Dead Alain Besançon, ex-communist turned sharp-edged Soviet scientist

communism as a young man French historian Alain Besanon, who passed away at the age of 91, Then he returned to the Catholic faith in his childhood. It is no coincidence that his interpretation of Bolshevik ideology, to which he devoted long and in-depth studies, emphasized its nature as a secular version of millenarianism. With the fall of the Soviet regime, Bezanun turned his attention to the Islamic question, rejecting the prevailing notion that there was a close relationship between Islamic monotheism and the biblical tradition. He has also devoted a treatise on the great commitment to the subject of iconoclasm and the fame attributed to sacred images in various denominations.

Professor at the Faculty of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Bezanon was born on April 25, 1932 in Paris to a family with great traditions in the field of medicine, But since he was a child he showed a remarkable penchant for history, which favored his youthful approach to Marxism..

A member of the French Communist Party since 1951, he found himself playing out the political struggle with other future prestige dissidents such as François Foret and Annie Kregel. In 1956, he was shocked by Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about the crimes of Joseph Stalin and soon after he left the French Communist Party Because of the party’s applause for choking the Hungarian revolution in blood.

This choice left its mark on Bezanon’s intellectual path, as he stated in his memoirs Une gnration (Juilliard, 1987). Buried with anger and shame at his adherence to a totalitarian ideology, he set out to study its nature and origins as a historian.. He also stayed in the USSR for a few months, between the end of 1960 and the beginning of 1961, to study Russian culture and especially its artistic expressions. It was later in the United States that he met Martin Malia, one of the most acute and intense researchers of the October Revolution and its developments.

It was the result of the in-depth work Bezanon had done on these topics Two important books published in the 1970s Also translated in Italy, Brief treatise on Soviet science (Editioni dilo Scorpion, 1976) H The intellectual origins of Leninism (Sansoni, 1978).

Note the author in the first text The alternation in the Soviet Union of phases in which authoritarian rigor became sharper, with practices of mass terror and obsessive control over society, and another in which the regime loosened its grip., giving people some space for freedom and independent initiative. Neither of these can last, the French historian noted, because excessive tyranny threatens the collapse of the regime, while loosening the state’s grip on citizens can produce unwanted forms of pluralism.

instead of The intellectual origins of Leninism
He delved into the religious background of the Bolshevik mentality, in the Gnostic claim, borrowed from some Christian heresies, to know the course of history. and thus to have all the qualifications to impose one’s own worldview, from which may emanate the end of all injustices and ugliness on this earth. A deceptive belief that is destined to cause harmful effects.

Later Bezanon did not hesitate To break a taboo in progressive European culture,
Draw a parallel between communism and national socialism Hitler in the article The twentieth century is the century of evil (Ideazione, 2000; Lindau, 2008), a reprise of a conference held at the Institut de France and its extension after the controversies that followed that intervention.

While acknowledging the differences between the two systems Bisanon In both directions he saw the power of humanism and, as a devout believer, he saw, a devilish streak. In particular, he flatly rejected the idea that communism could be seen as a useful ideal misapplied. Indeed, Nazism presented itself as a message of salvation, albeit one limited to the Aryan race rather than extending to all of humanity. And Bolshevism from the very beginning called for the extermination of class enemies, often defined by completely arbitrary criteria. Besanon noted that if anything, its long duration caused Soviet ideology to lose all revolutionary inspiration, to the point of turning it into a power-preserving tool for a bureaucratic caste.

The other side of Besanon’s studies concerned first psychoanalysis and then above all Christianity in its various incarnations, from Slavic Orthodoxy to American Protestantism. He was very passionate about the issue of sacred images and their prohibition in some sectsin which he published a book of deep theological depth that was also published in Italy, forbidden photo (Maretti 1820, 2009).

Through his reflections on spirituality, Besanon arrived at a somewhat conservative Catholicism. He was a great admirer of Joseph Ratzinger, and warned the Church against the temptation to adapt to modernity. And He considered it wrong to seek correspondence between Christianity and Islam, which he considered to be fundamentally incompatible religions. The function of Christ represented in the Qur’an, as Bezannon notes, is in fact the denial of the Christian doctrines attached to his personality. While the New and Old Testaments (which Jews and Christians share) are considered by Muslims to be false holy books.