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This is the third book on Russian psychoanalysis to have recently appeared. Alexander Etkind's Eros of the Impossible (1997) and James Rice's Freud's Russia (1993) were both different and yet wholly fascinating; Martin Miller's new book is distinguished by the fact that as a professional
historian he provides a smooth narrative account, whereas the two earlier texts were both primarily thematic rather than chronological. While the first two books on Freud in Russia interestingly explored special topics on the subject that particularly interested the authors, this new study by Miller undertakes to cover the entire sweep of the story of psychoanalysis in Russia, and he does so in less than 200 pages.
It is often forgotten that before the Russian Revolution there were psychiatrists and intellectuals in the Romanov Empire who took great interest in Freud's work. The 1904 Russian translation of The Interpretation of Dreams was the first to be made into any language. Other Russian translations of Freud soon followed. Although Miller does not choose to dwell on the way nineteenth-century Russian literature prepared the way for Freud, it is clear that in no country was the national response more immediate than in imperial Russia. And Russian-born analysts (like Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sabina Spielrein, and Max Eitingon) played a notable part in the international movement of Freud's followers.
Once the Revolution took place, even more interest in Freud's work grew in Bolshevik Russia; the Russian Psychoanalytic Institute, with about thirty members in 1922-1923, then made up about an eighth of the entire membership of the IPA. And the Soviet state officially supported the work of the analysts. An experimental school for small children was founded along psychoanalytic lines, and one of Stalin's children attended.
Miller sensitively explores the issue of how ambivalent about psychoanalysis Lenin might have been, and he touches on Trotsky's endorsement of Freudian objectives. By the