I’ve mentioned before that one of the most formative and important courses I ever took in college—or anywhere—was called “Russian Intellectual History.” I signed up not because I was so fascinated by the subject itself (although I always liked Russian literature), but because I’d been told it was an interesting course and the professor was good.

The person who told me that didn’t steer me wrong:

It was there I learned””without anyone ever telling me directly””that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good. I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.

Lately I’ve been slogging through a very long book first published in 1997 and called A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. When I say “slogging” I’m referring to the book’s length: it’s about 800 pages long, and I’m only around page 130. I may put it down before I get to the end, but already it’s been a fascinating read that illuminates much and reminds me of that long-ago college course in its harmonic resonances with 20th and 21st Century America.

For example, we have:

Guilt was the psychological inspiration of the [Russian] revolution. Nearly all of these radical intellectuals were acutely conscious of their wealth and privilege. ‘We have come to realise’ the radical thinker Nicolai Mikhailovsky wrote, ‘that our awareness of the universal truth could only have been reached at the cost of the age-old suffering of the people. We are the people’s debtors and this debt weighs down on our conscience.’ As the children of the noblemen brought up by serf domestics on the estate, many of them felt a special personal sense of guilt, since, as Max Raeff has pointed out, these “little masters” had usually been allowed to treat their serf nannies and ‘uncles’ (whose job it had been to play with them) with cruel contempt. Later in life thee conscience-stricken nobles would seek to repay their debt to ‘the people’ by serving them in the revolution. If only, they thought, they could bring about the people’s liberation, then their own original sin—that of being born into privilege—would be redeemed. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was dominated by the theme of repentance for the sin of privilege.

The only thing missing here is “white privilege”—because of course in Russia virtually all the players were white, both the serfs/ex-serfs and their masters.

The above quote from the book doesn’t cover the motivation of all the Russian revolutionaries, of course; not by a longshot (although the book does; it’s nothing if not comprehensive). But it was a sizeable subgroup that formed a large portion of the intellectual and emotional engine that drove a revolution that led to untold suffering for both the Russian people and the inhabitants of the unfortunate “satellite” countries that mother Russia appropriated in its iteration as the USSR.

[NOTE: I plan to offer other quotes from the book from time to time.]

‘