Skip Navigation

a public event

Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial

CEES Book Discussion with author Igal Halfin

Thursday, May 18, 2006
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
UCLA
6275 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095

The Center for European and Eurasian Studies invites the public to a discussion of the forthcoming book, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial, with author, Professor Igal Halfin, Associate Professor of History, Tel Aviv University. The discussant for the talk will be Professor Arch J. Getty, History, UCLA.

About the book (from Harvard University Press, 2003):

In this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the demands of the Party.

Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as helplessly flawed.

Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge.

Cost: The lecture is free and open to the public.

For more information please contact

Amanda Mountain
Tel: 310-825-4060
amountain@international.ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Eurasian Studies, Department of History