The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals And The Soviet State 1917 To The Present
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
What happens to the life of the mind when the state decides it owns it? The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State 1917 to the Present chronicles the turbulent, often tragic relationship between Russian intellectuals and the Soviet regime across seven decades, tracing how thinkers, writers, and artists navigated — and were consumed by — the immense machinery of ideological power. Boris Kagarlitsky, himself a dissident who was imprisoned under Brezhnev, brings an unflinching insider's authority to this sweeping historical account, mapping the shifting currents of conformity, collaboration, resistance, and survival that defined intellectual life from the Bolshevik Revolution through to the late Soviet era. Translated by Brian Pearce, the work presents a richly textured analysis that sits at the intersection of political history, cultural criticism, and social theory. Kagarlitsky argues with passionate precision that the Soviet intelligentsia was never a monolithic bloc of either complicity or heroic dissent, but rather a fractured, contradictory stratum caught between the demands of power and the imperatives of conscience. Drawing on a formidable breadth of Soviet cultural and political history, this is a landmark work of socialist thought — one that leaves the reader asking what it truly means to think freely under a state determined to make thinking its own.
Author: Boris Kagarlitsky
Format: Hardback
Genre: Politics & law
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
What happens to the life of the mind when the state decides it owns it? The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State 1917 to the Present chronicles the turbulent, often tragic relationship between Russian intellectuals and the Soviet regime across seven decades, tracing how thinkers, writers, and artists navigated — and were consumed by — the immense machinery of ideological power. Boris Kagarlitsky, himself a dissident who was imprisoned under Brezhnev, brings an unflinching insider's authority to this sweeping historical account, mapping the shifting currents of conformity, collaboration, resistance, and survival that defined intellectual life from the Bolshevik Revolution through to the late Soviet era. Translated by Brian Pearce, the work presents a richly textured analysis that sits at the intersection of political history, cultural criticism, and social theory. Kagarlitsky argues with passionate precision that the Soviet intelligentsia was never a monolithic bloc of either complicity or heroic dissent, but rather a fractured, contradictory stratum caught between the demands of power and the imperatives of conscience. Drawing on a formidable breadth of Soviet cultural and political history, this is a landmark work of socialist thought — one that leaves the reader asking what it truly means to think freely under a state determined to make thinking its own.