Breaking with Communism: The Intellectual Odyssey of Bertam D. Wolfe Tapa dura - 1990

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Bertram Wolfe (1896-1977) was the pre-eminent U.S. historian of Soviet Russia and author of the classis Three Who Made a Revolution, a triple biography of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. His autobiography, A Life in Two Centuries, ends around 1937-1939, after he has related how his opposition to World War I led him to become an early admirer of V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, how he helped create communist parties in the United States and Mexico, how he was expelled by Joseph Stalin in 1929, and how during the next decade he hoped for a reconciliation with Stalin. Wolfe's account breaks off, however, before he could explain how he reached the conclusion that Soviet communism, which he had once idealized and defended, would destroy human liberty if not opposed.

Breaking With Communism documents the second half of Wolfe's life, drawing from his papers in the Hoover Institution Archives. This volume, consisting chiefly of Wolfe's letters from 1939 on and supplemented by unpublished speeches and writings, illuminates his struggle to uncover the truth about the history of Soviet Russia and his anguish over renouncing his earlier allegiances not only to Lenin, but to Karl Marx as well. At a time when intellectuals in Eastern Europe and China are going through the same painful, soul-searching process, this book is especially timely and insightful.

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