Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University

recent ‘War on Terror’. Arguing that by 1794 many French revolutionaries had come to believe that ‘the entire earth’ was ‘the battlefield on which the fate of the republic [would] be decided’ (261), Edelstein alleges that the Jacobins eventually envisaged a world revolution. This claim seems out of tune with the essential indifference on the part of both Robespierre and Saint-Just towards anything besides France. Edelstein’s next argument that the Terror’s extra-judicial measures inspired twentieth-century totalitarianism also comes across as a little uninspired, as does his comparison of George W. Bush’s use of the concept ‘enemies of humanity’ with the Jacobins’ rhetoric. The conclusion to Edelstein’s book does not therefore quite do justice to an otherwise highly intelligent, subtle and challenging work, a book that is based on an impressive amount of research and that offers an exciting new answer to a classic question: what caused the Terror in the French Revolution?