Review by The Economist. Will have to quote as this is protected content. Apparently not "the" definitive book. -------- Stalin: A Biography By Robert Service Macmillan; 528 pages; £25. To be published in America by Belknap Press in March IN HIS still unequalled 1991 biography, “Stalin: Breaker of Nations”, Robert Conquest found that there was “something in [Stalin's] character best thought of as an absence of life in its fullest sense.” He called the Soviet dictator a “vast, dark figure looming over the century”, defined mainly by a capacity for murder and deceit. A biographer often became attached to a subject, Mr Conquest said, but with Stalin it was “probably impossible to have that sort of sympathetic relationship”. On this last point at least, Robert Service has proved Mr Conquest wrong. In “Stalin: A Biography”, Mr Service sets out to examine Stalin “simultaneously as leader, administrator, theorist, writer, comrade, husband, and father”. He declares Stalin to be “as wicked a man as has ever lived”, but also finds in him a “thoughtful man [who] throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it”. He portrays Stalin as a “dangerously damaged” personality but also a “hard-working” man “capable of kindness to relatives”, a “ruler of great assiduity”, a “fluent and thoughtful writer” and “a delightful purveyor of jokes and mimicry”. Mr Service reaches into Stalin's harsh childhood for explanations of the dictator's later brutality. He argues that aggression marked Stalin's character from early youth, such that age and power merely brought opportunities for indulging this underlying viciousness on a much greater scale. He contends that Stalin's previous biographers, relying too heavily on the memoirs of rivals and enemies, grossly underestimated Stalin's intellect, political skills, and early achievements. He sets out to show—and this is the main success of his book—that Stalin was a substantial figure in Bolshevik politics well before 1917. He foresees that his attempts to understand and explain Stalin's conduct will expose him to charges of “humanising” the dictator. And to this, he says, “I plead guilty.” His defence is that society needs to know its enemies. “If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals’, ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines’”, he says, “we shall never be able to discern their successors.” In principle, Mr Service may be right. But his carefully constructed and meticulously researched book still does not manage to convey how, at the personal level, Stalin exercised his terrible power over those around him. There must have been some black magic which enabled this short, ugly man, famed for his rudeness and stumbling speech, to trap and dominate millions, but what on earth was it? Mr Service divides his attentions so judiciously between his reporting of Stalin's public life and crimes on the one hand, and his analyses of Stalin's political skills and personal foibles on the other, that he leaves himself no time to unshackle his own imagination and to bring his subject more instinctively to life. He leaves little time, too, for reflecting on the consequences of Stalin's orders and policies for those on the receiving end. Too many terrible things happen at a great distance from the narrative. The Katyn massacre of the Polish army officer corps in 1940, for example, gets two sentences. As for the question of discerning future tyrants, the author himself recently wrote an article comparing—with various disclaimers and hedges—the methods of Stalin with those of Tony Blair. Say what you like about Mr Blair, he does not belong in that universe. If Mr Service himself can make such an error of judgment, then the more reason to worry that by “humanising” Stalin, you risk eroding your capacity to distinguish between tyrants and decent people. Here the reader is told that Stalin's crimes, while vast and terrible, were things which a sane, intelligent, sometimes kindly human being might do for understandable if not defensible reasons. It does not feel like a step in the right direction.
Also interesting, the Economist's obituary of... Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin’s interpreter, died on November 20th, aged 82 IN 1943 Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met for the first time in Tehran. They scarcely knew a word of each other’s language. Their only communication was through Valentin Berezhkov, and he was not entirely confident in English. “You’re not too tired?” said an anxious Stalin as they awaited Roosevelt’s arrival. “I feel fine,” said his nervous interpreter. One day a future Shakespeare may turn this meeting of giants into drama. But for now Mr Berezhkov’s account will do. How did they greet each other? With careful politeness. As Roosevelt arrived in his wheelchair he apologised for being a “little late”. Stalin insisted that the American was right on time. “I came a bit early.” What charming people they were. Suitably relaxed, they moved to the business of war. Roosevelt spoke of invading Europe to ease the German pressure on Russia. Stalin seemed pleased and said that after the war Russia would be a big market for American goods. They offered each other cigarettes, but said that they preferred their own. They allowed themselves a little gossip. Stalin observed that the French were collaborating with the Germans. Roosevelt said he did not like De Gaulle. They had a dig at Winston Churchill, who was also in Tehran to review the war. He was touchy about giving independence to Britain’s overseas possessions, Roosevelt said. He advised Stalin not to mention India. Mr Berezhkov made a shorthand note of the conversation as he translated, so the account is probably pretty accurate, even though he wrote his memoirs many years later. Any historian writing about Roosevelt, perhaps the most influential American president this century, is likely to refer to Mr Berezhkov’s notes. They appear to confirm that Roosevelt was taken in by the man he called Uncle Joe. He wrote to Churchill that he thought he could handle Stalin better than the British could. “He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.” Many people were fooled by Stalin. But none was more important than Roosevelt. Secrets of history Stalin once remarked, “I trust no one, not even myself.” But at least he seemed to be at ease with Valentin Berezhkov. If, as is likely, Stalin instinctively judged him to be loyal, that judgment has proved to be sound. After Stalin’s death Mr Berezhkov did not criticise his former master’s policies. He denied that the agreement made at Yalta in 1945 for the division of Europe had been broken by the Russians. The cold war was mostly the fault of the West, he said, although he conceded that the relationship between wartime allies inevitably changed when peace came. In old age Mr Berezhkov still seemed awed that he had been privy to some of the great secrets of his time. He recalled Stalin whispering to him in 1943 that Russia would declare war on Japan once Germany was defeated, and he passed the whisper to Cordell Hull, an American diplomat, at a Kremlin dinner party. He stuck with the Soviet Union until it broke up. In 1991 he moved to Claremont in California. American universities were pressing him to tell of his days at the centre of Russian foreign affairs. Mr Berezhkov obliged. He was thought to be good value. He would tell of meeting Hitler in 1940, and of shaking his hand “cold and moist to the touch”. And what about Stalin? Was he not a monster too? Mr Berezhkov would tell a Stalin story, of how he had ordered a guard to shoot a dog whose barking had kept him awake. But this, surely, was the human side of Stalin. What else should you do with a barking dog? Mr Berezhkov was trained as an engineer but had an ear for languages and as a child had picked up English and German from his parents. In 1940, when the Soviet Union was discussing the details of a peace pact made in 1939 with Germany (to be broken when Germany invaded in 1941), its Berlin embassy was short of linguists. The Soviet bureaucracy turned up young Berezhkov, who was then in the navy. Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, took him under his wing. How would he like to work permanently as a translator? An honour, said Mr Berezhkov, “but I have no specialised training”. That did not matter, Molotov said. “We’ve all had to learn different things.” Mr Berezhkov received a dark suit, a grey overcoat, a trilby hat and a diplomatic passport. “Thus began my diplomatic career,” with meetings with Hitler, Stalin and other makers of history. Later Mr Berezhkov was entrusted with the editorship of Soviet publications, including New Times, a foreign affairs weekly, and in the 1970s and 1980s worked in the Soviet embassy in Washington. In 1983 his son Andrei, then 16, wrote to Ronald Reagan saying he wanted to defect to the United States. His upset parents persuaded him to change his mind and he returned to Moscow. Andrei died the following year in a shooting accident, apparently unconnected with his proposed defection. Another son, Sergei, is an interpreter for Boris Yeltsin, and is said to be very loyal. (written at the time of B.Y.)
More Economist reviews... A HISTORY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIA. By Robert Service. Allen Lane; 688 pages; £25. Harvard University Press; $29.95 CRITICAL COMPANION TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. Edited by Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev and William Rosenberg. Arnold; 800 pages; £59.99. Indiana University Press; $59.95 IN HIS fresh and lively survey of recent Russian history, Robert Service spans the whole era from the rise of communism in the first decade of this century to the aftermath of its collapse in 1991. It is far more than a comprehensive summary of the established facts, and provides an introduction to the results of western and Russian research. The thoroughness of recent historical studies of 20th-century Russia is not generally realised. The crucial formative years of Stalinism—the 1930s—have, for instance, inspired in-depth accounts from western historians of the industrial working class (Donald Filtzer, Vladimir Andrle, David Hoffmann and many others), the railways (E.A. Rees and John Westwood) and the peasantry (Sheila Fitzpatrick)—and even of individual towns such as the entirely new “steel city” Magnitogorsk (Stephen Kotkin). Mr Service also draws on the work of talented young Russian historians based on previously closed archives. By meticulously sifting the personal files of Politburo members and the secret materials of the Politburo, one of them, Oleg Khlevnyuk, has traced how, by persistent arguments, blandishments and threats, Stalin overcame the resistance of his close associates to his more repressive policies and manoeuvred himself into an unassailable position. On one occasion in 1933, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s old friend from revolutionary days who had become supreme boss of heavy industry, defended his officials too strenuously against the attacks of the state prosecutor. Stalin berated Ordzhonikidze’s “hooliganism”, and accused the normally obsequious Lazar Kaganovich, who had unwisely sympathised with Ordzhonikidze, of joining “the camp of the party’s reactionary elements”. Kaganovich climbed down; Ordzhonikidze retreated into silence. It was a turning point in the internal history of the Kremlin. Another young historian, Elena Osokina, has used the departmental papers of the commissariat of supply, at first sight extremely boring, to disclose the “hierarchy of consumption” by which high-quality food and industrial goods were provided for the Soviet elite in the harsh 1930s. From the files of the former Communist Party, another Elena, Elena Zubkova, movingly depicts the naive optimism of army veterans and others in the immediate aftermath of victory in the second world war. (Their hopes for a more democratic socialism were soon snuffed out by Stalin.) And the indefatigable Viktor Zemskov has uncovered in amazing detail the secret-police statistics about the Gulag, resolving many of the arguments among western historians about the number of Stalin’s victims. Incidentally, Mr Zemskov’s findings contradict Mr Service’s statement that “about half” of the repatriated Red Army soldiers who had been prisoners of war were sent to the Gulag. According to Zemskov, a very high proportion of repatriated officers were incarcerated by Stalin but their fate was shared by only a small percentage of the rank and file. The main weakness of the history is its muted and incomplete treatment of the fierce, stimulating and sometimes bitter controversies which permeate and inspire historical research. Were Stalin and his successors betrayers of socialism, as in Trotsky? Or authoritarian modernisers, as in E.H. Carr and Barrington Moore? Or were they, rather, Milovan Djilas’s new class? Or Zbigniew Brzezinski’s totalitarians? Mr Service concludes that there is much to be said for all these approaches. On nearly all the great historical questions of a more specific kind he is content to present his own conclusions. Thus he tells us that the success of Petr Stolypin, a tsarist conservative reformer, was “very limited”—no doubt, but why do other historians take a much more enthusiastic view of his achievements? He applauds the achievements of the New Economic Policy which established the mixed economy of the 1920s, and attributes its failure largely to political factors. But he does not explain why some historians claim that the economy was fundamentally weak and unstable. He makes a powerful case for the view that the Great Purges of 1936-38 were primarily a result of Stalin’s personal whim, but both general readers and students with essays to write would have benefited from a summary of the alternative analysis in terms of social, economic and historical pressures on the regime. “Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution” is modelled on the “Critical Dictionary” published in 1989 to mark the 200th anniversary of the French revolution. It is even longer than Mr Service’s tome, yet covers a much shorter time-span—the first world war, the two revolutions of 1917 and the civil war which followed. The length is justified; this was a momentous period in world history. The volume consists of short essays by 46 historians—39 of them western, including Mr Service, and seven Russian. It is well edited, and the historians are well chosen: they have all undertaken substantial original research in this field, and almost all of them write plainly and concisely. Their individual essays often show insufficient appreciation of approaches which they do not share. But for the years they cover they correct the one-sidedness of Mr Service’s history. Many rival views are presented, and the collection as a whole provides a succinct exposition of the different interpretations of the key issues which are being debated. One or two of the contributors even have a good word to say about Lenin, a rare event in this post-communist world.
