REVIEWS
Bromwich, David & Pachter, Henry & Mills, Nicolaus & Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs & T., E.
BUKHARIN AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, 1888-1938, by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 495 pp. $15. Among the fathers of the Great October Revolution, the...
...PROSECUTOR: You believed that you would be able to preserve your independence...
...But more than a picture is needed...
...This is contrary to the notion that the Bolsheviks were banking on revolution in Europe...
...It strikes me that a full account of my work ing retreat in the country sounds like a Phyllis McGinley joke...
...The quotations in Historical Materialism are mostly from 18th-century materialists— and may even have been gleaned from Plekhanov...
...Suzanne LaFollette, writing in 1926, observed: Those anxious critics who protest that women have got more freedom than is good for Society make the mistake of supposing that Society can exist only if its organization remains unchanged...
...Seelye is a gifted writer and, in many ways, he has accomplished what Philip Roth set out to do some 586 BOOKS years ago...
...PROSECUTOR: Why was the military organization to open the front...
...Fortunately The Great School Wars is so accomplished and important a narrative that even these shortcomings are not fatal...
...Perhaps the failure of revolution in the West caused him to accept a half-revolution in one country...
...Feminists stress today, as Charlotte Perkins Gilmore and others stressed earlier in our history, that even women's work in the home is of economic value...
...BOOKS Bukharin needed spiritual support...
...Isn't that exactly the attitude he later on had toward the Party...
...Allegedly Bukharin told Nikolaevsky: One is saved by the faith that development isgoing forward...
...It is the political struggle for control of the New York City schools that most concerns her, and her book revolves around four wars for control of the schools...
...In 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams, asking that In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors...
...Stanton admired her father's intellect but suffered from his evaluation of her...
...I do not believe in psychoanalyzing a subject dead 35 years, or in spreading out a statesman's youthful poems before his embarrassed admirers...
...Writing to a cousin about "scourgings" from her father, she commented, I cannot tell you how deep the iron entered my soul...
...THE EDITORS FORT Dix STOCKADE: OUR PRISON CAMP NEXT DOOR, by Joan Crowell...
...some money from her disapproving father (when he wasn't cutting her off from it...
...Jokes apart, I wonder whether an admiring biographer must suppress information that is of a very personal nature but may help others to understand better what happened in a political crisis...
...Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writer and theorist, bore several children and applauded motherhood, yet she was the radical of a duo who organized the first women's rights association, and coedited the first history of women's suffrage...
...To think that all in me of which my father would have felt a proper pride 3 Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Bibliography (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972...
...Yet in such books as Michael Gold's Jews Without Money and Leonard Covello's The Heart is the Teacher, there are at least adult recollections of being a child in the New York public schools, and at present there is a wealth of writing by children about the city's public schools—with much of it, like the materials in Herbert Kohl's 36 Children, invaluable reading...
...Schneir's volume first made me aware of the pleas of Abigail Adams and the black suffragette, Sojourner Truth, and of others whose words reappear at greater length in Rossi's book...
...paper, 1966), a novel prophetically apt in more than its title...
...In the study Imperialism and World Economy (which appeared before Lenin's better known Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism), Bukharin announced that capitalism would break up, not in the most advanced countries but "where the link of its chain is weakest": in the colonies...
...Prior to The Great School Wars, no modern or comprehensive account of the New York City public schools existed...
...it is different...
...It has rained for three days...
...1 The arts also flourished under Bukharin's leadership, the biographers claim, or had not yet been totally brought into line, and they also quote the many visitors who have described Bukharin's humaneness, his help in easing Mensheviks out of the country, his easy-going ways, his overall "lovable" nature—which also is attested to in Lenin's "Testament...
...But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.— This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy...
...Nevertheless, the bond between the two men was indissoluble, and in Lenin's last days Bukharin was closer to him than any other Bolshevik...
...ORDINARILY WOMEN TODAY seem to be more aware of both the formal and informal obstacles to autonomy in private and occupational spheres than women did in the 228-year period Rossi covers in her book: from Adams to de Beauvoir...
...his "bill of rights" was more useless than a fig leaf for the enormous crimes it was supposed to cover...
...She speaks, for example, of the New York public schools in the period from 1842 to 1896 as being "directly controlled by the people...
...THERE ARE INSIGHTS in Rossi's volume that go beyond the rediscovery of problems we associate with the feminist cause...
...the European parties were "bolshevized...
...Rossi's analysis is directed not only to biog raphy but to the integrated context in which these few social philosophers and commentators wrote, spoke, and organized feminist sentiment...
...They may be as dangerous now as Marx's "early writings" were in Bukharin's own time...
...Rossi's book has longer comments and selections...
...In a book that frightened Lenin, The Economics of Transformation, Bukharin then explained that capitalism had organized its production in undesirable ways...
...And 5 Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (NewYork: Atheneum, 1973...
...BOOKS 581 Admittedly, not all men are protected, but there is a kind of privacy they are permitted, across class and culture, to ponder and experiment...
...What these women wanted was freedom and dignity, economic independence— in short, what the woman's movement is about today...
...nor have the conditions that create those needs...
...An 1896 law abolishing the ward system and dividing control of the schools among a 21member Central Board appointed by the mayor and the Board of Superintendents, whose members the Central Board appointed and who, as professional educators, were expected to do the hiring of teachers and set educational policy within the schools...
...Nevertheless there is humor in Alger's fiction, also of the Tom Sawyer variety...
...Much as one would like to sympathize with many of the causes he stood for, one cannot but agree with his last self-evaluation, in his final speech at the Moscow Trial: "My life has become an absolute vacuity...
...The early feminists dug deep into the social fabric...
...Lenin, Lukacs, and Gramsci agreed that Bukharin did not understand much about philosophy...
...Fanny Wright also saw the importance of autonomy...
...The mind too has only a foreground, when it can speak in a language of things too numerous to mention...
...This view had come to Bukharin from Slavophile traditions...
...Alice Rossi's anthology of The Feminist Papers informs me that a number of major feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Frederick Engels and Simone de Beauvoir have made that observation as well, each in their own way...
...Seelye's defeat is an honorable one since it is shared by Nathanael West, who also took Alger for his model in writing the remarkable fantasy entitled A Cool Million...
...We are in the presence of a human being comprised utterly of his own superego...
...BUKHARIN: I used the word do/then [which may mean either "must" or "ought to" in Russian] with the meaning of the German word miissen [being forced to] and not in the sense of sollen [ought to...
...With no fear of being paradoxical one might say that "What Is to Be Done...
...The imperious Trotsky, commander of the army, seemed to be the most likely candidate for such a role, while the insignificant Stalin still seemed to be mired in the insignificant post of secretary general...
...Schneir's book, with its perceptive introduc tions, was intentionally brief...
...Seelye is good at names: the home town of Poco Lobo, little wolf...
...PROSECUTOR: In Russian do/then means dolzlien...
...After this ordeal it was natural for the Bolsheviks to seek shelter in the Party and to endow it with that transcendence each of them individually was lacking: no man can abandon principle, but the Party can survive tactical retreats...
...I shall quote a few lines from Bukharin's interrogation (spring 1938) : PROSECUTOR: So you say Tomsky [a codefendant, former head of the trade unions and a close friend of Bukharin's] intended to open the front to the Fascist invasion...
...PROSECUTOR: Was it to open the front from the point of view of [Marshall Tukhachevsky...
...I never felt more keenly the degradation of my sex...
...And the people grow, becomingstronger, building a new society...
...had that not been the case, we would have dissolved the bloc [of oppositionists...
...THE GREAT SCHOOL WARS: NEW YORK CITY, 1805-1973, by Diane Ravitch...
...The whole process of election narrows into gaining recognition from a series of patrons...
...Conscience on the other hand is foreign...
...Bukharin had no home but the Party...
...When it comes to community control, on the other hand, Ravitch is often more loyal to her pendulum theory of the way New York schools have shifted between local and centralized control than to the underlying facts of the case...
...But there was more to it: Bukharin told both Denicke in 1923 and Nikolaevsky in 1936 that the Bolsheviks had not expected to win the civil war...
...The Stanton family's solution supports a view that feminists, as well as the effective personnel of the EEOC, and other minority rights activists have advocated for some time: that attitudes may follow behavior...
...There, for the first time in my adult life, I was able to be truly private...
...I not only need locks on my study door but in my mind...
...Charming...
...He disregarded Trotsky's warnings about the bureaucratic degeneracy of the Party and voted against publication of Lenin's last articles, which expressed concern about arbitrary government...
...They were not alike in personal style or life-style...
...Is your speech to be exclusively on the point of educating the sexes together, or as to the best manner of educating women...
...New York: Columbia University Press...
...Although Susan Anthony's father wanted his daughters as well as his sons trained to be self-supporting, and encouraged her views on social reforms, one wonders if that would have sustained her effort if she had not had an intimate intellectual and political association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton for over 50 years...
...Nigel Nicolson's new book describing the marriage of his parents, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, indicates that each felt the other was "there," yet they often were together only on weekends and each had intimate attachments to others at various points in their lives...
...True: he had obtained a fair trial for the Social Revolutionaries accused of high BOOKS crimes against the state—but that had been demanded by representatives of the Second International, with whom he was conducting negotiations about a possible merger...
...but the national leadership of a colonial nation or the Communist party of the Soviet Union would also be able to use such an instrument for their purposes...
...I have been told that after the civil war he developed a phobia that prevented him from crossing Red Square unaided...
...One tends to read Virginia Woolf, but turns aside from the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilmore or Suzanne LaFol lette, believing they must be antiquated...
...We ought to learn that revelation does not insure revolution...
...How many of them, like that vendor, are subtle grotesques...
...School is out and I need not meet with a hundred-odd students three times a week for classes, or attend conferences, or spend hours weekly in departmental committee meetings...
...The New Economic Policy, which demanded the cooperation of other classes and gave the peasants a measure of economic independence, did not bring greater political freedom to any class, not even to the Communists themselves...
...It seems ludicrous that in spite of the chil dren, the distractions, the small uncumulative pieces of time women can carve out in the schedule of their days, men in power still regard them as threats to their monopoly of the crea 582 tive spheres and centers of power, and contrive and collude to keep them down...
...But it is the power of the call, which I suspect has been underplayed in analyses of women's inactivity in the intellectual and political realm...
...The result is a picture in which school administrators are seen without the means of meeting the political demands made upon them...
...Given a character, however, who must be entirely impure of heart, this is the necessary sacrifice, in return for which we have the spectacle of an ascent that looks breathtaking after the fashion of every rogue's progress...
...It is tempting to play the patron and hold out aid and comfort: he will do the same, will he not, for boy scouts and returned veterans...
...Mary Wollstonecraft's first published work was a collection of essays entitled "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters," written in 1786 to meet the rent on a building in which she ran a school...
...He was allowed to be Stalin's spokesman as editor of Izvestia...
...In its sixth decade, the Russian revolution no longer appears to us as the ignition spark of a worldwide proletarian October, as it did to Lenin and Trotsky, but as the first in a series of national, anticolonial wars of liberation, of revolutions not so much against capitalism as against Western domination, with Russia leading the "Asian" countercrusade...
...Bukharin's epistemology is a naive realism...
...Unhappily, Mr...
...Lowy agrees with this evaluation, and Boris Nikolaevsky, the Menshevik writer, whom Bukharin met in 1936 when he was in Paris on business, provides another clue...
...In the final part of her narrative, Ravitch moves directly into the present with an analysis of the 1969 Decentralization Act through which locally elected community school boards were given new authority over curriculum, the right to choose superintendents, and, in certain cases, leeway to select teachers who were not on the competitive eligibility list...
...A man of Bukharin's stature who knew that he was marked to be shot must have fought for his image in the eyes of posterity...
...This is because Rossi's empathy comes through in sensing the web of relationships among the feminists...
...Considering that Stanton did not grow up with such supports, nor received them from her husband or father, it is clear that Susan Anthony provided her with a supportive friendship and a partner who continuously spurred her to writing and activity...
...We contemplate our male friends, teachers, and colleagues who sit wondering and writing behind the doors of their studies, coming out occasionally to have a meeting, have a drink, to hold court or hands with an admiring friend...
...How we are transported from ostensible to virtual acceptance of any lie is the proper concern of the illusionist...
...Stanton always responded to the call, notes Rossi...
...11.] John Adams responded: As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh...
...For Virginia Woolf, her precarious mental health (as she, and others in her circle defined it) made others attentive to her needs and moods rather than ordering her to be attentive to theirs...
...Older Marxists considered the state an instrument of the ruling class, which one can conquer and then turn around like a gun...
...Even Professor Cohen does not assert that Bukharin's policies would have been more successful in the framework of the Soviet State...
...But excerpts catch the eye and capture attention, and one is advised of one's bad judgment...
...there is ample evidence that they did, and Bukharin himself told his Swiss partisan Humbert-Droz: "The opposition is planning individual terror against Stalin...
...to perform to one's highest abilities in business and in the professions...
...The umbilical cord to the European labor movement had not been cut completely...
...Bukharin was convinced that the NEP had to be carried out seriously and honestly...
...She has made little effort to deal with how children saw their teachers and classes or with the political implications of their acceptance of an order they often found inimical...
...Even in that last letter, which he asked his wife to memorize and transmit to posterity, he began by praising the Cheka, and only then proceeded to accuse its successor, the renamed NKVD...
...Yet the middle ground Ravitch takes between the "extreme revisionists" and the "eulogists" is hardly neutral territory, and it is important to note the costs of occupying it...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Is the reason perhaps that Bukharin's other jokes were rarely printable...
...Professor Cohen's exasperating austerity does not permit us ever to see Lenin and Bukharin together except on official business...
...In the first war (1840-42), the opponents are the city's Irish Catholics and the Protestant establishment running the Public School Society, with the primary issue the control of the religious and cultural direction of the schools...
...Hitler had already announced that he would negotiate only with a military dictator in Russia...
...Until the basic political framework of public education in New York City is altered, strikes and boycotts— or both—are likely to occur on an annual basis...
...they expected to survive only "enshrined in the great heart of the world's working class," as Marx had written about the Paris Communards...
...it is analytic and penetrating...
...a period of national wars and colonial uprisings, which, though in themselves not proletarian, are nonetheless constituent parts of the world proletarian movement...
...But more recently, interest in his works and in his person has been waning, while the amiable Nikolai I. Bukharin is now being studied as both a companion of Lenin and an ancestor of revisionism...
...Apart from John Seelye's Dirty Tricks or, Nick Noxin's Natural Nobility, another, older book is relevant: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (Macmillan, 1962...
...BUKHARIN: He did not object...
...Many of the authors in the book argue for these or their functional equivalent...
...PROSECUTOR: But we want one meaning here...
...Bukharin's ultimate martyrdom, therefore, does not earn him a place among the protagonists of democracy and humanism...
...Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could...
...The Commission's members apparently haven't read the formal and informal studies I've seen recently, all indicating that women tend to be overqualified for the positions they have won in academia...
...For his book is neither a biography, in the sense of a personal life story, nor a political book as that term is usually understood...
...The message of the Trials therefore is clear and loud: Do not conclude a pact with Hitler...
...But when Lenin was able to consolidate his power as revolution in the West did not materialize, he wisely called a halt to war communism, restored the market for small businesses and farms, and invited for eign investment...
...4 Much current work in sociology rests on a model that assumes the primary importance of early influences and the impact of role models on aspiration, motivation and commitment to work...
...She tells of the sufferings of the five young soldiers accused of having led the uprising, of their trials and their long, hard road to justice and rehabilitation...
...Nor does Professor Cohen inform us what the personal relations were between Bukharin and Stalin...
...All the forces which have brought New York City to its present condition are at work elsewhere, and the New York story will certainly be repeated in dozens of other major cities around the country during the next decade...
...After quoting Michels, Pareto, and Trotsky on the dangers of bureaucratization, Bukharin rejects the idea that "socialists can Professor Cohen correctly rejects Arthur Koestler's conception of a"last service to the Party...
...5.95...
...Had he not told the Trotskyists, in the best Stalin-and-Torquemada style: "You must come to the Party and say: `We have sinned, forgive us.'" This self-denying attitude has still another aspect...
...That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters...
...But in a historical sense, Bukharin's last speech was meant as a service...
...Considering this human dimension of the story, I find Professor Cohen's chapter on "Rethinking Bolshevism" deeply unsatisfactory...
...The difficulty is just this: Mr...
...There are two stories to be found in Rossi's book...
...i Miriam Schneir, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (New York: Random House-Vintage, 1972...
...BOOKS Bukharin was to develop these consequences of his theory ten years later, when he needed to justify the failure of the Bolshevik state to wither away...
...In this respect, Professor Cohen's question whether a Bukharinite Soviet Union would have been better equipped to meet the Fascist threat than Stalin's Russia is beside the point...
...Unknowingly, the sum of their observations are as reliable as an independent sociological study: looking at similar events and common social patterns, they drew the same conclusions...
...era after era...
...make it possible to reconcile communism with the present temper of radical feeling...
...At birth, the hero must have been impoverished in ways he could hardly suspect...
...716 pp...
...As late as in 1921 he still angered Lenin by insisting that it should, and we shall see that the abandonment of his antistatism was a major crisis in his life: after that he became defenseless against Stalin's realization of his own conceptions...
...from this information Stalin had concluded that it was necessary to seek an alliance with Hitler...
...It seems more essentially female to be baking than writing reviews...
...it was the strategy of the war of 1812.] BUKHARIN: He did not say that...
...BUKHARIN: That's what you want, but I take the liberty not to agree with you...
...They found themselves at the head of a backward 576 state and isolated...
...This crude use of an undialectical materialism explains both Bukharin's acceptance of the NEP in 1921 and his collaboration with Stalin, his fight against Trotsky in the later '20s, and his ultimate confession in 1938...
...He could not see that Stalin's crimes were in the nature of the beast...
...They knew as well as Stalin that other leaders had been dissembling when they submitted to him...
...I agreed earlier that what a woman needs to work creatively is an income and a room of one's own...
...like a stream running to the sea...
...Marshal Tukhachevsky apparently had given the leaders such a pessimistic forecast...
...Almost certainly, a policy economically oriented toward the peasants would also have resulted in political concessions...
...Particularly during the 1890s, when the trustees formed a citywide organization and began to lobby in Albany, they managed to cut themselves off from both the parents they served and the Central School Board...
...Those of us who were once seduced by its grandeur see now that this particular form of suffering is a luxury enjoyed by a protected class...
...This turnabout also appeared reasonable to those who looked with anxiety upon Russia's international isolation...
...152 pp...
...That's not to say they have been won over...
...The importance of Diane Ravitch's The Great School Wars is, I think, best illustrated by turning for a moment to Christopher Jencks's BOOKS assessment of the 1968 teachers' strike and community-control struggle in New York...
...He did prevent special cruelties that later on, under Stalin's personal dictatorship, became standard practice...
...he developed it in his writings and political actions...
...We never watch Bukharin in action, in the rough and tumble of committee meetings, etc., though we always get a faithful record of their ideological sediments...
...Bukharin spoke the Marxist language with a Slavophile accent...
...BOOKS Personal history and social structure—Rossi makes clear how they interact...
...Among the fathers of the Great October Revolution, the brilliant and incisive L. D. Trotsky has long held the attention of the Western world...
...When Mary Wollstonecraft married Godwin, they decided to maintain separate residences so as to be able to work...
...An excellent biography by A. G. Lowy appeared in Vienna five years ago, and now a young Princeton professor comes forward with an ingenious thesis, thoroughly researched and gracefully written, which challenges the conventional view that Trotsky was the great rival of Stalin...
...We believed that there were international forces that were not interested in letting Fascism grow...
...he would not be worth writing about if all he intended to say was: "I did not plan to kill Stalin...
...It was he, not Stalin, who coined the slogan "socialism in one country...
...that it is unnecessary to persuade people to reform as long as they are compelled to act differently...
...The people, like their ideas, seem contemporary...
...he was allowed to write the program of the Communist International—and later even the "Stalin Constitution," complete with a bill of rights and voting rights even for concentration camp inmates...
...A recent Carnegie Commission report 2 suggests that universities and colleges have lowered their standards by hiring women to fulfill affirmative action programs...
...Thus, Rossi's short analysis of her life is more penetrating than the entire Flexner biography...
...Some men, we admit, suffer behind those doors, assessing their intellectual posterity, trying to capture visions in words or formulae...
...Noxin as Nixon, noxious and perhaps toxic...
...Up to that time, the Bolsheviks had always reached their decisions in lively debates...
...Through the years, Anthony turned to Stanton for help in drafting speeches, testimony, and letters for presentation to conventions on temperance, education, and women's rights...
...The child in his turn patronizes those of his bottom-dog friends who may be expected to stay down longer than he himself...
...The other ores to mine in this book are the analytic biographies...
...The enormous problem of just distribution of rewards for work becomes clear when it is examined from the perspective of the "woman problem...
...He had made the power that unmade him...
...But it is a revelation to discover how universal these social problems have been...
...He is seconded by a senior expert in the field, Professor Leonard Schapiro, who writes in the New York Review of Books that Bukharin stood for "socialism with a human face" and that he presided over a "golden age of Marxian scholarship...
...One of Bukharin's bitterest jokes (reported by Lowy) was: "We have made many mistakes, but the fatal one was our failure to foresee that we could win...
...THE PEOPLE ALWAYS MARCH FORWARD" may be the summary of Bukharin's philosophy of history, embodied in his most ambitious work, Historical Materialism, which he wrote in 1921 at the same time as Economics of Transformation...
...it is expressed in works of art he sponsored, such as the movie Storm over Asia...
...He admits having envisaged a war situation in which it would become necessary to "open the front," possibly even to give up the Ukraine (as had happened in 1919 and was to happen again in 1941...
...449 pp...
...Bukharin's political evolution from Left communism to Right can best be explained by his attachment to the Russian peasant and by his patriotism, which we shall discuss infra...
...he struck foreign delegates as "the most Russian among the Bolsheviks...
...Too many themes presented in this volume are contemporary, both in the writings and in the biographies...
...he recognized—again, earlier than Lenin—that the revolution would have to find its main support in the countryside...
...I had the feeling while reading Eleanor Flexner's biography of Mary Wollstonecraft 3 that she didn't like or approve of her central character...
...Like the Alger hero our own Noxin is a soul utterly composed: for him (continued on page 592) BOOKS superego equals ego equals id...
...Would that they pass into history...
...A deadpan account of lunacy is the only satire worth having...
...It doesn't really say much for our progress to admit that our writing today is old wine in new bottles...
...Indeed, by the end of the century the position of the trustees was that of a third force...
...Although ward trustees had enormous power during this period, for much of the time they failed to represent either the community or the principle of decentralization...
...The pattern for most women who have managed careers has always been chance, a somewhat supportive network together with persistent pressures produced by economic need— not plan, design, or systematic training...
...Did they joke together in the crude fashion Stalin liked...
...Charlotte Gilman Perkins's discussion of the economic productivity of women in the economy is not unlike one recently observed in Washington among Department of Labor specialists and critics of the Social Security system (which provides unequal benefits to men and women) . Is this only playing intellectual games...
...There is an interesting parallel...
...But the constraints of condition follow me...
...To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...I cannot believe that Bukharin coolly sat down to think the situation over and decide, perhaps with Lenin's help, that the country needed the NEP...
...This has been my suspicion for some time...
...It was probably of equal importance as any of the childhood experiences of these women that in later life they found supportive networks in which to work and from which to derive emotional sustenance...
...This was also true of Mary Wollstonecraft (with William Godwin) and Fanny Wright (with Lafayette and later Robert Owen and her husband Phiquepal D'Arusmont) and a number of other women whose writings are included in this book...
...Let us focus for a moment on the structures of the mind that affected the feminists as opposed to the structures of life...
...Glass puddin' " cries a street vendor, who turns out to be an ordinary glazier saying: "Glass put in...
...When Trotsky demanded intraparty democracy, he reminded him that "we Bolsheviks never believed in democracy, which is dear to Menshevism...
...He did not consider "war communism" a calamity but found positive justification for its wholesale expropriation of small business, its abolition of the market economy, its forcible requisitioning of food and brutal suppression of all opposition...
...The people are marching ahead" —this was the hope that comforted his last moments...
...On the other hand, it is a return to the "illusions" of 1918-19, the "permanent revolu tion," war communism, anti-imperialism...
...How much more would we know of how the institu tionalized modes of "proper behavior" and "fair play" and the like act to unbalance the rela tionship most typically in favor of the man...
...Now suddenly the Bolsheviks found that they had survived and had to continue surviving their greatest moment, their heroic vision...
...the workers were restive...
...His quarrel with Stalin was over policy, not over the system...
...SOKOLNIKOV: We believed that we had a chance...
...BUKHARIN: In Russian it means two different things...
...Bukharin is trying to deny that he planned to cooperate with the Fascist invaders...
...HOW ARE WE TO JUDGE such an ambitious and complex undertaking...
...On one level of analysis, Bukharin fell from power because his policies had failed both at home and abroad...
...I have said "no" to participation in any conference on research, political or social action...
...Stanton, on the other hand, met resistance from her father who threatened her with disinheritance...
...they had instituted the most radical measures of war communism because they wished to show to posterity, the way the Paris Commune had shown to its own generation, what a Communist government would have to do...
...5 Most significant to our interest here is that each left the other to do their own work...
...they also cite earlier episodes to prove that he always had tried to mitigate the cruelties of the dictatorship...
...A third legacy of the Slavophiles was Bukharin's attitude to the state...
...PROSECUTOR: Did Tomsky agree that the military organization was to open the front to the Germans...
...The conclusion of Dirty Tricks is borrowed from Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe," and features the hero plunging through the bowels of the earth after a quake—here is a fine and possibly unconscious pun—until he connects with the local sewer system, is tossed out to sea with the town garbage, and floats back to shore and long life...
...This sentence is omitted by Cohen.] The stream goes through the most difficult places, but it stillgoes forward...
...And they were attempted by many of these feminists for the same reasons as today: in the hope of freeing the partners in a marriage from the oppression of either one...
...Professor Cohen has no inkling that he is talking of a man who had come back from the dead (I think it was Lenin who referred to the Bolsheviks as "dead men on furlough...
...Of course no single factor explains everything...
...to his familiarity with modern science Professor Cohen pays the left-handed compliment: "Whether or not Bukharin fully understood modern physics is less important than his be'ief that the most advanced tendencies accept [his] point of view...
...380.] What would be analogous today...
...The photographs in The Great School Wars include a striking picture by Jacob Riis of a class in the Essex Market School, and from the picture we get a strong sense of the constraint and rigidity felt by the students in that class...
...Yet there is a more profound reason to study Bukharin...
...This fellow is BOUND TO RISE, we are informed: just like the sewage...
...Bukharin wanted to "smash" the state because he saw it as an integral part of an economic-social-political complex of domination...
...It was precisely when the Party adopted a more liberal economic policy that deviations came to be considered attacks on its substance...
...New York: Basic Books...
...The excerpt ap proach is useful...
...In 1871 a Tweed Bill gave the right to appoint the trustees to the mayor, and in 1873 the Central Board of Education, which the mayor appointed, acquired the power to designate trustees...
...On the contrary, if there is one crime of which posterity could accuse Bukharin it is precisely that his plot was too timid and that the opposition failed...
...Had Freud read some of the writings assembled in this book, he would have had his answer to the question, "What Do Women Want...
...but after Lenin's death, in 1924, the two men developed distinct "lines," one somewhat to the Right, the other to the Left...
...Although there were male feminists who wrote brilliantly and insightfully on the condition of women, the greater passionate interest was to be found among the women...
...Yet as Marxists and Bolsheviks they believed that, since Stalin had won, he was historically "right," as Napoleon had been in the French revolution...
...some few get more than they deserve, but I would guess that the balance is far from having been upset...
...but by 1927 he had to admit that Germany, too, was "imperialist...
...Economic incentive is a thin reed on which to base work motivation because only a tiny percentage of the population of any society, female as well as male, does not "need" to work...
...Her collaborator, Susan B. Anthony, was the political strategist, the better orator...
...When Lenin first heard of this, he called Bukharin an "anarchist," but in 1917 he changed his own position and incorporated Bukharin's conception in his State and Revolution, the classic of Leninism...
...This term, "open the front," refers to the defensive tactics that were actually used when Hilter attacked in 1941...
...It is hard to concentrate and I wonder if I have the right to try...
...If I weren't a sociologist, I would be convinced that any woman dedicated to a task would surmount trivial obstacles...
...And 45 years before Lin Piao launched his famous manifesto calling the rural masses of the world to rise against the industrial citadel, Bukharin had written that "the city of the world" is surrounded by the vast majority of the rural masses, its providers of food and hewers of wood, who now are uniting to rebel against this domination...
...If we were to plot patterns of women's oppression, using as indicators the writings of feminists from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, the emerging themes would be of no surprise to any woman sitting at a typewriter today, whether she is writing scholarly papers or transcribing the letters of a meatpacking executive...
...The theory was tested in China 30 years later...
...What women want, and indeed their analysis of what they need, has not changed much through the years...
...This was a moment that changed the Party, a moment that demanded a choice of comrades: the moment, probably, when "Leninism" and the legend of the "iron cohort" were created...
...but even in the narrow framework of intellectual history, the private conversations of the two men ought to be interesting, if only to determine how certain ideas originated in bolshevism and came to be accepted...
...Admittedly, the further back in time we go, the more difficult it becomes to get the recorded views of children...
...Questioned on one occasion about the reason his grooming BOOKS has seemed to go from bad to better, Ragged Dick deflects his interrogator neatly: "I was dressed up for a party, then, but the clo'es was too well ventilated to be comfortable in cold weather...
...My female colleagues always nod and affirm, like a Greek chorus at the revelations and outbursts on the subject...
...Ravitch virtually does not discuss how school officials made it difficult for black and Puerto Rican parents to find out about transfer plans, how they delayed sending home notices about these plans until the last weeks of school—and how, when pairings did take place, they undermined these by such BOOKS tactics as using tracking to keep classes in the paired schools homogeneous...
...His smiling face became a mask for Stalin's sneer...
...Yet he traveled a great deal...
...Just as Engels, who had anticipated several "Marxian" themes, nevertheless agreed to play second fiddle and later became the popularizer of a somewhat diluted "Marxism," so Bukharin subordinated his own bold visions to the sober authority of Lenin and then erected "Leninism" as an authority for others...
...When Gramsci read Bukharin's Historical Materialism, he exclaimed that the author must be religious...
...New York: Liveright...
...BUKHARIN'S DEFENDERS have searched the min utes of the Trial to prove that he did not capitu late but defended himself, admitting only as much as was absolutely necessary to save his family, but fighting over points that in com parison seem to be minor...
...discussion within the Party was stifled...
...Ravitch is just as thorough in treating the second half of the 19th century, focusing on the structural changes in the school system, which by the end of that period once more led to greater centralization...
...Her father approved of her activities and helped her...
...Like all other Marxists, Lenin and Trotsky were "Westernizers...
...Bukharin...
...as Marxists they knew that revolutions that fall short of their social goal end in the personal dictatorship of a Caesar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon...
...PROSECUTOR: Or the Fascists would use you .. . and did you expect anything but to be used and discarded by the Fascists...
...We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bonds of Government everywhere...
...he suffered the humiliation of his friends and he cooperated with BOOKS the ruthless subjugation of the Communist International to the Kremlin power game...
...Perhaps that is the concealed horror of the story...
...His place in history must be determined by his contributions to theory...
...Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Vita SackvilleWest, members of the Bloomsbury Group at various times, managed through their very alternate life-styles to maintain strong work commitments and personal identities, even in a circle of strong-minded, egocentric, and creative men...
...Jencks wrote: The public school system of New York City is on the brink of collapse...
...If you try to stand up in midstream it will throw you out altogether...
...Rationalizations differ as to why women ought not be paid as much as men (they have less of a commitment to work) or given the same political rights (they are too erratic to make crucial decisions...
...The landscape in which he moves is the modern city, with its magnificence, squalor, and deranging shock-tempo...
...There is more to it than that...
...To save the country from ruin, Stalin put it on a war footing by proclaiming the Five-Year Plan and forcing the peasants into collectives...
...Equally memorable is the chronicle of days spent by the young worthy at a nearby beach, practicing his oratory and lodging pebbles in his mouth to increase jowl size...
...Margaret Sanger, for example, not only orga 2 Richard A. Lester, "Anti-bias Regulation of Universities: Faculty Problems and Their Solutions," 1974...
...Up till then, he had often sided with Trotsky in intraparty debates...
...But a few facts should not be allowed to stand in the way when a new hero is needed...
...It is no secret that men of intellectual and artistic distinction tend to overpower most of the women in their world as well as some of the men...
...Time may be right for a parting glimpse of our cherished national fiction...
...Shrewd, easygoing, like Tom Sawyer "no better than he should be," he has somehow an instinct that takes him in the right direction, which is up...
...Imagine me, day in and day out, watching, bathing, dressing, nursing, and promenading the precious contents of a little crib in the corner of the room...
...I have been making that observation, too, for as long as I can remember (in published research and private life, in prose and in hysterics...
...and a worthy housekeeper...
...peasants were encouraged to "get rich" while industrial development was to proceed at a slow pace...
...Soviet foreign policies—based on Bukharin's theories of imperialism and colonialism—had suffered defeats both in Europe and in Asia...
...There are insights into the sociology of crea tivity to be found in this book...
...The feminist writers are participant observers...
...BOOKS 583 nized the movement to provide birth control information (and to encourage research on birth control techniques) but insisted that women also had a right and a need for sexual satisfaction...
...they considered the colonial revolutions as an auxiliary but not the vanguard of the proletarian revolution...
...to his friends, i.e., inferiors, self-conscious but not condescending...
...To his superiors he is likely to appear submissive but not obsequious...
...What makes Ravitch's account so telling is not just its sheer detail, but her way of avoiding recourse to a conventional narrative...
...Some Party leaders saw this program as a cloak for Trotsky's personal ambitions...
...There is no background in the world of Alger, so that characters are always having to step onto the midway for introduction...
...Again without psychologizing, one cannot ignore the father-son relationship between Lenin and Bukharin, which is well attested by direct and indirect evidence on both sides...
...The Right Opposition had held to the opinion that it was necessary to prepare for war with Hitler, even if that meant to "open the front," i.e., to take a defeat, lose territory...
...Bukharin was able to give his party that "last service," 2 precisely because he was no longer a "Bukharinist...
...To this day, Crowell reports, American soldiers suffer these torments in our Armycamp stockades—a condition in desperate need of reform...
...Although Professor Cohen tries to reduce the characterization to one angry outburst of Lenin's, everyone who knew Bukharin has described him as "soft," "impressionable," "weak...
...Yet this analysis ignores the role these authorities played in denying any hope for integration and in sabotaging such experimental efforts as open enrollment and pairing...
...Unfortunately, to resist the hopeful gaze of this Caliban has become a necessity in our own rise out of the streets...
...We figured that the Fascists would not be able to conquer the Soviet Union and that they would arouse the jealousy of their imperialist rivals...
...The attempt to give historical materialism a naturalistic foundation is characteristic of Comintern philosophy...
...Surprisingly, Bukharin accepted the NEP and came to be its outstanding theoretician...
...Now it is written that the mother of the Anti-Christ is a whore, and so young Nikolai anxiously asked his mother whether she had sinned...
...Once again the parodist has been outdone by the more rigorous deadpan of his original, for BOUND TO RISE was the motto Alger wanted as his own epitaph...
...It is well known that Bukharin suffered from frequent depressions, especially when things went wrong for his cause...
...The conspirators therefore had to discuss the question whether they would negotiate with Hitler...
...Guineas and locks, wrote Virginia Woolf, were two essential ingredients for creativity, and conditions virtually unobtainable for women...
...She married D'Arusmont only after she became pregnant...
...In his trial, Bukharin was accused of having planned Lenin's murder, and much was made of the fact that during the trade union debate Lenin had been exasperated by Bukharin's "deviation...
...Nor was Bukharin as well-read as Professor Cohen asserts...
...as per scientific method...
...When asked why there was only one party in the Soviet Union, Bukharin quipped: "The other would be in jail...
...At all events, Mr...
...578 BOOKS win while socialism loses" on the ground that "a new era has begun": since all industry belongs to the workers' state, there is no economic foundation for a new class...
...Later, as chairman of the Communist International, Bukharin wrote in its nroeram: Between the capitalist and the socialist society there lies...
...Again, what are we to make of a hero who thinks in the following manner: "I guess I'll go to Barnum's tonight, and see the bearded lady, the eight-foot dwarf, and the other curiosities, too numerous to mention...
...In Germany he had gambled on an alliance with the anti-Western nationalists and the army...
...though it is hard to penetrate the obscurity of dialectical wit that prompted him to call the sire Norman O. Noxin...
...DIRTY TRICKS OR, NICK NOXIN'S NATURAL NOBILITY, by John Seelye...
...12.95...
...His ultimate rehabilitation in the Soviet Union may be prevented by those "early writings" which in that case could be studied by Soviet students...
...This was at the time of Kronstadt and the first purge of the Party...
...Stanton wrote back at one point: Your servant is not dead but liveth...
...Yet no such evaluation is possible...
...Bukharin's crackup is not only understandable, it also helps us understand what happened and, moreover, it may explain what was to follow...
...As all other opposition had been destroyed, there was no balancing force...
...I believe that in the later stages, after the retreat of the revolution...
...In the fourth war (1966-69), the principal foes are the teachers' union and black and Puerto Rican community-control advocates, with the key issue to whom the city's educational system should be accountable...
...The Alger child is pure in heart...
...PIOUS BIOGRAPHERS interpret Bukharin's trial as the last stand of democracy under Stalin...
...Why did he name his daughter Svetlana...
...Fiction on this exag (continued from page 587) gerateu scale couia oe an excuse ow...
...My son, taken recently to organic gardening, reads choice passages aloud every few minutes, noting the ways in which I have poisoned the family by cooking with refined sugar and processed salt...
...4 "Negative Values, Countersystem Models, and the Analysis of Social Systems," in Herman Turk and Richard L. Simpson, eds., Institutions and Social Exchange (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971...
...Rossi observes that financial need prodded many of these women toward the path to a writing career...
...But as a student of the "woman problem" I see them all, the mounting accumulation of the trivial interlocking with the larger social obstacles that hold women in their places and explain why they haven't painted or written or created...
...the Cheka was 574 transformed into the GPU...
...This came out in the trial of another conspirator: soKOLNIKOV: We had to reason as politicans...
...Seelye's new book is a latter-day imitation of the Alger story, written under conditions that allow parody to run into satire...
...In that blank scene, with little to fill the mind or crowd the fancy, the Alger fiction merged with his own life...
...What is different today is that there is a larger effort to market the stuff and a somewhat more receptive audience for it...
...In the third war (1913-20), the 580 sides are almost the same as in the second, with Tammany and the old school bureaucracy opposing the efforts of the Progressives and other reformers to streamline the schools and make them more responsive to social conditions...
...While doubting God, he continued to believe in theology...
...Commentators have wondered how it was possible for the same man to write these two works, which seemingly are so different in spirit, and at the same time at that...
...crisis, war, and revolution brought on a period of negative accumulation, with famine and undersupply of goods temporarily "demanding sacrifice on an unprecedented scale...
...But as most women cannot solve the problems of their condition independently in any way, but must strive for structural and institutional solutions, I have not been able to duplicate that utopia on Long Island...
...Where Mr...
...The writings of the feminists describe current events...
...0 f all American myths "rags to riches" has been the most stubbornly enduring...
...If tragedy (as most people understand it) is undeserved misfortune, Bukharin was no tragic hero...
...Although Bukharin knew that Stalin was vicious, he preferred the dictatorship of the Secretariat to that of Trotsky—a judgment one must understand from the vantage point of the year 1924...
...An 1873 law providing for the appointment of the Central School Board by the mayor and for the appointment of the trustees (who still retained such powers as the right to hire teachers and select school sites) by the Central Board...
...New York: Links Books...
...During the civil war, which at the same time was a war against the interventionists, he was able to identify the Soviet cause with the defense of national territory...
...BOOKS I AM CONVINCED that a not-so-secret message, easy to decipher for those in the know, was plainly spelled out in the record, not only of Bukharin's but also of other defendants' interrogations...
...Seelye is grandly accommodating and lets the subject condemn itself without visible aid...
...On the contrary: opposition groups were purged and harassed...
...What was to follow the defeat can easily be surmised when we realize that all the conspirators had been actors in the 1917 revolution: Defeat meant the overthrow of the government...
...Seelye has not preserved the humor...
...Did Bukharin ever have tea with the Djugashvilis...
...he saw the New Leviathan as the mobilization of all national forces under the leadership of the state...
...This was also the birth of "Bolshevism" as the organized, disciplined form of Leninist ideology...
...The peasants refused to "get rich" and did not voluntarily deliver their grain...
...It was a crisis not only of bolshevism but for each Bolshevik...
...Rossi's analytic biographies show that alternate life-styles—specially relating to new ways for men and women to live together and have children—existed a long time ago...
...THESE THEORIES are impressive adaptations of the Marxian system to the conditions of an underdeveloped country...
...BOOKS The problem of relationships between strong women and strong men, both of whom demand attention and support, seems insoluble...
...In brief, the dictatorship became a Frankenstein monster, which Bukharin could no longer tame when it was ready to devour him too...
...12.95...
...Grace, yes, but grace only that can be certified by works: never too much too soon...
...The implications of that particular double-play are too dense for any commentator...
...while thinking heresy, he recognized the Church's right to call him a heretic...
...Once, having expounded to his father the philanthropic value of selling rat cheese to customers as if it were Swiss cheese—thus insuring that the unmoneyed shall get ostensible and hence virtual Swiss cheese at bargain prices— young Noxin is rewarded with a morsel of said rat cheese to eat and praise...
...At the time he was arrested, in 1937, his close friend, admirer, and one-time secretary Fanny Jeserskaya told me: "He is going to confess to whatever they want...
...Rossi's work suggests a countermodelthat of the importance of later and ongoing socialization, and that of negative role models —may also explain women's work commitment...
...I try to assuage my guilt and former wrongs by baking whole-wheat brown-sugar cookies...
...aisu a justification: by resorting to myth, the Presidentto-be acquired a most fertile imaginative prospect as well as a protocol to which he might forever defer in his peculiar serial rite of expiation...
...It is almost unbelievable that they should not have conspired against him...
...then she moves on to 1826, when the Free School Society became the Public School Society and was designated by the New York City Common Council as the only agency to receive state funds for the education of all children in the city...
...She traces the way the ward system brought about scandals in the public schools, especially when the Tweed Ring was in control of New York, and how discon tent with the politicalization of the schools resulted in a series of new laws: • An 1864 law dividing the school system into seven districts rather than 44 wards and increasing the authority and independence of the Central Board...
...In the Bloomsbury Group this was perhaps because their relationships with the men in their lives (for any number of idiosyncratic reasons) were not intensive or absorbing...
...Some insights predate modern "discoverers...
...Brought up in a supportive family, Anthony never married...
...he also beat down the Workers' Opposition and the Kronstadt sailors, nationalized the trade unions, and candidly announced that this was a "retreat...
...Birth and education are gotten over with in two hurried pages, and what there was of friends, loves, family we must guess from accidential intelligence...
...It is simply first...
...What has changed is society's responses to these demands, anyway, some of the responses...
...Some time ago Gideon Sjoberg and Leonard Cain discussed the merit of using negative values and countersystem models in our analytic thinking about how society works...
...SOKOLNIKOV: Obviously...
...What sociologists designate as alternate social structures are popularly seen as "alternate lifestyles...
...Bukharin's views on the transition to socialism were ultraradical...
...He denied the su preme crime of having plotted to depose Stalin, but he "admitted" so many contradictory facts, like meetings in impossible places with people who demonstrably could not have been there (e.g., because they were in jail) that a well informed and watchful listener could receive all the clues to exonerate him from other crimes, too...
...To maintain himself near the seat of power, he recanted in 1929, in 1930, and again in 1933...
...At some point before 1921, in the turmoil of the civil war, Bukharin lost the libertarian instincts of his youth...
...The other is the story told by Rossi in her "socio graphic" and biographic accounts of the people whose work she includes...
...the Party was harnessed into the rigid ideology of "Leninism" as defined in Bukharin's simplistic ABC of Communism, then the most popular exposition of Soviet theory...
...while it was probably true that none of these women had idyllic private lives, their lives were probably more complete and fulfilling than the lives of most women around them, and probably no worse emotionally...
...The writers anthologized by Rossi were aware of the radical consequences of changing the position of women in society...
...The ties between the Soviet Union and the colonial peoples become ever closer...
...The same conservatism has opposed all the revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the social order to the breakdown of old forms and their replacement by new ones...
...Some were married and had children, others not...
...How much more we would know about the dynamics of power in society...
...I have gone to the country to write this comment on Rossi's book, hoping to recapture my experience last year at the MacDowell Colony, the New Hampshire retreat where writers, painters, and composers are given private studios, food, fireplaces, and easy chairs...
...Bukharin and his friends had "conspired" to resist Hitler, to provoke or at least to risk war with a much better armed Fascist Germany, to gamble on the opportunity Bukharin lost in 1918—the people's war against the invader and against the ineffective, powerless Stalin dictatorship, until other forces in the West would come to the rescue...
...Wisest to turn such things away at the border or at least refuse their naturalization papers...
...Although the emphasis of The Great School Wars is on the years following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, Ravitch has not skimped on the early history of the New York public schools in order to capitalize on the present school crisis...
...Under capitalist-fascist conditions such a system would be poised for imperialist conquest...
...But of course they did not wish to return to pre-1917 conditions...
...Some people are still laughing at all this but not very many...
...He believed in their creativity...
...But the measure of Bukharin's fairness is not the evil that came after him but the one he brought into being and emblazoned with the ideology of Leninism...
...With regard to the motives of those in control of the schoo's, Ravitch is, for example, so concerned with avoiding conspiratorial theories that often she sacrifices the obvious for the subtle...
...If this quotation is correct, it goes a long way to explain why Bukharin could not say No to Stalin and the Party, why he interpreted discipline as submission, and unity as the obligation to abandon criticism...
...Trotsky wanted to industrialize fast in order to overcome the NEP, to avoid the ossification of the Party, and to carry the revolution abroad as soon as possible...
...whole chapters to savor...
...So Rykov told the prosecutor: `Bukharin expressed the idea that in case the front was opened, it might become necessary to take measures forestalling the take-over by a military group...
...This was to be the longed-for opportunity to get rid of Stalin...
...Bukharin supported Stalin because he believed that Stalin would support Bukharin's policies, which he believed to be Lenin's...
...Having instituted the ritual of recantation for others who had lost power, Bukharin now had to recant in order to survive...
...BUKHARIN: From my point of view it was not to open the front...
...the Secretary General by then dominated the structure of the Party and the opposition did not dare to submit its platform to the country...
...Henry Stanton did not help his wife...
...One is the writings of the feminists whose works provide not just threads that intertwine but a kind of system analysis of society...
...I had been introduced to a similar array of feminist writings in the anthology published earlier by Miriam Schneir I and the Rossi book took me deeper into study...
...Bukharin had dinner with Lenin and his wife before an attempt was made on Lenin's life, and Bukharin had begged him not to go out that night...
...Socialist reconstruction, Bukharin felt, had to start on premises that had not been prepared by capitalism...
...Nor is New York unique...
...they need not have split the European labor movement...
...to write and think and build rather excellent fires...
...Joan Crowell reports in conscientious detail on the history of the June 1969 uprising in the Fort Dix stockade...
...But while Lenin did not draw the radical conclusion, Bukharin anticipated the theory of totalitarian government...
...In situation after situation...
...As for the content of the feminists, Rossi provides full excerpts...
...Finally, what is missing from Ravitch's account is a serious concern for the way students viewed the New York public schools...
...For four years the two ruled the Soviet Union, with the one doing the dirty work and the other providing the lofty theories...
...he was unable to be or stand alone...
...And yet, perhaps this coincidence explains the complexity of Bukharin: his sudden passing from the Communist ultra-Left to the Communist Right, his opposition to Stalin at the same time as his support of Stalinism, and his ultimate capitulation...
...In Elizabeth Cady Stanton's case the equivalent was the room in her life provided by a husband who was often away and thus (though there is no comment to this effect) didn't get in her way...
...Seelye is exceeded in genius by Alger himself, who, like America, can be surrealistic without knowing it, and is able to instruct even as he delights...
...I cite these examples because I think that what they mute (the hostility of school officials to genuine change, the sham of local or decentralized control, the thinking of those the schools are supposed to benefit) goes far toward explaining why Ravitch is comfortable in the middle ground she occupies...
...But the women writers then were as aware as anyone writing today...
...Perhaps affirmative action has permitted some women to enjoy privileges long monopolized by men...
...BOOKS I will do what I can to help you with your lecture...
...But to "explain" does not mean to excuse...
...In her analysis of the first half of the 19th century, she begins with the formation in 1805 of the Free School Society, the first nonsectarian organization in the city to assume responsibility for educating the poor...
...Its determinism relieved the Communist leaders of all responsibility: since in the end the "objective conditions" were bringing about socialism anyway, one did not need to be bothered by Stalin's crimes...
...This also appears in his attitude to the peasants...
...Bukharin's mechanical materialism necessarily blocked his understanding of the basic issue of totalitarianism...
...That is something social science should have picked up long ago, yet today only a few social scientists' eyes are turned toward the study of those micro interactions between men and women who live together or who encounter each other...
...that some service workers get paid for it but others— the wives—do not get paid...
...Typically, even strong women bow before strong men...
...Unable to assure the country's reconstruction under the socialist system, they had to resort to dictatorship...
...But I wonder why Professor Cohen refrains from commenting on a story he cites from Bukharin's autobiography: Bukharin began to doubt God at an early age and was frightened by the thought, "Am I by any chance the AntiChrist...
...it was at a time when Bolsheviks had their first inkling that the world revolution would not come and that indeed they were alone...
...Indeed, this approach is made all the more appealing by Ravitch's attack on the educational historians she labels "extreme revisionists" whose "angry reinterpretation of American educational history is to a large extent a reaction to the onesided, over-idealized histories which viewed the development of American education as an unfolding series of triumphs...
...Nor is there much about the life of this man, who lived so intensely...
...This conception is a strange mixture of realism and illusion...
...We had to decide whether we ought to pay such a painful price, which meant committing a number of abominable, shameful crimes against the Soviet state...
...Now the theory of the Bolshevik state was projected back onto that of the Party...
...had never been taken quite seriously and had been forgotten during the exciting years of the Soviet experience...
...It is the ragging of an earnest boy who understands very well how to go just far enough...
...The book itself, Historical Materialism, is weak and disappointing;, it can hardly be called a philosophical work and is a rather "popular" (in the worst sense) continuation of the ABC of Communism...
...It is perhaps for this reason that Professor Cohen concentrates on ideas...
...There is not much here for either the Old or the New Left to build up a new hero...
...Now with dogmatism out of fashion, we see, 40 years after "permanent revolution" was opposed to "socialism in one country," a new battle between the images of the two protagonists of these ideas...
...He could not live in any other environment than the one he had helped create, even though he came to hate and fear it...
...250 pp...
...The train ride from Poco Lobo to Long Beach carried him through fields of asphalt and sand, the rubble of ad hoc civilization...
...We had to decide whether we would be able to use the Fascists...
...We understood that this was a question not to be decided upon on the basis of feelings but by reason of state...
...We find Emma Goldman arguing that the great problems of equality lay not just in the formal structure of laws and their practice but in the relations between the sexes...
...Only enough to make one hope that those who build on Ravitch's work will feel the need for something more than her kind of "balanced" perspective...
...What he sees and hears is often startling, and the weird undertone comes of an impossible blend of the innocuous and the terrible...
...A call to give academic papers, to participate in sympo sia...
...In China, Stalin and Bukharin had ordered the Communists to support Chiang Kai-shek, and his Kuomintang—which duly booted them out in 1927...
...Bukharin called the NEP "the twilight of our illusions...
...On another level, Stalin used these emergency measures to push Bukharin and his friends to the wall...
...He was, with Lenin, for the overthrow of the Provisional government, for the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, for the erection of one-party rule, for the ban on factions within the Party, for the establishment of the secret police (Cheka...
...He had become a living lie, and when the final sacrifice was demanded of him he confessed heinous crimes, which, in his own words, he could not have committed...
...she then follows the Public School Society to its demise in 1842, when it was superseded by an elected Central Board of Education, and control of the public schools now was vested in trustees elected in each ward of the city...
...One senses that Rossi liked them...
...But the feminist writers were often able to circumvent this style...
...On the one hand, it is an almost prophetic vision of what actually was to happen...
...he is such a weakling...
...Roth, at best an unsteady realist, spoiled the broth by throwing in a dose of his own venom, Mr...
...The temptation is to accept the overview Ravitch presents and to quarrel with her, if at all, on specific issues or the relative importance she assigns one school war in comparison to another...
...Further, to have seen our ruler, in his early days, as a rotten-hearted kid on the make was a stroke of genius...
...Not very funny, but this is the only example Professor Cohen cites of Bukharin's famous sense of humor...
...However, they became a major "revision" in the light of one tenet that was rarely mentioned before 1917 but that placed Bukharin beyond the pale: his utter indifference to democracy...
...We cannot imagine that the leaders whose lives were in constant danger did not think day and night: "How can I get rid of Stalin before he gets rid of me...
...Cohen instead designates Bukharin as the significant historical alternative...
...If such an intelligent reader of the minutes was assumed, however, that reader should have been able to decipher a much more important cryptogram: did that floating bottle which was Bukharin's last speech carry a secret "ship wreck's message...
...Thus, in her treatment of the integration struggles of the 1960s, Ravitch presents a detailed analysis of the demographic problems faced by school officials, showing how shifts in population plus a rise in parochial and private schools left the city without an adequate supply of white students for integration...
...The chosen women, following convention and the internalized mandates of the social control system, stimulate and serve these men, ministering to their physical and psychic needs...
...Thus, on p. 352 (when that information helps to explain what kind of pressure was brought to bear on Bukharin to make him confess) we finally learn that there was a Mrs...
...Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands...
...Incidentially, Mr...
...Rossi reports that the family was often separated and, reversing the usual pattern, the father remained with their daughter while Fanny Wright traveled to earn money by lecturing and supervising her publications...
...In the second war (1892-96) , the main antagonists are Tammany Hall and the Progressive reformers, with the central issue the depoliticalization of the schools and their return to the authority of an appointed Central School Board...
...These Edwardians were far more contemporary in spirit and life-style than presentday radicals who insist on consistency, condemning many choices, and refuse to see that it is probably quite human to want both the security of traditional marriage and the options of independent choice...
...She writes of the cruel conditions that led to the uprising—of degradation, starvation diet, beatings, and torture...
...Professor Cohen wonders how "two characters so dissimilar in temperament, values, gifts and ambition" could form an alliance, but he makes no effort to show us the relationship...
...The remainder of The Great School Wars explores in detail the two main problems of the New York public schools in the 20th century: the immigrant challenge, which dominated the attention of the schools during the first quarter of the century, and the black and Puerto Rican challenge, which took center stage after 1954...
...All this should Professor Schapiro knows, of course, in this glorious age of Marxist scholarship the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow was sitting on the now famous "Early Manuscripts...
...He was looking beyond the NEP, Stalin, and Trotsky, to a different Russia and a new revolution...
...THE FEMINIST PAPERS: FROM ADAMS TO DE BEAUVOIR, by Alice S. Rossi...
...for him, there was a personal difference between Stalin and Dzershinski, the first head of the GPU...
...584 had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman...
...Even if their attitudes don't immediately follow their behavior, life can be made easier for the victim...
...9.95 cloth, $3.95 paper...
...Of course within the Bloomsbury Group was an ethos of permissiveness with regard to sexual attachments and sexual proclivities...
...This definition also precluded motherhood...
...Their history had to be gleaned from a patchwork of singleissue monographs or a few dated narrative essays...
...With this book, Ravitch has made possible a historical grasp of the forces to which Jencks refers...
Vol. 21 • September 1974 • No. 4
