Description:
An Intellectual Biography of N.A. Rozhkov is the first English language study to follow Russia's most gifted and important historian to emerge from the school of V.O. Kliuchevskii through the transformative decades that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rozhkov's early philosophical influences are examined to explain his radicalisation from middle-class intellectual academic to Leninist-Bolshevik to Menshevik social-democrat. His Marxist-socialist beliefs landed him in gaol several times and eventually he was exiled to Siberia for a decade where he was able to refine his political worldview and develop his theory of historical development. Critical of Lenin and the 1917 revolution, he spent the last decade of his life being persecuted by the Bolshevik regime.
Brief description: Dr John González is an independent scholar and Director of the Rozhkov Historical Research Centre in New South Wales, Australia. In 2011 he became a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Moscow State Regional University's History and Politics series. Previously he has taught history and politics at the University of Wollongong and has taught languages for the New South Wales Department of Education and Training. He has published many articles on various aspects of Russian history, translated a wealth of material from Russian and other languages and is currently preparing for publication English translations of several of Rozhkov's books. This is his first monograph.
Review Quotes: "Gonzalez's biography, which includes twenty-four illustrations, a biographical chronology, and a list of Rozhkov's works, gives long-overdue attention to Rozhkov's place in the Russian revolutionary movement and Russian Marxist historiography." - Barbara C. Allen, in: The Russian Review, 2017, pp. 565-6