An Intellectual Biography of N.A. Rozhkov

Book excerpt: 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.