The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism

Originally published in 2004, the highly acclaimed The Soviet Mind has assumed its rightful place among Isaiah Berlin’s works. Collected for the first time, Berlin’s writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalin’s manipulative “artificial dialectic’; portraits of Osip Mandel'shtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more. The Soviet Mind will prove invaluable for policymakers, students, and those interested in Russian politics, past, present and future.