Historian’s research into a Moscow residence for the communist elite shows reading of key Bolshevik texts falling off among the young – sowing seeds of counterrevolution
The Communist party elite and their families eschewed Soviet texts on their bedside tables for the works of western writers such as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and even Oscar Wilde, according to an in-depth study by the historian Yuri Slezkine.
Researching Moscow’s House of Government, a huge apartment block where hundreds of top communist officials lived with their families in the 1930s before Stalin’s Great Purges, Slezkine conducted dozens of interviews, as well as delving through archive diaries and letters. He discovered that far from focusing on the writings of Marx and Engels for their reading, the Bolsheviks and their children preferred expressly anti-revolutionary works by western authors such as Dickens, Defoe, Shakespeare, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, Kipling and Wilde.
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