Abstract

Minority Report

To the European revolutionaries of 1917, the Paris Commune of 1871 was not a matter of antiquity. Yet they also fretted about the terrible decision of the Bolshevik leadership to put down the mutiny of soldiers and sailors at Kronstadt by force of arms. Even Vladimir Lenin, least sentimental of those who decided to repress the mutineers, described the rebellion as the flash which lit up reality better than anything else. For the brotherhood of Marxist internationalists who had escaped to Russia from a Europe turning putrid with fascism, Kronstadt was the worst moment of their young lives. In his last novel "Oh What a Paradise It Seems," John Cheever has an odd but real hero in Lemuel Sears, who tells his analyst about his great lost love.