Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin
By Michael McFaul, Cornell University Press, 2001
This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.
The failures to meet academic standards are the most glaring fault of the book. What can one say of an academic work that attempts to chart Russia’s “course to democracy” without once even attempting to define its central term, “democracy”? Was this mere incompetence? God knows there is incompetence and provincial gaucherie enough in McFaul’s work, from the Preface, in which he informs us that “In 1799, France was still deep in the throws [sic] of revolutionary turmoil…,” to his Conclusion, which ends with some of the most inadvertently comic attempts at grand chiasmus since Cicero wore out his whipping-arm on his duller pupils. (more…)
November 27th, 2002 | Leave Comment
