Jay Bergman, Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University

Jay Bergman is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut. He received his BA in history from Brandeis University in 1970, and subsequently received his MA (1972), MPhil (1973), and PhD (1977) from Yale University. Bergman is the author of Vera Zasulich: A Biography (1983); Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov (2009); and articles in modern Russian and European history. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars, and in 2009 was named a member of the Connecticut Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, on which he served for two two-year terms.

"This excellent monograph examines the protracted musings by successive generations of Russia's radical intellectuals on the changing applicability to Russian conditions of mythologies and counter-mythologies in an emergent French Revolutionary Tradition. It illustrates the potency of historical myth-making, as individual events from the past were distilled into emblems of transcendent historical significance." -- Frederick Corney, Professor of History, Department of History, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, International Affairs

"There is much to learn from Bergman's exposition that will be usefully consulted by a range of specialists" -- Ian D. Thatcher, Slavonic and East European Review

"This is a very impressive book on a fascinating topic that has not up to now been treated in anything like the depth and complexity to be found here... One comes away from this fine book with great admiration for the skill with which Jay Bergman has untangled the intellectual gymnastics through which Russian and Soviet thinkers charted their own past, pressent, and future by drawing on French analogies." -- Jonathan Beecher, The Journal of Modern History

"... the book is a goldmine of detail about a formative influence on the Bolshevik leadership" -- Jonathan Daly, the Slavic Review

"This is a very impressive book on a fascinating topic that has not up to now been treated in anything like the depth and complexity to be found here." -- Jonathan Beecher, the Journal of Modern History

"Bergman's book is scholarly, thoroughly enjoyable, and thought -- provoking. It is hard to disagree with his general conclusion that the Bolsheviks were constantly forced to improvise, and "their improvisations depended for their plausibility on their finding precedents in the modern history of France" (p. 493)." -- Geoffrey Swain, The Russian Review

"Bergman's book is an impressive work embodying an enormous amount of research. It must be the most comprehensive study of the subject to date, and much can be learned from it." -- James D. White, European History Quarterly

"...this is an excellent, exhaustively researched book, an encyclopaedic examination of the topic, and an important contribution to our understanding of Bolshevik thought. It will be of considerable value to anyone interested in the fate of the Russian or French revolutions." -- James Ryan, English Historical Review

"...the reviewed book on the role of the French Revolution in Russian intellectual discourse is important, not just because it elucidates the important aspects of Russian intellectual history, but because it is a perfect snapshot of the time when the West, in all its manifestations, including its historical imagination, ruled supreme in Russia's - and not only Russia's, of course - intellectual life." -- Dmitry Shlapentokh, Indiana University South Bend, H/Soz/Kult

"Bergman has produced a fine piece of intellectual history that sheds new light on the Bolsheviks and the Soviet regime over which they presided." -- Gavin Murray-Miller, Revolutionary Russia