 | The Soviet Mind Subjects: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Essays.; HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism & Socialism.; Politics and culture; Communism; Arts; "Berlin's great powers of observation combine with his great knowledge and literary gifts to provide us with a fascinating series of insights." --Geoffrey Riklin George Kennan, the architect of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, called Isaiah Berlin "the patron saint among the commentators of the Russian scene." In The Soviet Mind , Berlin proves himself worthy of that accolade. Although the essays in this book were originally written to explore tensions between Soviet communism and Russian culture, the thinking about the Russian mind that emerges is as relevant today under Putin's post-communist Russia as it was when this book first appeared more than a decade ago. This Brookings Classic brings together Berlin's writings about the Soviet Union. Among the highlights are accounts of Berlin's meetings with Russian writers in the aftermath of the war; a celebrated memorandum written for the British Foreign Office in 1945 about the state of the arts under Stalin; Berlin's account of Stalin's manipulative "artificial dialectic"; portraits of Pasternak and poet Osip Mandel'shtam; Berlin's survey of Russian culture based on a visit in 1956; and a postscript reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and other events in 1989. Henry Hardy prepared the essays for publication; his introduction describes their history. In his revised foreword, Brookings' Strobe Talbott, a longtime expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, relates the essays to Berlin's other work. The essays and other pieces in The Soviet Mind --including a new essay, "Marxist versus Non-Marxist Ideas in Soviet Policy"--represent Berlin at his most brilliant and are invaluable for policymakers, students, and anyone interested in Russian politics and thought--past, present, and future. Philosopher, political theorist, and essayist, Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 to Russian-speaking Jewish parents in Latvia. Reared in Latvia and later in Russia, Berlin developed a strong Russian-Jewish identity, having witnessed both the Social-Democratic and the Bolshevik Revolutions. At the age of 12, Berlin moved with his family to England, where he attended prep school and then St. Paul's. In 1928, he went up as a scholar to Corpus Christi College in Oxford. After an unsuccessful attempt at the Manchester Guardian, Berlin was offered a position as lecturer in philosophy at New College. Almost immediately, he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls. During this time at All Souls, Berlin wrote his brilliant biographical study of Marx, titled Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939), for the Home University Library. Berlin continued to teach through early World War II, and was then sent to New York by the Ministry of Information, and subsequently to the Foreign Office in Washington, D.C. It was during these years that he drafted several fine works regarding the changing political mood of the United States, collected in Washington Despatches 1941-1945 (1981). By the end of the war, Berlin had shifted his focus from philosophy to the history of ideas, and in 1950 he returned to All Souls. In 1957, he was elected to the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, delivering his influential and best-known inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty. Some of his works include Liberty, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, Flourishing: Selected Letters 1928 - 1946, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, and Unfinished Dialogue, Prometheus. Berlin died in Oxford on November 5, 1997. (Bowker Author Biography) |
