A Fateful Triangle: Essays on Contemporary Russian, German, and Polish History

Description

The twentieth century began with a deep identity crisis of European parliamentarianism, pluralism, rationalism, individualism, and liberalism―and a following political revolt against the West's emerging open societies and their ideological foundation. In its radicalism, this upheaval against Western values had far-reaching consequences across the world, the repercussions of which can still be felt today. Germany and Russia formed the center of this insurrection against those ideas and approaches usually associated with the West. Leonid Luks's essays deal with the various causes and results of these Russian and German anti-Western revolts for twentieth-century Europe. The book also touches upon the development of the peculiar post-Soviet Russian regime that, after the collapse of the USSR, emerged on the ruins of the Bolshevik state that had been established in 1917. What were the determinants of the erosion of the "second" Russian democracy that was briefly established, after the disempowerment of the CPSU in August 1991, until the rise of Vladimir Putin? Further foci of this wide-ranging study include the specific geopolitical trap in which Poland--constrained by its two powerful neighbors--was caught for centuries. Finally, Luks explores the special relationship that all three countries of Central and Eastern Europe's "fateful triangle" had with Judaism and the Jews. Contents Introduction Part I. Bolshevism and Fascism: Two Faces of Totalitarianism The Totalitarian Double Revolution of the Twentieth Century (1917–1933) and Its Ideological Roots—An Outline Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism—Related Opponents? Part II. Late Soviet and Post‐Soviet Russia in Search of Identity Farewell to Class Struggle The Aggrieved Great Power: Russia after the Crimean War and after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union—A Comparative Outline “Weimar Russia?”—Notes on a Controversial Concept A “Third Way”—or Back to the Third Reich? Part III. Poland and Its Neighbors Polish Perceptions of Russia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Aleksander Wat about the Janus‐Faced Russia The German Question in Unofficial Polish Journalism of the 1970s Polish Antiauthoritarian Revolutions, the Euromaidan, and Putin’s Neo‐Imperial Doctrine Part IV. The Jewish Question The Craving for “Organic National Unity” and the“ Jewish Question” in the Writings of Fedor Dostoevsky and Heinrich von Treitschke Cosmopolitanism as an Anti‐Jewish Stereotype under Stalin The Catholics in Postwar Poland and the Jews Concluding Remarks: Does Russia Belong to Europe?