The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder

Today, as we confront the social and political upheaval that has led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a deeper understanding of Russia's turbulent past is more essential than ever. In this fascinating book, Russian history unfolds as a "continuous history of political murder" as the author, Helene Carrere d'Encausse, focuses on this dramatic theme from its origins in Kievan Rus to the threshold of the Gorbachev era.
Since the eleventh century - when dynastic murder was used to settle questions of inheritance and succession in Kiev - through the regimes of Stalin and Brezhnev, there has been a tragic relation between politics, violence, and terror. The Russian Syndrome's riveting narrative not only brings to life extraordinary personalities and events - Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Bakunin, Rasputin, Lenin, the Stalinist terror, for example - but also serves as the framework for comparing and contrasting Russian historical patterns with those of Western Europe. Demonstrating in vivid detail the continuity and force of recurrent historical patterns that link the Soviet era with its prerevolutionary past, d'Encausse shows how terror and political violence, used by the tsars to consolidate their power and to unify the state, became the instruments of totalitarian successors as well as of those revolutionaries who aimed to destroy the state and bring about radical social and political change.
Exploring the beliefs, ideology, and political culture of monarchs, dictators, revolutionaries, and reformers, this provocative and timely work illuminates the complex and traumatic course of Russian history as it sheds light on the Soviet state's enigmatic future.