Two Revolutionaries

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
 

Register

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

In his great work, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge writes about the “psychosis of power.” This class will focus on the evolution of the absolutist, totalitarian “mind” through the lens of the life of two important participants of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution who both sought to understand this “psychosis.” Victor Serge and Isaac Nachman Steinberg, one a Russian, the other an observant Jew. Serge (aka, Viktor Lvovich Kibalchik; 1890-1947) was born in Brussels to Russian parents. An Anarchist by temperament and education, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1919. Expelled from the Party in 1927/28 for joining Trotsky’s Opposition, he was imprisoned in 1928 and again in 1933 to 1936. His Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941, perhaps his greatest work, provides unique—often astonishing—insights into the times in which he lived, the movements for which he fought, into himself and his many colleagues. His vision of a just and equitable world in a time of extremism and crisis is especially valuable today.

I.N. Steinberg (1888-1957) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Daugavpils, Latvia. He studied law at Moscow University and became a Socialist Revolutionary elected to the Constituent Assembly—the ruling government body after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, March 15, 1917. From Dec. 1917 to March 1918, Steinberg was Commissar of Justice in Lenin’s new Bolshevik government but resigned in protest of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk and was arrested in 1919. In 1923 he fled Russia after learning of an assassination plot against him and settled in Berlin. In 1933, he fled to London and became one of the co-founders of the Freeland League, an organization formed to help displaced and threatened Jews find a homeland. He came to America after the War, became a member of the YIVO board of trustees and gave YIVO his extensive and extraordinary archive. Leo Steinberg, the art critic and scholar, was his son. We will read his memoir In the Workshop of the Revolution, a deeply personal, brilliant account of the revolution and the evolution of the doomed Soviet experiment.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase a copy of Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Purchase). All other course materials will be provided digitally by the instructor through Canvas.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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