“NON-ANNIVERSARY” BOOK

The article analyzes the monograph of V.P. Buldakov and T.G. Leontieva “The War that gave birth to the revolution”, which in terms of the content and research focus destroys the prevailing historiographical myths about the Great Russian revolution. After the historical-anthropological deconstruction of the old and new concepts, the authors created a multidimensional and multifaceted research of the problem of psychology of war perception in various strata of the Russian society. The authors examine the war and the revolution as anacute manifestation of global psychopathology, to which came the Enlightenmentthat resulted in the global cataclysm. The research approaches are based on the theory of resentiment (implicitly accumulated aggression within the “progressive” society). According to the authors,psychopathology of the European world was associated with the demographic boom and enormous development of technology. The “rejuvenation” of the population led to youthful destructiveness in societies. In Russiait was associated with the persistent internal social antagonism, which was exacerbated by the heterogeneity of the cultures of the “top” and “bottom”. Before the revolution people’s minds had been mainly influencednot by “objective” indicators, but subjective ideas of the events based on everyday personal experience. To prove this thesis, the authors used a huge number of personal sources. The most interesting part of the research is connected with the reproduction of extracts from censored letters of people of different ranks and classes. The authors seek to show that the preconditions of the revolution to a small extent depended on the parties, since the dissatisfaction with what was happening was typical of all strata of society. But whereas the liberal and socialist elites came from the political practices of parliamentary democracy, the lower classes tended to the traditional political culture. This allowed the Bolsheviks to easily “seize” power. This conclusion is a fundamental point of the author’s conception of the revolution.