Croire ou brûler : Une génération de révolutionnaires européens face au phénomène soviétique (1914-1939)

This study aims to measure the impact of the Soviet phenomenon - as a life experience and political referent - on a generation of European revolutionaries in the inter-war period. This research focuses on men and women from French, Italian and Russian cultures, who share a common experience of revolutionary Russia in the 1920s and who are among the first to adhere to the Bolshevik revolutionary project but also the first to detach themselves from it and to oppose the evolution taken by both the Bolshevik regime and the communist movement. Using a method based on the study of individual biographies, combining social, political, and cultural history, history of political ideas and sociology of activism, this work intend to make a processual analysis of revolutionary commitment and disinvolvement. It also examines the construction of a specific negative image of the Soviet regime among the first supporters of the Russian revolution. By questioning the relationship to the Soviet phenomenon, this work studies the very identity of the militants, as well as their representations of the world and their conceptions of the revolution. This study relies on private archives and especially on ego-documents. It thus focuses less on the analysis of the discourse produced on the USSR than on the circumstances and modalities of its construction. It deals with the condition of the opponent, the dissident, the excluded and the exile, but also considers the commitment to the written word and to political ideas. This research examines the different stages of disengagement, from disaffection to disidentification, and the modalities of reconversion and of political reinvestment chosen by these men and women. The later eventually became witnesses and actors of the historical discourse on the USSR and the communist world. Some of them sought to write the history of their generation in the late 1930s and thus noted the failure of the worker’ movement in the inter-war period, which eventually led them to question their very political convictions. These factors, combined with the evolution of the Soviet regime during this period, help us to understand to the formulation of anti-communist views among the first supporters of the revolution. In this perspective, this research contributes to a better understanding of what underlies the disengagement and the “lucidity” of these men and women in the 1920s and 1930s