The Last Revolution
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The Last Revolution
The last successful invasion of England; mobs burning Catholic chapels; one king, James, driven from his palace by night while another, William, rode in at the head of a foreign army; the events of winter 1688 were among the most dramatic in our history. The settlement which followed would place England decisively on the path to freedom, toleration, parliamentary democracy and empire. Few moments have done so much to shape this country as the Glorious Revolution. But 1688 would change England in other ways as well. This was the time of Isaac Newton's scientific breakthroughs and John Locke's philosophy; the emergence of free market ideas and the end of press censorship. Closely researched, teeming with dramatic incident and vivid character and weaving political drama with the lives of scientists and revolutionaries, stockjobbers and refugees, The Last Revolution paints a vivid canvas of England's last great political struggle and brings to life the revolutionary world of the late seventeenth century.
The Last Revolutionary
On August 20, 1940, a man named Jacques Mornard entered Leon Trotsky's study in Mexico City, carrying a manuscript and an ice axe hidden beneath his raincoat. Twenty-six hours later, the last revolutionary was dead. The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of the twentieth century's most relentless manhunt. For over a decade, Joseph Stalin had deployed thousands of agents across three continents with a single obsession: destroy the one man who could expose the truth about what the Russian Revolution had become. The Last Revolutionary tells the complete story of Trotsky's extraordinary life — from his childhood on the Ukrainian steppe to the Siberian exile from which he escaped hidden in a hay cart, from the streets of revolutionary Petrograd where he helped overthrow an empire to the fortified compound in Mexico where Stalin's assassin finally reached him. This is a story of ideas powerful enough to shake the world and hatred deep enough to pursue a man to the ends of the earth. It is the story of a brilliant intellectual who built an army from nothing, commanded millions of soldiers, and stood second only to Lenin in the revolution that transformed the twentieth century. It is also the story of his fall — outmaneuvered by Stalin, expelled from his country, watching helplessly as his children were murdered one by one, his comrades executed, his legacy erased. But Trotsky refused to be silenced. From exile in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico, he continued to write, to organize, to fight. His pen became his weapon, his words a constant threat to Stalin's grip on power. The dictator who controlled the largest country on earth could not tolerate the existence of one man with a typewriter. Drawing on letters, diaries, declassified intelligence files, and eyewitness accounts, The Last Revolutionary brings to life the dramatic final years of a man hunted across continents by the world's most powerful secret police. It reveals the patient work of Soviet intelligence in grooming an assassin, the tragic love affair that gave him access to Trotsky's inner circle, and the terrible morning when the ice axe finally fell. The Last Revolutionary is both an intimate biography and an epic tale of ideas in collision, a story that illuminates how the twentieth century's great ideological struggles played out in the life of a single extraordinary individual.
The Final Revolution
Author: George Weigel
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2003-09-18
The collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe--the Revolution of 1989--was a singularly stunning event in a century already known for the unexpected. How did people divided for two generations by an Iron Curtain come so suddenly to dance together atop the Berlin Wall? Why did people who had once seemed resigned to their fate suddenly take their future into their own hands? Some analysts have explained the Revolution in economic terms, arguing that the Warsaw Pact countries could no longer compete with the West. But as George Weigel argues in this thought-provoking volume, people don't put their lives, and their children's futures, in harm's way simply for better cars, refrigerators, and TVs. Something else--something more--had to happen behind the iron curtain before the Wall came tumbling down. In The Final Revolution, Weigel argues that that "something" was a revolution of conscience. The human turn to the good, to the truly human, and, ultimately, to God, was the key to the political Revolution of 1989. Weigel provides an in-depth exploration of how the Catholic Church shaped the moral revolution inside the political revolution. Drawing on extensive interviews with key leaders of the human rights and resistance movements, he opens a unique window into the soul of the Revolution and into the hearts and minds of those who shaped this stirring vindication of the human spirit. Weigel also examines the central role played by Pope John Paul II in confronting what Václav Havel called communism's "culture of the lie," and he suggests what the future role of the Church might be in consolidating democracy in the countries of the old Warsaw Pact. The "final revolution" is not the end of history, Weigel concludes. It is the human quest for a freedom that truly satisfies the deepest yearnings of the human heart. The Final Revolution illustrates how that quest changed the face of the twentieth century and redefined world politics in the year of miracles, 1989.