Freedom’s Journey through the History of the New World (Belkovich R.Yu. Blood of Patriots: An Introduction to the Intellectual History of American Radicalism. 2nd ed., revised and expanded. St Petersburg: Vladimir Dal’, 2024)

Amid the backdrop of Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States, the reissue of Rodion Belkovich’s book Blood of Patriots: An Introduction to the Intellectual History of American Radicalism appears particularly timely. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the works of religious preachers, Founding Fathers, publicists and scholars, Belkovich demonstrates how the idea of resistance to the centralization of power has been “wandering” from one author to another throughout five centuries, from the beginning of the colonization of North America until Barack Obama’s presidency. Moreover, each of the authors considered corresponds to a certain historical context. As a result, the reader not only obtains a catalog of works that can be labeled anarchist, but also he has an opportunity to feel what events made their authors disenchanted with the idea of state and express their disappointment in journalistic and/or scientific texts. As Belkovich himself admits, he wanted his book to have the effect of a “flash-bang grenade”. According to the reviewer, this effect has been achieved. The book utterly disrupts the established interpretation of the American history. The views of the authors, that Belkovich focuses on, depict in front of the reader an “inverted” history of the United States, where Lincoln is not a great reformer, but a bloody tyrant, where Dwight Eisenhower is a communist stooge, and the New Deal is not a miracle that saved America at one of the most difficult moments in its history, but the final nail in the coffin, where the dream of freedom in the New World is buried.