of all things".[5]

Middle Ages

The 8th-century Muslim alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (Latinized as Geber) analyzed each classical element in terms of the four basic qualities. Fire was both hot and dry, earth cold and dry, water cold and moist, and air hot and moist. He theorized that every metal was a combination of these four principles, two of them interior and two exterior. From this premise, it was reasoned that the transmutation of one metal into another could be affected by the rearrangement of its basic qualities. This change would presumably be mediated by a substance, which came to be called al-iksir in Arabic (from which the Western term elixir is derived). It is often considered to exist as a dry red powder (also known as al-Kibrit al-Ahmar الكبريت الأحمر—red sulphur) made from a legendary stone—the philosopher's stone.[6][7] Jabir's theory was based on the concept that metals like gold and silver could be hidden in alloys and ores, from which they could be recovered by the appropriate chemical treatment. Jabir himself is believed to be the inventor of aqua regia, a mixture of muriatic (hydrochloric) and nitric acids, one of the few substances that can dissolve gold (and which is still often used for gold recovery and purification).[citation needed]

In the 11th century, there was a debate among Muslim world chemists on whether the transmutation of substances was possible. A leading opponent was the Persian polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sina), who discredited the theory of transmutation of substances, stating, "Those of the chemical craft know well that no change can be effected in the different species of substances, though they can produce the appearance of such change."[8]

According to legend, the 13th-century scientist and philosopher Albertus Magnus is said to have discovered the philosopher's stone and passed it to his pupil, Thomas Aquinas, shortly before his death circa 1280. Magnus does not confirm he discovered the stone in his writings, but he did record that he witnessed the creation of gold by "transmutation".[9]

Renaissance to early modern period

Image
The Squared Circle: an alchemical symbol (17th century) illustrating the interplay of the four elements of matter symbolising the philosopher's stone

The 16th-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) believed in the existence of alkahest, which he thought to be an undiscovered element from which all other elements (earth, fire, water, air) were simply derivative forms. Paracelsus believed that this element was, in fact, the philosopher's stone.

The English philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in his spiritual testament Religio Medici (1643) identified the religious aspect of the quest for the philosopher's Stone when declaring:

The smattering I have of the Philosophers stone, (which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great deale of Divinity.

— (R.M.Part 1:38)[10]


A mystical text published in the 17th century called the Mutus Liber appears to be a symbolic instruction manual for concocting a philosopher's stone. Called the "wordless book", it was a collection of 15 illustrations.

In Buddhism and Hinduism

The equivalent of the philosopher's stone in Buddhism and Hinduism is the Cintamani.[11] It is also referred to[12] as Paras/Parasmani (Hindi: पारस/पारसमणि) or Paris (Marathi: परिस).

In Mahayana Buddhism, Chintamani is held by the bodhisattvas, Avalokiteshvara and Ksitigarbha. It is also seen carried upon the back of the Lung ta (wind horse) which is depicted on Tibetan prayer flags. By reciting the Dharani of Chintamani, Buddhist tradition maintains that one attains the Wisdom of Buddhas, is able to understand the truth of the Buddhas, and turns afflictions into Bodhi. It is said to allow one to see the Holy Retinue of Amitabha and his assembly upon one's deathbed. In Tibetan Buddhist tradition the Chintamani is sometimes depicted as a luminous pearl and is in the possession of several of different forms of the Buddha.[13]

Within Hinduism it is connected with the gods Vishnu and Ganesha. In Hindu tradition it is often depicted as a fabulous jewel in the possession of the Nāga king or as on the forehead of the Makara.[citation needed] The Yoga Vasistha, originally written in the 10th century AD, contains a story about the philosopher's stone.[14]

A great Hindu sage wrote about the spiritual accomplishment of Gnosis using the metaphor of the philosopher's stone. Saint Jnaneshwar (1275–1296) wrote a commentary with 17 references to the philosopher's stone that explicitly transmutes base metal into gold. The seventh century Siddhar Thirumoolar in his classic Tirumandhiram explains man's path to immortal divinity. In verse 2709 he declares that the name of God, Shiva is an alchemical vehicle that turns the body into immortal gold.

Properties

The most commonly mentioned properties are the ability to transmute base metals into gold or silver, and the ability to heal all forms of illness and prolong the life of any person who consumes a small part of the philosopher's stone.[15] Other mentioned properties include: creation of perpetually burning lamps,[15] transmutation of common crystals into precious stones and diamonds,[15] reviving of dead plants,[15] creation of flexible or malleable glass,[16] or the creation of a clone or homunculus.[17]

Names

Numerous synonyms were used to make oblique reference to the stone, such as "white stone" (calculus albus, identified with the calculus candidus of Revelation 2:17 which was taken as a symbol of the glory of heaven[18]), vitriol (as expressed in the backronym Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem), also lapis noster, lapis occultus, in water at the box, and numerous oblique, mystical or mythological references such as Adam, Aer, Animal, Alkahest, Antidotus, Antimonium, Aqua benedicta, Aqua volans per aeram, Arcanum, Atramentum, Autumnus, Basilicus, Brutorum cor, Bufo, Capillus, Capistrum auri, Carbones, Cerberus, Chaos, Cinis cineris, Crocus, Dominus philosophorum, Divine quintessence, Draco elixir, Filius ignis, Fimus, Folium, Frater, Granum, Granum frumenti, Haematites, Hepar, Herba, Herbalis, Lac, Melancholia, Ovum philosophorum, Panacea salutifera, Pandora, Phoenix, Philosophic mercury, Pyrites, Radices arboris solares, Regina, Rex regum, Sal metallorum, Salvator terrenus, Talcum, Thesaurus, Ventus hermetis.[19] Many of the medieval allegories for a Christ were adopted for the lapis, and the Christ and the Stone were indeed taken as identical in a mystical sense. The name of "Stone" or lapis itself is informed by early Christian allegory, such as Priscillian (4th century), who stated Unicornis est Deus, nobis petra Christus, nobis lapis angularis Jesus, nobis hominum homo Christus.[20] In some texts it is simply called 'stone', or our stone, or in the case of Thomas Norton's Ordinal, "oure delycious stone".[21] The stone was frequently praised and referred to in such terms.

It needs to be noted that philosophorum does not mean "of the philosopher" or "the philosopher's" in the sense of a single philosopher. It means "of the philosophers" in the sense of a plurality of philosophers.

Appearance

Image
Philosopher's stone as pictured in Atalanta Fugiens Emblem 21

Image
The first key of Basil Valentine, emblem associated with the 'Great Work' of obtaining the Philosopher's stone (Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine).

Descriptions of the Philosopher's Stone are numerous and various.[22] According to alchemical texts, the stone of the philosophers came in two varieties, prepared by an almost identical method: white (for the purpose of making silver), and red (for the purpose of making gold), the white stone being a less matured version of the red stone.[23] Some ancient and medieval alchemical texts leave clues to the physical appearance of the stone of the philosophers, specifically the red stone. It is often said to be orange (saffron colored) or red when ground to powder. Or in a solid form, an intermediate between red and purple, transparent and glass-like.[24] The weight is spoken of as being heavier than gold,[25] and it is soluble in any liquid, yet incombustible in fire.[26]

Alchemical authors sometimes suggest that the stone's descriptors are metaphorical.[27] The appearance is expressed geometrically in Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens. "Make of a man and woman a circle; then a quadrangle; out of this a triangle; make again a circle, and you will have the Stone of the Wise. Thus is made the stone, which thou canst not discover, unless you, through diligence, learn to understand this geometrical teaching."[28] Rupescissa uses the imagery of the Christian passion, telling us it ascends "from the sepulcher of the Most Excellent King, shining and glorious, resuscitated from the dead and wearing a red diadem...".[29]

Interpretations

The various names and attributes assigned to the philosopher's stone has led to long-standing speculation on its composition and source. Esoteric candidates have been found in metals, plants, rocks, chemical compounds, and bodily products such as hair, urine, and eggs. Justus von Liebig states that 'it was indispensable that every substance accessible... should be observed and examined'.[30] Alchemists once thought a key component in the creation of the stone was a mythical element named carmot.[31][32]

Esoteric hermetic alchemists may reject work on exoteric substances, instead directing their search for the philosopher's stone inward.[33] Though esoteric and exoteric approaches are sometimes mixed, it is clear that some authors "are not concerned with material substances but are employing the language of exoteric alchemy for the sole purpose of expressing theological, philosophical, or mystical beliefs and aspirations".[34] New interpretations continue to be developed around spagyric, chemical, and esoteric schools of thought.

Creation

The philosopher's stone is created by the alchemical method known as The Magnum Opus or The Great Work. Often expressed as a series of color changes or chemical processes, the instructions for creating the philosopher's stone are varied. When expressed in colors, the work may pass through phases of nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, and rubedo. When expressed as a series of chemical processes it often includes seven or twelve stages concluding in multiplication, and projection.

Art and entertainment

The philosopher's stone has been an inspiration, plot feature, or subject of innumerable artistic works: animations, comics, films, musical compositions, novels, and video games.

See also

• Angelicall Stone
• Azoth
• Biological transmutation
• Cintamani
• Cupellation
• Elixir of life
• Filius philosophorum
• Homunculus
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
• Midas
• Nicolas Flamel
• Nuclear transmutation
• Panacea (medicine)
• Synthesis of precious metals
• The Net (substance)
• Unobtainium
• FullMetal Alchemist

References

1. Heindel, Max, Freemasonry and Catholicism, ISBN 0-911274-04-9
2. Andrew Ede, Lesley B. Cormack. A History of Science in Society: from philosophy to utility. University of Toronto Press. p .66
3. Raphael Patai. The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book Princeton University Press, 1995. p.19
4. Stanton J. Linden. The alchemy reader: from Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton Cambridge University Press. 2003. p. 29.
5. Mark Haeffner. Dictionary of Alchemy: From Maria Prophetessa to Isaac Newton. Karnac Books, 2004. p.211
6. Ragai, Jehane (1992), "The Philosopher's Stone: Alchemy and Chemistry", Journal of Comparative Poetics, 12 (Metaphor and Allegory in the Middle Ages): 58–77
7. Holmyard, E. J. (1924), "Maslama al-Majriti and the Rutbatu'l-Hakim", Isis, 6 (3): 293–305, doi:10.1086/358238
8. Robert Briffault (1938). The Making of Humanity, p. 196-197.
9. Julian Franklyn and Frederick E. Budd. A Survey of the Occult. Electric Book Company. 2001. p. 28-30. ISBN 1-84327-087-0.
10. The Major Works ed C.A. Patrides Penguin 1977
11. Guénon, René (2004) (1962). Symbols of Sacred Science. Sophia Perennis, USA. ISBN 0-900588-78-0. pp. 277.
12. DICTIONARY.COM
13. R. A. Donkin, Beyond price: pearls and pearl-fishing : origins to the Age of Discoveries, p. 170
14. Venkatesananda, Swami (1984). The Concise Yoga Vasistha. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 346–353. ISBN 0-87395-955-8. OCLC 11044869.
15. Theophrastus Paracelsus. The Book of the Revelation of Hermes. 16th century
16. An unknown German Sage. A Very Brief Tract Concerning the Philosophical Stone. (unknown date, possibly 16th century)
17. Theophrastus Paracelsus. Of the Nature of Things. 16th century
18. Salomon Glass, Johann Gottfried Olearius, Philologia sacra: qua totius Vet. et Novi Testamenti Scripturae tum stylus et litteratura, tum sensus et genuinae interpretationis ratio et doctrina libris V expenditur ac traditur^, imp. J. Fred. Gleditschius (1743)
19. listed e.g. in W. Schneider, Lexikon alchemistisch-pharmazeutischer Symbole, Weinheim 1962.
20. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum t. XVIII, p. 24, cited by C. G. Jung in Roots of Consciousness.
21. Line 744 in Thomas Norton's The Ordinal of Alchemy by John Rediry. The Early English Text Society no. 272.
22. John Read "From Alchemy to Chemistry" p.29
23. A German Sage. A Tract of Great Price Concerning the Philosophical Stone. 1423.
24. John Frederick Helvetius. Golden Calf. 17th Century.
25. Anonymous. On the Philosophers' Stone. (unknown date, possibly 16th century)
26. Eirenaeus Philalethes. A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby. 1694 CE
27. Charles John Samuel Thompson. Alchemy and Alchemists. p.70
28. J.B. Craven. "Count Michael Maier". p.90
29. Leah DeVun. Prophecy, alchemy, and the end of time: John of Rupescissa in the late Middle Ages. Columbia University Press, 2009. p.118
30. John Read. From Alchemy to Chemistry London: G. Bell. 1957. p. 29.
31. Burt, A.L. 1885. The National Standard Encyclopedia: A Dictionary of Literature, the Sciences and the Arts, for Popular Use p. 150. Available online.
32. Sebastian, Anton. 1999. A Dictionary of the History of Medicine. p. 179. ISBN 1-85070-021-4. Available online.
33. Stanton J. Linden. The alchemy reader: from Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton Cambridge University Press. 2003. p. 16.
34. Eric John Holmyard. Alchemy Courier Dover Publications, 1990. p. 16.

Further reading

• Encyclopædia Britannica (2011). Philosophers' stone and Alchemy.
• Guiley, Rosemary (2006). The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy. Infobase Publishing, USA. ISBN 0-8160-6048-7. pp. 250–252.
• Myers, Richard (2003). The basics of chemistry. Greenwood Publishing Group, USA. ISBN 0-313-31664-3. pp. 11–12.
• Pagel, Walter (1982). Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. Karger Publishers, Switzerland. ISBN 3-8055-3518-X.
• Marlan, Stanton (2014). The Philosophers' Stone: Alchemical Imagination and the Soul's Logical Life. Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University.
• Thompson, Charles John Samuel (2002) [1932]. Alchemy and Alchemists. Chapter IX. Courier Dover Publications, USA. ISBN 0-486-42110-4. pp. 68–76.

External links

• "The Stone of The Philosophers" by Edward Kelly
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

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Charles S. Zimmerman
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

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Charles S. "Sasha" Zimmerman

Charles S. "Sasha" Zimmerman (1896–1983) was an American socialist activist and trade union leader, who was an associate of Jay Lovestone. Zimmerman had a career spanning five decades as an official of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. During the early 1970s, Zimmerman and Bayard Rustin were national Co-Chairmen the Socialist Party of America and the Social Democrats USA.

Biography

Early years


Charles S. Zimmerman was born of ethnic Jewish parents as Alexander Ubsushone in 1896. Alexander, known to family and friends as "Sasha," was born in the Ukrainian shtetl of Talna, then part of the Russian empire.[1] Sasha's father died when he was 7 and his widowed mother opened up a small grocery store and candy shop to support Sasha, his two siblings, and her mother.[2] Sasha was raised in large measure by his grandmother, a very orthodox observer of the Judaic religion.[1]

Sasha attended Talmud Torah for three years and had two years of Russian schooling, gaining admission to the Russian gymnasium, which already had its quota of Jewish students, only after a battle made with the assistance of a local doctor.[2]

At the age of 12, Sasha began transcribing communiques to help a young man he knew who was connected with the revolutionary movement in Odessa and Kiev.[2]

Zimmerman later recalled:

Apparently he didn't want his handwriting to be on it... I asked him questions... [He replied that] when you will grow up, you'll understand. But whether I understood or not, it was bound to leave some impression. There was the revolutionary movement in town ... and the kids knew all about it, and there were meetings.

All these things had an effect... At the age of eleven and twelve you were no longer a child.[3]


Sasha emigrated to the United States in 1913 at the age of 16, where he joined a sister in living with an uncle in New York City.[4] Sasha had his name changed to Charles Sasha Zimmerman by an official at Ellis Island upon arrival and he was thereafter known by this new moniker.[1]

Zimmerman first went to work as a retail clerk in a store near his apartment, but the hours of employment made it impossible for the boy to attend night school.[5] Charles quit and took a job in the burgeoning New York garment industry making knee-pants, a position which allowed him to continue his studies in the evening. Pay for the immigrant workers was low and conditions poor in the New York sweatshops. Within a year, the young Zimmerman had helped to form a union local and had led a three-week strike of his fellows for better wages.[1]

In 1914, Zimmerman found himself laid off his job. He was taken to work by his uncle, a factory foreman in Astoria, where he was taught carpentry, a job which netted him just $5.80 per week after car fare was paid.[6] After less than a year, Zimmerman again found himself unemployed, and he returned to work in the garment industry, working in a factory in New Jersey.[7]

Political career

In 1916, Zimmerman joined the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), and was elected chairman of his shop within a few weeks.[7]

In 1917, Zimmerman joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA).[7] He remained active in the radical labor movement for the rest of his life.

Zimmerman joined the Communist Party of America (CPA) at the time of its formation in 1919.[7] In the CPA, Zimmerman was a close associate of Jay Lovestone, who emerged as Executive Secretary of the organization after the sudden death of C.E. Ruthenberg in 1927.

From 1923 until 1958, except for one interlude, Zimmerman was prominent in the powerful Local 22 of the ILGWU in New York.[8] Zimmerman was stripped of his position due to his Communist political affiliation in 1925.[9]

During the period in which he was excluded from the ILGWU, Zimmerman was influential in establishing the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union, a dual union sponsored by the Communist Party's Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) and affiliated with the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU).[10] Zimmerman's expulsion from the Communist Party in 1929 led to his expulsion from the NTWIU in 1930,[10] paving his way for a return to ILGWU Local 22 shortly thereafter.[9]

Zimmerman was three times a candidate for elective political office, running in Bronx County for New York State Assembly in 1925, 1926, and 1928 on the ticket of the Workers (Communist) Party.[11]

Zimmerman was in Moscow on party business in association with RILU in May 1929 at the time of the decisive showdown between Lovestone and his associates with the Communist International.[12] The Comintern's was at the time attempting to solve the unceasing and bitter factional war in the American Communist Party by equalizing factional strength in the party leadership and reassigning factional leaders Lovestone and Alexander Bittelman to Comintern work abroad, decisions which the Lovestone majority group deeply resented. Zimmerman soon found himself expelled from the organization along with Lovestone and most of the others in his circle for their defiance of the Comintern's instructions.[13]

Zimmerman joined with Lovestone in establishing the Communist Party (Majority Group), an organization which underwent a series of name changes before eventually emerging as the Independent Labor League of America in the late 1930s. He was among the initial members of the governing National Council of the CPMG.[14]

In 1933, Zimmerman was asked by the retiring manager of Local 22 to run for his post. The election was held on April 6, 1933, with Zimmerman elected manager by a narrow margin, receiving 396 votes out of 825 cast in a three-way race.[15] Zimmerman remained in this position heading Local 22 of the ILGWU for the next 40 years, retiring only in the early 1970s.[15]

In 1934, Zimmerman was elected as a national vice-president of the ILGWU.[9] His election to such a prestigious position did not necessarily follow that Zimmerman had left his radical political orientation behind, however. Zimmerman was a bitter critic of the National Recovery Act of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the period, regarding it in particular and the New Deal in general as "a Fascist idea," and he was outspoken in holding the view, saying as much to a convention of the ILGWU.[16]

In the middle 1930s, with the ultra-radical "Third Period" at an end in favor of the coalition-building of the "Popular Front," the official Communists were persuaded to drop their dual union activities and to rejoin the ILGWU. Communist Party loyalists contested the "Lovestoneite" Zimmerman's leadership of Local 22 for a number of years, without success.[17]

As a national leader of the ILGWU, Zimmerman proved a loyal supporter of union head David Dubinsky, supporting the affiliation of the union to the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 and backing Dubinsky's decision to withdraw from the CIO in 1938 in order to return to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a decision made in the face of particularly bitter opposition from official Communists in the union.[18]

During the years of the Spanish Civil War, Zimmerman led a trade union campaign to aid the Spanish workers and civilian populations in Spain who suffered under shortages of food, clothing, and medicine. The initial impulse for this fund-raising work was an appeal that came to Dubinsky and the ILGWU from secretary general Walter Schevenels and president Walter M. Citrine of the International Federation of Trade Unions, which had established a Labor Solidarity Fund for the relief work. In response the ILGWU took the lead in founding the Trade Union Red Cross for Spain, with Zimmerman as chairman, Dubinsky as treasurer, and Alex Rose, of the Hat, Cap, and Millinery Workers Union, as secretary. Promoting the humanitarian effort as support to Spanish labor in the fight against fascism, the union leaders raised $125,000 by May 1937.[19] The relief organization was later renamed Trade Union Relief for Spain, and remained in existence through early 1939.[20]

By the end of the 1930s, Zimmerman had come over to lending the Roosevelt Administration and its New Deal policies his full sympathy and support. In January 1939 he sent a telegram to William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, accusing "conservative forces in Congress" of "organizing to prevent enactment of new social legislation" and of acting "to worsen the unemployment situation by cutting down WPA appropriations." Zimmerman called for a national conference bringing together representatives of the AFL, the CIO, and the railway brotherhoods as a means of establishing "united labor action" to defend the Rooseveltian policies.[21]

Along with his political allies David Dubinsky and Jay Lovestone, Zimmerman emerged as a prominent anti-communist "Cold War liberal" in the years after the conclusion of World War II. Early in 1946, Zimmerman was dispatched to Europe on behalf of the Jewish Labor Committee to make a survey of the political situation on the ground there. Zimmerman made his report on his trip in April 1946, detailing his perspective on Scandinavia, France, Poland, and Germany.[22] Zimmerman was particularly concerned that in the zone of divided Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, Communist unionists were receiving five times the amount of newsprint allotted to the Socialists, thus making them far better able to advance their views.[22]

In 1958, Zimmerman became the head of the Dress Waistmakers Union.[8] He also served as chairman of the Civil Rights Committee of the AFL-CIO.[8]

Death and legacy

Charles S. Zimmerman suffered a stroke in 1966, which blinded him but did not remove him from active political activity.[7] In 1972, he and Bayard Rustin were elected co-chairman of the Socialist Party -Democratic Socialist Federation, and supports its changing its name to Social Democrats, USA.[8]

After his retirement from union work in 1972, Zimmerman continued to live in New York City. He died on June 3, 1983, at the age of 86.[23] Zimmerman's son Paul is the famed football writer for the weekly magazine Sports Illustrated.

Zimmerman's papers are housed at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Footnotes

1. Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985; pg. 149.
2. Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, pg. 151.
3. Interview, Charles Zimmerman, Howe collection, YIVO, 1968, pp. 2-3. Cited in Geral Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, p. 151.
4. Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, pp. 151-152.
5. Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, pg. 152.
6. Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, pg. 153.
7. Sorin, The Prophetic Minority, pg. 154.
8. Sorin, The Prophetic Majority, pg. 155.
9. "Guide to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Charles S. Zimmerman papers, 1919-1958." Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library. Retrieved October 26, 2009.
10. Alexander, The Right Opposition, pg. 45.
11. Lawrence Kestenbaum (ed.), "Charles Zimmerman,", PoliticalGraveyard.com. Retrieved October 26, 2009.
12. Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981; pg. 22.
13. Instead of accepting the decisions of the American Commission of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, Lovestone and his associates issued a statement declaring that "the Executive Committee of the Communist International desires to destroy the [American] Central Committee and therefore follows the policy of legalizing the past factionalism of the opposition block and inviting its contiuation in the future." Cited in Alexander, The Right Opposition, pg. 23. Specific note that Zimmerman was among those expelled appears Ibid., pg. 28.
14. The Revolutionary Age, November 1, 1929. Cited in Alexander, The Right Opposition, pg. 35.
15. Alexander, The Right Opposition, pg. 46.
16. Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement.New York: New York University Press, 2005; pg. 100.
17. Alexander, The Right Opposition, pg. 47.
18. Alexander, The Right Opposition, pp. 47-48.
19. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement. p. 137.
20. Zimmerman's papers related to trade union relief efforts during the Spanish Civil War are contained in the Spanish Civil War Collection, RG 1477, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, N.Y.
21. "Zimmerman Calls for United Labor Front: New Congress Threatens Past Gains," Workers Age, vol. 8, no. 2 (January 14, 1939), pg. 1.
22. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue, pg. 224.
23. Joseph B. Treaster, Charles S. Zimmerman Dies at 86; Longtime Garment Union Leader," New York Times, June 5, 1983, section 1, pg. 32.

Publications

• American labor faces the future; the problems of trade unionism in the light of the San Francisco general strike. New York, Dressmakers union local 22, I.L.G.W.U. 1934
• The labor movement and the NRA: the standpoint of progressive unionism. New York, Dressmakers union local 22, I.L.G.W.U. 1934
• Our Union at work; Summary report of the executive board of Dressmakers Union, Local 22, I.L.G.W.U., for the year April 1933 to April 1934 New York, Dressmakers union local 22, I.L.G.W.U. 1934
• Report on the medical administration of sick benefits to Dressmakers' Union Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union for the year 1935. New York, Dressmakers union local 22, I.L.G.W.U. 1936
• Probable effect of the war on the New York women's garment industry and some recommendations: report by a special committee of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. New York: Jewish Labor Committee 1942
• In freedom 's cause. Report Antidiscrimination department Jewish Labor Committee [of the] 1957 Biennial Convention, Atlantic City, N.J. New York: Jewish Labor Committee 1957

External links

• "Guide to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Charles S. Zimmerman papers, 1919-1958 (bulk 1920-1945)." Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library. Collection Number: 5780/014. Retrieved October 26, 2009.
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Oct 03, 2018 3:15 am

Part 1 of 2

Boris Pasternak
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18

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This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Leonidovich and the family name is Pasternak.

Image
Boris Pasternak
Pasternak on a 1990 Soviet stamp
Born Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890
Moscow, Russian Empire
Died 30 May 1960 (aged 70)
Peredelkino, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Occupation Poet, writer
Citizenship Russian Empire (1890–1917)
Soviet Russia (1917–1922)
Soviet Union (1922–1960)
Notable works My Sister, Life, The Second Birth, Doctor Zhivago
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Literature
(1958)

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (|p|æ|s|t|ər|ˌ|n|æ|k) (29 January 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.

As a novelist, Pasternak is also known as the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel which takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR.[1] Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.[2]

Early life

Image
Boris Pasternak c. 1908

Image
Boris (left) with his brother Alex; painting by their father, Leonid Pasternak

Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February, into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family.[3] His father was the Post-Impressionist painter, Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist Isadore Kaufman and his wife. Pasternak had a younger brother Alex and sisters Lydia and Josephine. The family claimed to be descended on the paternal line from Isaac Abrabanel, the famous 15th-century Sephardic Jewish treasurer of Portugal.[4]

Early education

From 1904 to 1907 Boris Pasternak was the cloister-mate of Peter Minchakievich (1890–1963) in Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, located in West Ukraine. Minchakievich came from an Orthodox Ukrainian family and Pasternak came from a Jewish family. Some confusion has arisen as to Pasternak attending a military academy in his boyhood years. The uniforms of their monastery Cadet Corp were only similar to those of The Czar Alexander the Third Military Academy, as Pasternak and Minchakievich never attended any military academy. Most schools used a distinctive military looking uniform particular to them as was the custom of the time in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boyhood friends, they parted in 1908, friendly but with different politics, never to see each other again. Pasternak went to the Moscow Conservatory to study music (later Germany to study philosophy), and Minchakievich went to L'viv University (L'vov, L'wow) to study history and philosophy. The good dimension of the character Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago is based upon Peter Minchakievich. Several of Pasternak's characters are composites. After World War One and the Revolution, fighting for the Provisional or Republican government under Kerensky, and then escaping a Communist jail and execution, Minchakievich trekked across Siberia in 1917 and became an American citizen. Pasternak stayed in Russia.

In a 1959 letter to Jacqueline de Proyart, Pasternak recalled,

I was baptized as a child by my nanny, but because of the restrictions imposed on Jews, particularly in the case of a family which was exempt from them and enjoyed a certain reputation in view of my father's standing as an artist, there was something a little complicated about this, and it was always felt to be half-secret and intimate, a source of rare and exceptional inspiration rather than being calmly taken for granted. I believe that this is at the root of my distinctiveness. Most intensely of all my mind was occupied by Christianity in the years 1910–12, when the main foundations of this distinctiveness – my way of seeing things, the world, life – were taking shape...[5]


Shortly after his birth, Pasternak's parents had joined the Tolstoyan Movement. Novelist Leo Tolstoy was a close family friend, as Pasternak recalled, "my father illustrated his books, went to see him, revered him, and ...the whole house was imbued with his spirit."[6]

In a 1956 essay, Pasternak recalled his father's feverish work creating illustrations for Tolstoy's novel Resurrection.[7] The novel was serialized in the journal Niva by the publisher Fyodor Marx, based in St Petersburg. The sketches were drawn from observations in such places as courtrooms, prisons and on trains, in a spirit of realism. To ensure that the sketches met the journal deadline, train conductors were enlisted to personally collect the illustrations. Pasternak wrote,

My childish imagination was struck by the sight of a train conductor in his formal railway uniform, standing waiting at the door of the kitchen as if he were standing on a railway platform at the door of a compartment that was just about to leave the station. Joiner's glue was boiling on the stove. The illustrations were hurriedly wiped dry, fixed, glued on pieces of cardboard, rolled up, tied up. The parcels, once ready, were sealed with sealing wax and handed to the conductor.[7]


According to Max Hayward, "In November 1910, when Tolstoy fled from his home and died in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, Leonid Pasternak was informed by telegram and he went there immediately, taking his son Boris with him, and made a drawing of Tolstoy on his deathbed."[8]

Regular visitors to the Pasternak's home also included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Lev Shestov, Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak aspired first to be a musician.[9] Inspired by Scriabin, Pasternak briefly was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910 he abruptly left for the German University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp.

Life and Career

Olga Freidenberg


In 1910 Pasternak was reunited with his cousin, Olga Freidenberg (1890-1955). They had shared the same nursery but had been separated when the Freidenberg family moved to Saint Petersburg. They fell in love immediately but were never lovers. The romance however is made clear from their letters, Pasternak writing:

‘You do not know how my tormenting feeling grew and grew until it became obvious to me and to others. As you walked beside me with complete detachment, I could not express it to you. It was a rare sort of closeness, as if we two, you and I, were in love with something that was utterly indifferent to both of us, something that remained aloof from us by virtue of its extraordinary inability to adapt to the other side of life.'


The cousins' initial passion developed into a lifelong close friendship. From 1910 Pasternak and Freidenberg exchanged frequent letters, and their correspondence lasted over 40 years until 1954. The cousins last met in 1936.[10][11]

Ida Wissotzkaya

Image
Boris Pasternak in 1910, by his father Leonid Pasternak

Pasternak fell in love with Ida Wissotzkaya, a girl from a notable Moscow Jewish family of tea merchants, whose company Wissotzky Tea was the largest tea company in the world. Pasternak had tutored her in the final class of high school. He helped her prepare for finals. They met in Marburg during the summer of 1912 when Boris' father, Leonid Pasternak, painted her portrait.[12]

Although Professor Cohen encouraged him to remain in Germany and to pursue a Philosophy doctorate, Pasternak decided against it. He returned to Moscow upon the outbreak of World War I. His first book of poems was published later that year. In the aftermath, Pasternak proposed marriage to Ida. However, the Wissotzky family was disturbed by Pasternak's poor prospects and persuaded Ida to refuse him. She turned him down and he told of his love and rejection in the poem "Marburg" (1917):[12]

I quivered. I flared up, and then was extinguished.
I shook. I had made a proposal—but late,
Too late. I was scared, and she had refused me.
I pity her tears, am more blessed than a saint.


Another failed love affair in 1917 inspired the poems in his first book, My Sister, Life. His early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Immanuel Kant's philosophy. Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favourite poets such as Rilke, Lermontov, Pushkin and German-language Romantic poets.

During World War I, Pasternak taught and worked at a chemical factory in Vsevolodovo-Vilve near Perm, which undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later. Unlike the rest of his family and many of his closest friends, Pasternak chose not to leave Russia after the October Revolution of 1917. According to Max Hayward,

Pasternak remained in Moscow throughout the Civil War (1918–1920), making no attempt to escape abroad or to the White-occupied south, as a number of other Russian writers did at the time. No doubt, like Yuri Zhivago, he was momentarily impressed by the "splendid surgery" of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, but – again to judge by the evidence of the novel, and despite a personal admiration for Vladimir Lenin, whom he saw at the 9th Congress of Soviets in 1921 – he soon began to harbor profound doubts about the claims and credentials of the regime, not to mention its style of rule. The terrible shortages of food and fuel, and the depredations of the Red Terror, made life very precarious in those years, particularly for the "bourgeois" intelligentsia. In a letter written to Pasternak from abroad in the twenties, Marina Tsvetayeva reminded him of how she had run into him in the street in 1919 as he was on the way to sell some valuable books from his library in order to buy bread. He continued to write original work and to translate, but after about the middle of 1918 it became almost impossible to publish. The only way to make one's work known was to declaim it in the several "literary" cafes which then sprang up, or – anticipating samizdat – to circulate it in manuscript. It was in this way that My Sister, Life first became available to a wider audience.[13]


Image
Pasternak (second from left) in 1924, with friends including Lilya Brik, Sergei Eisenstein (third from left) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (centre)

When it finally was published in 1921, Pasternak's My Sister, Life revolutionised Russian poetry. It made Pasternak the model for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetayeva and others.

Following My Sister, Life, Pasternak produced some hermetic pieces of uneven quality, including his masterpiece, the lyric cycle Rupture (1921). Both Pro-Soviet writers and their White emigre equivalents applauded Pasternak's poetry as pure, unbridled inspiration.

In the late 1920s, he also participated in the much celebrated tripartite correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva.[14] As the 1920s wore on, however, Pasternak increasingly felt that his colourful style was at odds with a less educated readership. He attempted to make his poetry more comprehensible by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the Russian Revolution of 1905. He also turned to prose and wrote several autobiographical stories, notably "The Childhood of Luvers" and "Safe Conduct".

Image
Pasternak with Evgeniya Lurye and son

In 1922 Pasternak married Evgeniya Lurye (Евгения Лурье), a student at the Art Institute. The following year they had a son, Evgenii.

Evidence of Pasternak's support of still-revolutionary members of the leadership of the Communist Party as late as 1926 is indicated by his worshipful poem "In Memory of Reissner"[15] presumably written upon the shockingly premature death from typhus of legendary Bolshevik leader Larisa Reisner at age 30 in February of that year.

By 1927, Pasternak's close friends Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Aseyev were advocating the complete subordination of the arts to the needs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[16] In a letter to his sister Josephine, Pasternak wrote of his intentions to, "break off relations," with both of them. Although he expressed that it would be deeply painful, Pasternak explained that it could not be prevented. He explained,

They don't in any way measure up to their exalted calling. In fact, they've fallen short of it but – difficult as it is for me to understand – a modern sophist might say that these last years have actually demanded a reduction in conscience and feeling in the name of greater intelligibility. Yet now the very spirit of the times demands great, courageous purity. And these men are ruled by trivial routine. Subjectively, they're sincere and conscientious. But I find it increasingly difficult to take into account the personal aspect of their convictions. I'm not out on my own – people treat me well. But all that only holds good up to a point. It seems to me that I've reached that point.[17]


By 1932, Pasternak had strikingly reshaped his style to make it more understandable to the general public and printed the new collection of poems, aptly titled The Second Birth. Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book alienated the core of Pasternak's refined audience abroad, which was largely composed of anti-communist emigres.

In 1932 Pasternak fell in love with Zinaida Neuhaus, the wife of the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus. They both got divorces and married two years later.

He continued to change his poetry, simplifying his style and language through the years, as expressed in his next book, Early Trains (1943).

Stalin Epigram

In April 1934 Osip Mandelstam recited his "Stalin Epigram" to Pasternak. After listening, Pasternak told Mandelstam: "I didn't hear this, you didn't recite it to me, because, you know, very strange and terrible things are happening now: they've begun to pick people up. I'm afraid the walls have ears and perhaps even these benches on the boulevard here may be able to listen and tell tales. So let's make out that I heard nothing."[18]

On the night of 14 May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested at his home based on a warrant signed by NKVD boss Genrikh Yagoda. Devastated, Pasternak went immediately to the offices of Izvestia and begged Nikolai Bukharin to intercede on Mandelstam's behalf.

Soon after his meeting with Bukharin, the telephone rang in Pasternak's Moscow apartment. A voice from The Kremlin said, "Comrade Stalin wishes to speak with you."[18] According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak was struck dumb. "He was totally unprepared for such a conversation. But then he heard his voice, the voice of Stalin, coming over the line. The Leader addressed him in a rather bluff uncouth fashion, using the familiar thou form: 'Tell me, what are they saying in your literary circles about the arrest of Mandelstam?'" Flustered, Pasternak denied that there was any discussion or that there were any literary circles left in Soviet Russia. Stalin went on to ask him for his own opinion of Mandelstam. In an "eager fumbling manner" Pasternak explained that he and Mandelstam each had a completely different philosophy about poetry. Stalin finally said, in a mocking tone of voice: "I see, you just aren't able to stick up for a comrade," and put down the receiver.[18]

Great Purge

According to Pasternak, during the 1937 show trial of General Iona Yakir and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Union of Soviet Writers requested all members to add their names to a statement supporting the death penalty for the defendants. They demanded Pasternak's signature as well, but he refused to give it. Vladimir Stavski, the chairman of the Union, was terrified that he would be punished for Pasternak's dissent. The leadership of the Union travelled to Pasternak's dacha at Peredelkino and severely threatened the writer, who refused to sign the statement and returned to his dacha. Hearing this, Zinaida Pasternak, who was pregnant, was terribly upset, accusing him of risking the destruction of their family. Pasternak went to bed. He and Zinaida expected to be arrested that evening. They later learned that an NKVD agent was hiding in the bushes outside their window and wrote down every word they said to each other.[19]

Soon after, Pasternak appealed directly to Stalin. He wrote about his family's strong Tolstoyan convictions, which he still held dear. He declared that his own life was at the Leader's disposal. He said that he could not stand as a self-appointed judge of life and death. Pasternak was certain that he would be instantly arrested, but he was not.[19] Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off an execution list during the Great Purge. According to Pasternak, Stalin declared, "Do not touch this cloud dweller" (or, in another version, "Leave that holy fool alone!")[20]

Although Pasternak was never arrested by the Soviet secret police, his close friend Titsian Tabidze fell victim to the Great Purge. In an autobiographical essay published in the 1950s, Pasternak described the execution of Tabidze and the suicides of Marina Tsvetaeva and Paolo Iashvili as the greatest heartbreaks of his entire life.

Ivinskaya wrote, "I believe that between Stalin and Pasternak there was an incredible, silent duel."[21]

World War II

Pasternak was elated by the outbreak of war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. When the Luftwaffe began bombing Moscow, Pasternak immediately began to serve as a fire warden on the roof of the writer's building on Lavrushinski Street. According to Ivinskaya, he repeatedly helped to dispose of German bombs which fell on it.[22]

In 1943, Pasternak was finally granted permission to visit the soldiers at the front. He bore it well, considering the hardships of the journey (he had a weak leg from an old injury), and he wanted to go to the most dangerous places. He read his poetry and talked extensively with the active and injured troops.[22]

With the end of the war in 1945, the Soviet people expected to see the end of the devastation of Nazism, and hoped for the end of Stalin's Purges. But sealed trains began carrying large numbers of prisoners to the Soviet Gulags. Some were Nazi collaborators who had fought under General Andrey Vlasov, but most were ordinary Soviet officers and men. Pasternak watched as ex-POWs were directly transferred from Nazi Germany to Soviet concentration camps. White emigres who had returned due to pledges of amnesty were also sent directly to the Gulag, as were Jews from the Anti-Fascist Committee and other organizations. Many thousands of innocent people were incarcerated in connection with the Leningrad Affair and the so-called Doctor's Plot, while whole ethnic groups were deported to Siberia.[23]

Pasternak later said, "If, in a bad dream, we had seen all the horrors in store for us after the war, we should not have been sorry to see Stalin fall, together with Hitler. Then, an end to the war in favour of our allies, civilized countries with democratic traditions, would have meant a hundred times less suffering for our people than that which Stalin again inflicted on it after his victory."[24]

Olga Ivinskaya

In October 1946, the twice married Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya, a 34 year old single mother employed by Novy Mir. Deeply moved by her resemblance to his first love Ida Vysotskaya,[25] Pasternak gave Ivinskaya several volumes of his poetry and literary translations. Although Pasternak never left his wife Zinaida, he started an extramarital relationship with Ivinskaya that would last for the remainder of Pasternak's life. Ivinskaya later recalled, "He phoned almost every day and, instinctively fearing to meet or talk with him, yet dying of happiness, I would stammer out that I was "busy today." But almost every afternoon, toward the end of working hours, he came in person to the office and often walked with me through the streets, boulevards, and squares all the way home to Potapov Street. 'Shall I make you a present of this square?' he would ask."

She gave him the phone number of her neighbour Olga Volkova who resided below. In the evenings, Pasternak would phone and Volkova would signal by Olga banging on the water pipe which connected their apartments.[26]

When they first met, Pasternak was translating the verse of the Hungarian national poet, Sándor Petőfi. Pasternak gave his lover a book of Petőfi with the inscription, "Petőfi served as a code in May and June 1947, and my close translations of his lyrics are an expression, adapted to the requirements of the text, of my feelings and thoughts for you and about you. In memory of it all, B.P., 13 May 1948."

Pasternak later noted on a photograph of himself, "Petőfi is magnificent with his descriptive lyrics and picture of nature, but you are better still. I worked on him a good deal in 1947 and 1948, when I first came to know you. Thank you for your help. I was translating both of you."[27] Ivinskaya would later describe the Petőfi translations as, "a first declaration of love."[28]

According to Ivinskaya, Zinaida Pasternak was infuriated by her husband's infidelity. Once, when his younger son Leonid fell seriously ill, Zinaida extracted a promise from her husband, as they stood by the boy's sickbed, that he would end his affair with Ivinskaya. Pasternak asked Luisa Popova, a mutual friend, to tell Ivinskaya about his promise. Popova told him that he must do it himself. Soon after, Ivinskaya happened to be ill at Popova's apartment, when suddenly Zinaida Pasternak arrived and confronted her.

Ivinskaya later recalled,

But I became so ill through loss of blood that she and Luisa had to get me to the hospital, and I no longer remember exactly what passed between me and this heavily built, strong-minded woman, who kept repeating how she didn't give a damn for our love and that, although she no longer loved [Boris Leonidovich] herself, she would not allow her family to be broken up. After my return from the hospital, Boris came to visit me, as though nothing had happened, and touchingly made his peace with my mother, telling her how much he loved me. By now she was pretty well used to these funny ways of his.[29]


In 1948, Pasternak advised Ivinskaya to resign her job at Novy Mir, which was becoming extremely difficult due to their relationship. In the aftermath, Pasternak began to instruct her in translating poetry. In time, they began to refer to her apartment on Potapov Street as, "Our Shop."

On the evening of 6 October 1949, Ivinskaya was arrested at her apartment by the KGB. Ivinskaya relates in her memoirs that, when the agents burst into her apartment, she was at her typewriter working on translations of the Korean poet Won Tu-Son. Her apartment was ransacked and all items connected with Pasternak were piled up in her presence. Ivinskaya was taken to the Lubyanka Prison and repeatedly interrogated, where she refused to say anything incriminating about Pasternak. At the time, she was pregnant with Pasternak's child and had a miscarriage early in her ten-year sentence in the GULAG.

Upon learning of his mistress' arrest, Pasternak telephoned Liuisa Popova and asked her to come at once to Gogol Boulevard. She found him sitting on a bench near the Palace of Soviets Metro Station. Weeping, Pasternak told her, "Everything is finished now. They've taken her away from me and I'll never see her again. It's like death, even worse."[30]

According to Ivinskaya, "After this, in conversation with people he scarcely knew, he always referred to Stalin as a 'murderer.' Talking with people in the offices of literary periodicals, he often asked: 'When will there be an end to this freedom for lackeys who happily walk over corpses to further their own interests?' He spent a good deal of time with Akhmatova—who in those years was given a very wide berth by most of the people who knew her. He worked intensively on the second part of Doctor Zhivago."[30]

In a 1958 letter to a friend in West Germany, Pasternak wrote, "She was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a gruelling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life, and the fact that they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance."[31]

Translating Goethe

Pasternak's translation of the first part of Faust led him to be attacked in the August 1950 edition of Novy Mir. The critic accused Pasternak of distorting Goethe's "progressive" meanings to support "the reactionary theory of 'pure art'", as well as introducing aesthetic and individualist values. In a subsequent letter to the daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pasternak explained that the attack was motivated by the fact that the supernatural elements of the play, which Novy Mir considered, "irrational," had been translated as Goethe had written them. Pasternak further declared that, despite the attacks on his translation, his contract for the second part had not been revoked.[32]

Khrushchev thaw

When Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953, Olga Ivinskaya was still imprisoned in the Gulag, and Pasternak was in Moscow. Across the nation, there were waves of panic, confusion, and public displays of grief. Pasternak wrote, "Men who are not free... always idealize their bondage."[33]

After her release, Pasternak's relationship with Ivinskaya picked up where it had left off. Soon after he confided in her, "For so long we were ruled over by a madman and a murderer, and now by a fool and a pig. The madman had his occasional flights of fancy, he had an intuitive feeling for certain things, despite his wild obscurantism. Now we are ruled over by mediocrities."[34] During this period, Pasternak delighted in reading a clandestine copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm in English. In conversation with Ivinskaya, Pasternak explained that the pig dictator Napoleon, in the novel, "vividly reminded" him of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.[34]

Doctor Zhivago

Although it contains passages written in the 1910s and 1920s, Doctor Zhivago was not completed until 1956. Pasternak submitted the novel to Novy Mir, which refused publication due to its rejection of socialist realism.[35] The author, like his protagonist Yuri Zhivago, showed more concern for the welfare of individual characters than for the "progress" of society. Censors also regarded some passages as anti-Soviet, especially the novel's criticisms of Stalinism, Collectivisation, the Great Purge, and the Gulag.

Pasternak's fortunes were soon to change, however. In March 1956, the Italian Communist Party sent a journalist, Sergio D'Angelo, to work in the Soviet Union, and his status as a journalist as well as his membership in the Italian Communist Party allowed him to have access to various aspects of the cultural life in Moscow at the time. A Milan publisher, the communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, had also given him a commission to find new works of Soviet literature that would be appealing to Western audiences, and upon learning of Doctor Zhivago's existence, D'Angelo travelled immediately to Peredelkino and offered to submit Pasternak's novel to Feltrinelli's company for publication. At first Pasternak was stunned. Then he brought the manuscript from his study and told D'Angelo with a laugh, "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad."[36]

According to Lazar Fleishman, Pasternak was aware that he was taking a huge risk. No Soviet author had attempted to deal with Western publishers since the 1920s, when such behavior led the Soviet State to declare war on Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin. Pasternak, however, believed that Feltrinelli's Communist affiliation would not only guarantee publication, but might even force the Soviet State to publish the novel in Russia.[37]

In a rare moment of agreement, both Olga Ivinskaya and Zinaida Pasternak were horrified by the submission of Doctor Zhivago to a Western publishing house. Pasternak, however, refused to change his mind and informed an emissary from Feltrinelli that he was prepared to undergo any sacrifice in order to see Doctor Zhivago published.[38]

In 1957, Feltrinelli announced that the novel would be published by his company. Despite repeated demands from visiting Soviet emissaries, Feltrinelli refused to cancel or delay publication. According to Ivinskaya, "He did not believe that we would ever publish the manuscript here and felt he had no right to withhold a masterpiece from the world – this would be an even greater crime."[39] The Soviet government forced Pasternak to cable the publisher to withdraw the manuscript, but he sent separate, secret letters advising Feltrinelli to ignore the telegrams.[40]

Helped considerably by the Soviet campaign against the novel (as well as by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's secret purchase of hundreds of copies of the book as it came off the presses around the world – see "Nobel Prize" section below), Doctor Zhivago became an instant sensation throughout the non-Communist world upon its release in November 1957. In the State of Israel, however, Pasternak's novel was sharply criticized for its assimilationist views towards the Jewish people. When informed of this, Pasternak responded, "No matter. I am above race..."[41] According to Lazar Fleishman, Pasternak had written the disputed passages prior to Israeli independence. At the time, Pasternak had also been regularly attending Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy. Therefore, he believed that Soviet Jews converting to Christianity was preferable to assimilating into atheism and Stalinism.[42]

The first English translation of Doctor Zhivago was hastily produced by Max Hayward and Manya Harari in order to coincide with overwhelming public demand. It was released in August 1958, and remained the only edition available for more than fifty years. Between 1958 and 1959, the English language edition spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times' bestseller list.

Ivinskaya's daughter Irina circulated typed copies of the novel in Samizdat. Although no Soviet critics had read the banned novel, Doctor Zhivago was pilloried in the State-owned press. Similar attacks led to a humorous Russian saying, "I haven't read Pasternak, but I condemn him".[43]

During the aftermath of the Second World War, Pasternak had composed a series of poems on Gospel themes. According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak had regarded Stalin as a, "giant of the pre-Christian era." Therefore, Pasternak's Christian-themed poems were, "a form of protest."[44]

On 9 September 1958, the Literary Gazette critic Viktor Pertsov retaliated by denouncing, "the decadent religious poetry of Pasternak, which reeks of mothballs from the Symbolist suitcase of 1908–10 manufacture."[45] Furthermore, the author received much hate mail from Communists both at home and abroad. According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak continued to receive such letters for the remainder of his life.[46]

In a letter written to his sister Josephine, however, Pasternak recalled the words of his friend Ekaterina Krashennikova upon reading Doctor Zhivago. She had said, "Don't forget yourself to the point of believing that it was you who wrote this work. It was the Russian people and their sufferings who created it. Thank God for having expressed it through your pen."[47]

Nobel Prize

Image
Copy of the original Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago, covertly published by the CIA. The front cover and the binding identify the book in Russian; the back of the book states that it was printed in France.

According to Yevgeni Borisovich Pasternak, "Rumors that Pasternak was to receive the Nobel Prize started right after the end of World War II. According to the former Nobel Committee head Lars Gyllensten, his nomination was discussed every year from 1946 to 1950, then again in 1957 (it was finally awarded in 1958). Pasternak guessed at this from the growing waves of criticism in USSR. Sometimes he had to justify his European fame: 'According to the Union of Soviet Writers, some literature circles of the West see unusual importance in my work, not matching its modesty and low productivity…'"[48]

According to journalist Ivan Tolstoi, the British MI6 and the American CIA lent a hand to ensure that Doctor Zhivago was submitted to the Nobel Committee in the original Russian. According to Tolstoi, this was done so that Pasternak could win the Nobel prize and harm the international credibility of the Soviet Union. He repeats and elaborates upon Feltrinelli's claims that the CIA operatives had photographed a manuscript of the novel and secretly printed a small number of books in the Russian language.[49][50][40] More recently, Anna Sergeyeva-Klyatis wrote that the first Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago, which was a pirated version with numerous typographical errors and omissions, was actually initiated by the Central Association of Postwar Émigrées, in response to a growing demand among Russian émigrés.[51]

The issue of whether or not the CIA had a hand in creating the international controversy that led to Pasternak's winning the Nobel Prize was definitively settled on 11 April 2014 when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency released "nearly 100 declassified documents"[52] confirming that it had, in fact, undertaken a massive propaganda campaign to influence the Nobel Prize committee to consider Zhivago for the award, starting as early as 12 December 1957: "Dr. Zhivago should be published in a maximum number of foreign editions, for maximum free world discussion and acclaim and consideration for such honor as the Nobel prize" [sic][53] In order to turn Pasternak's novel into an international bestseller worthy of consideration for the Nobel Prize, the CIA purchased thousands of copies of the novel as they came off the presses throughout Europe. When in the summer of 1958 the Dutch publishing house of Mouton brought out an edition of Zhivago, the CIA secretly arranged to "obtain first thousand copies of the book off the press and of these send 500 copies to the Brussels Fair" (i.e., the World Fair held that summer in Brussels, Belgium).[54] In its announcement of the declassification of the Zhivago documents the CIA states that it also published "thousands" of copies of Zhivago and gave them out to Soviet tourists on holiday in Western Europe and had them smuggled into the Soviet Union: "After working secretly to publish the Russian-language edition in the Netherlands, the CIA moved quickly to ensure that copies of Doctor Zhivago were available for distribution to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. By the end of the Fair, 355 copies of Doctor Zhivago had been surreptitiously handed out, and eventually thousands more were distributed throughout the Communist bloc. [...] Subsequently, the CIA funded the publication of a miniature, lightweight paperback edition of Doctor Zhivago that could be easily mailed or concealed in a jacket pocket. Distribution of the miniature version began in April 1959."[55]


Meanwhile, Pasternak wrote to Renate Schweitzer[56] and his sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater.[57] In both letters, the author expressed hope that he would be passed over by the Nobel Committee in favour of Alberto Moravia. Pasternak wrote that he was wracked with torments and anxieties at the thought of placing his loved ones in danger.

On 23 October 1958, Boris Pasternak was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize. The citation credited Pasternak's contribution to Russian lyric poetry and for his role in, "continuing the great Russian epic tradition." On 25 October, Pasternak sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy: "Infinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed."[58] That same day, the Literary Institute in Moscow demanded that all its students sign a petition denouncing Pasternak and his novel. They were further ordered to join a "spontaneous" demonstration demanding Pasternak's exile from the Soviet Union.[59] On 26 October, the Literary Gazette ran an article by David Zaslavski entitled, Reactionary Propaganda Uproar over a Literary Weed.[60]

According to Solomon Volkov:

The anti-Pasternak campaign was organized in the worst Stalin tradition: denunciations in Pravda and other newspapers; publications of angry letters from, "ordinary Soviet workers," who had not read the book; hastily convened meetings of Pasternak's friends and colleagues, at which fine poets like Vladimir Soloukin, Leonid Martynov, and Boris Slutsky were forced to censure an author they respected. Slutsky, who in his brutal prose-like poems had created an image for himself as a courageous soldier and truth-lover, was so tormented by his anti-Pasternak speech that he later went insane. On October 29, 1958, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League, dedicated to the Komsomol's fortieth anniversary, its head, Vladimir Semichastny, attacked Pasternak before an audience of 14,000 people, including Khrushchev and other Party leaders. Semishastny first called Pasternak, "a mangy sheep," who pleased the enemies of the Soviet Union with, "his slanderous so-called work." Then Semichastny (who became head of the KGB in 1961) added that, "this man went and spat in the face of the people." And he concluded with, "If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did," because a pig, "never shits where it eats." Khrushchev applauded demonstratively. News of that speech drove Pasternak to the brink of suicide. It has recently come to light that the real author of Semichastny's insults was Khrushchev, who had called the Komsomol leader the night before and dictated his lines about the mangy sheep and the pig, which Semichastny described as a, "typically Khrushchevian, deliberately crude, unceremoniously scolding."[61]


Furthermore, Pasternak was informed that, if he traveled to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Medal, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union. As a result, Pasternak sent a second telegram to the Nobel Committee: "In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this undeserved distinction which has been conferred on me. Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss."[62] The Swedish Academy announced: "This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place."[63]

According to Yevgenii Pasternak, "I couldn't recognize my father when I saw him that evening. Pale, lifeless face, tired painful eyes, and only speaking about the same thing: 'Now it all doesn’t matter, I declined the Prize.'"[48]
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