Richard Lourie on Jochen Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin:
The principal service of Jochen Hellbeck's "Revolution on My Mind" is that it transports us back to that earlier, impassioned revolutionary Soviet Union, a time of epic hope and energy, when the transformation of man and history seemed imminent. There were no limits to the possibilities. Justice would reign on earth. In time, the state would wither away. And, as Leon Trotsky predicted at the end of his book "Literature and Revolution," the "average human type" would "rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx." Then, as if that were not grandiose enough, he added: "And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
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