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The Making and Unmaking of a French Christian Bolshevik: The Soviet Years of Pierre Pascal*

Pierre Pascal was—and is—best known for his magisterial study of the seventeenth-century Russian religious schism of the Old Believers, Avvakum et les debuts du Raskol: La Crise religieuse du XVIIe en Russie, which first appeared in 1938. But he was also the author of a penetrating study of Dostoyevsky, a fascinating volume on the Pugachev revolt, important essays on Russian modernism, dozens of translations, and many other books and articles on Russian intellectual history, Russian popular religion, and what he insistently described as the “civilization” of the Russian peasantry. Taken as a whole, this body of work earned him a reputation in the decades after World War II as the great French authority on Russian history and literature. Less well known was Pierre Pascal’s early life in the Soviet Union. Although a lifelong Catholic, he had as a young man welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, joined the Communist Party, and cut his ties with France to become a Soviet citizen. He remained in the Soviet Union until 1933. Then, in his forties, he embarked on an academic career that took him from the University of Lille to the Ecole des Langues Orientales to the Sorbonne. Pierre Pascal’s formal teaching career came to an end in 1960. After his retirement he continued to publish, and students, disciples, and friends found their way to his small apartment in Neuilly to benefit from the “precise, methodical and luminous teaching” of a master who was famous for his “exacting love” of the Russian language andwho couldmake history, literature, and philology shed light on one another—who could “show the reservoir of images that Russia’s national