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Jochen Hellbeck Revolution on my mind. Writing a diary under Stalin. Harvard University Press Cambridge, MA, London 2006. XI, 436 S., Abb. ISBN: 0-674-02174-6.
It is uncommon for historians to start talking about a book an entire decade before it actually appears. It is even rarer if the volume then lives up to the resultant expectations, as Jochen Hell-beck's investigation into Soviet diaries of the 1930s does. When, in 1996, he first published his ideas on the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi in the pages of this journal (vol. 44 [1996], pp. 344-373) he became an instant celebrity among Stalinism scholars. Not only did he present an intriguing new source, but he also offered a very strong reading of this evidence about how Stalinism felt from the inside. Throwing the usual caution of the historian overboard, discarding the deeply ingrained rhetoric of "on the one hand/ on the other", which passes as objectivity in scholarly discourse, he presented an interpretation as refreshing as it was radical. Soviet citizens, Hellbeck maintained, even those who were victimized by the regime, believed deeply in Soviet socialism; they worked hard to "fashion" their "Stalinist souls" in attempting to belong to the revolutionary polity on its march to the future. The private was political and the regime inscribed in the individual psyche. There was no "outside," no place to retreat, no possibility to oppose or even resist...