Corey Robin

Tag: Stalinism

It’s the Only Face I Have

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One of the big mistakes we make when we think about fear is to oppose fear to hope. Hope against fear, that’s the credo. And it’s badly mistaken. Nadezdha Mandelstam was one of the great writers on Stalinism. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was murdered in 1938. She survived the purges and went on to write a miracle of a memoir titled, aptly, Hope Against Hope. This is what she had to say on the topic of hope and fear: Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too…Having entered a realm of non-being, I […]

Stalinism on the Installment Plan

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One of the most frequent motifs in the literature on Stalinism is that of the dissenter who confesses to a crime he never committed. What made Stalinism so depraved, in the eyes of intellectuals, was not that it jailed or slaughtered men and women by the millions; it was that it was that it got those men and women, who were plainly innocent, to affirm their guilt to a waiting world. Here in the US, we don’t need to force people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit (though we certainly do that, too). No, to truly validate our system, we conscript the defendant’s soul in a different way. A state-by-state survey conducted by NPR found that defendants are charged […]