The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia

Portada
Yale University Press, 2003 - 153 pàgines
Sergei Degaev (1857-1921), a political terrorist in tsarist Russia, disappeared after participating in the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization in 1883. Those who later knew and admired the quietly brilliant Professor Alexander Pell at the University of South Dakota never guessed this was actually Degaev, who had triple-crossed friends and associates while entangled in the revolutionary movement of his homeland. This book is the first in any language to tell in detail the extraordinary story of one of the world's most intriguing revolutionaries, his role in building and betraying the earliest political terrorist network, and his subsequent conventional academic career in America. The well-known historian Richard Pipes uses previously unexplored Russian archives to draw a brilliant psychological, political, and sociological portrait of Degaev. Pipes pursues his protagonist on a twisting journey of changing loyalties and fateful collaborations within the network that provided the model for all modern terrorist organizations. A cunning conspirator, Degaev went on to reinvent himself in the United States as a beloved mathematics professor. Either of his lives would be considered remarkable; that Degaev lived both is nothing short of amazing.

Sobre l'autor (2003)

Richard Pipes was born Ryszard Edgar Pipes in Cieszyn, Poland on July 11, 1923. Soon after German troops entered Warsaw, he and his family fled to Italy on forged passports in 1939. They reached the United States a year later. He was attending Muskingum College in Ohio when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1942. He was sent to study Russian at Cornell University. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1946 and a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1950. His dissertation became the basis of his first book The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923. His other books included Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905; Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944; U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente; Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future; Russia Under the Old Regime; The Russian Revolution; Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime; and Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. He served for two years as the director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs for President Ronald Reagan's National Security Council. He spent his entire academic career at Harvard University. He died on May 17, 2018 at the age of 94.

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