Dead Alain Besançon, the former communist who became a sharp sovietologist – Corriere.it

Communist as a young man the French historian Alain Besanon, who passed away at the age of 91, he had then returned to the Catholic faith of his childhood. And it is no coincidence that his interpretation of Bolshevik ideology, to which he had dedicated long and in-depth studies, underlined its nature as a secularized version of religious millenarianism. With the fall of the Soviet system, Besanon had turned his attention to the Islamic question, rejecting the widespread idea of ​​a close relationship between Muslim monotheism and the biblical tradition. He had also dedicated research of great commitment to the theme of iconoclasm and the prominence attributed to sacred images in the various cults.

Professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Besanon was born on April 25, 1932 in Paris into a family with great traditions in the field of medicine, but since he was a boy he had shown a marked propensity for history, which had favored his youthful approach to Marxism.

Member of the French Communist Party since 1951, he had found himself playing political militancy together with other future defectors of prestige such as François Furet and Annie Kriegel. In 1956 he was traumatized by Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about the crimes of Joseph Stalin and shortly after he left the PCF because of the applause paid by the party to the suffocation in blood of the Hungarian revolution.

That choice had left its mark on Besanons intellectual trajectory, as he reported in his memoir Une gnration (Julliard, 1987). Filled with anger and shame at having adhered to a totalitarian ideology, he set out to study its nature and origins as a historian. He had also stayed in the USSR for a few months, between the end of 1960 and the beginning of 1961, to study Russian culture and in particular its artistic expressions. Later he had met in the United States with Martin Malia, one of the sharpest and most severe scholars of the October revolution and its developments.

The result of the in-depth work carried out by Besanon on these topics had been two important books published in the seventies and also translated in Italy, Brief treatise on Sovietology (Edizioni dello Scorpione, 1976) e The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (Sansoni, 1978).

In the first text the author observed the alternation in the USSR of phases in which totalitarian rigor became more intense, with mass terrorist practices and obsessive control over society, and others in which the regime loosened the reins, allowing the people some space for freedom and autonomous initiative. But neither could last, noted the French historian, because extreme despotism risked bringing the system to collapse, while easing the grip of the state on citizens could produce unwanted forms of pluralism.

Instead The Intellectual Origins of Leninism
he dug into the religious background of the Bolshevik mentality, into the Gnostic claim, borrowed from some Christian heresies, to know the course of history and therefore to have all the qualifications to impose one’s own vision of the world, from which the end of all injustices and ugliness on this Earth would have sprung. An illusory belief destined to produce harmful effects.

Later Besannon would not hesitate to break one of the taboos of European progressive culture,
drawing a parallel between Communism and National Socialism Hitlerian in the essay Twentieth century, the century of evil (Ideazione, 2000; Lindau, 2008), a reprise and extension of a conference held at the Institut de France, created following the controversies that followed that intervention.

While acknowledging the differences between the two regimes, Besanon he saw in both a strong dehumanizing tendency and, as a fervent believer he was, a satanic streak. In particular, he flatly rejected the idea that communism could be considered a beneficial ideal misapplied. In reality, Nazism too had presented itself as a message of salvation, albeit limited to the Aryan race rather than extended to all of humanity. And Bolshevism had from the beginning called for the annihilation of class enemies, often identified with completely arbitrary criteria. If anything, its long duration, Besanon observed, had caused the Soviet ideology to lose all revolutionary inspiration, to the point of transforming it into an instrument of conservation of power for a bureaucratic caste.

The other side of Besanon’s studies had initially concerned psychoanalysis and then above all Christianity in its various incarnations, from Slavic orthodoxy to American Protestantism. He was very passionate about the question of sacred images and their prohibition in some cultson which he had published a book of profound theological depth also released in Italy, The forbidden image (Marietti 1820, 2009).

Through his reflections on spirituality, Besanon had arrived at a rather conservative Catholicism. A great admirer of Joseph Ratzinger, he warned the Church against the temptation to adapt to modernity. AND he judged it wrong to seek correspondences between Christianity and Islam, which he considered fundamentally incompatible religions. The function of the Jesus represented in the Koran, observed Besanon, is actually that of denying the Christian dogmas linked to the figure of him. While the New Testament and also the Old (which Jews and Christians share) are considered by Muslims to be falsified scriptures.