Service Without a Smile

...The second was Bukharin's last letter, written from prison to his old friend, plaintively asking, "Koba, why is my death necessary for you?' The third was a letter from Marshall Tito saying that five assassins sent by the NKVD to assassinate him had been caught and warning that he would reciprocate...

...the cold-blooded policies that targeted entire classes of human beings for extermination...

...the monumental cruelty that condemned millions of innocent people for imaginary crimes are all laid out...

...He took pleasure in forcing people to grovel and conform to his own idiosyncrasies...

...But he doesn't...

...He was also a man of action, supervising armed robberies through which the Bolsheviks financed their organization...

...Getting Reagan Wrong J F YOU MANAGE TO PLOW THROUGH all 347 pages of Gil Troy's Morning in America, you will finally discover that Troy thinks, or at least asserts, perhaps to mollify Reagan admirers who read his book, that Ronald Reagan "saved the presidency from irreleMorning in America: vance" and "remains the How Ronald Reagan Invented greatest president since the 1980s by Gil Troy (PRINCETON, 417 PAGES, $29.95) Franklin Roosevelt...

...While his formal education was narrow, Stalin was by no means the uneducated boor so often depicted by his enemies...

...Here are some: "Reagan's anything goes ethos," Reagan "often con-fused great wealth with great virtue," "The childlike 'Being There' dimension about Reagan's saccharine political appeal...

...Those with connections to foreigners, members of minority ethnic groups, those with politically suspect pasts, cultural figures, and anyone unfortunate enough to have known Stalin in the old days were particularly at risk...

...But that should not be surprising since they come from an author who writes that "Tastes great...

...Service places no credence in persistent rumors that he was actually an agent of the tsarist secret police—he spent too much time in jail—butbelieves it plausible that Stalin might have informed on some of his factional opponents to get them out of the way...

...JUNE 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 B O O K S I N R E V I E W millions of lives...

...Service provides yet another chilling account of Stalin's maneuvers and policies from the early 1920s through the end of the 1930s...

...The collapse and military destruction of Germany virtually wiped out any lingering affection among Germans for the Third / Reich and its murderous leaders...

...Terrified ministers and aides had to be available if he decided to call their offices during his workday...

...and formerly a senior staff member for presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan...

...Indeed, an inordinate number of pages contain some sort of cheap shot, disparaging criticism, or belittling remark about "the greatest president" since FDR For instance, in the sentence immediately preceding his proclamation of Reagan's greatness, Troy declares that Reaganism at Lyn Nofziger is a writer based in Washington, D.C...

...None of these is a serious mistake but taken together they get one to wondering what other mistakes might be scattered through the book...

...When her arrest came to a vote in the Politburo, Molotov abstained but soon had second thoughts and apologized to Stalin at a subsequent Central Committee meeting for his lapse in revolutionary commitment...

...is a Budweiser beer commercial (see page 3), when in fact any football fan could have told him it was Miller Lite...

...We will annihilate his entire clan, his family...

...During one period of Siberian exile, he impregnated a 14-year-old...

...He had a number of her relatives killed, even though they had been among his closest associates in the years before the revolution...

...Joseph Stalin's legacy has been far more complicated...

...He wrote passable romantic Georgian poems good enough to get published...

...For the total annihilation of all enemies, both themselves and their clan...

...Service punctures several rumors and myths about Stalin...

...While Reagan on rare occasions raised his voice in anger, I doubt that any of those who worked with him when he was a governor, candidate, or president would agree that he was much of a thunderer or bellower...

...If Nancy were a shrieker I, without question, would have been one of those shrieked at...

...The collectivization campaign consolidated Soviet power in the countryside but dealt agriculture a blow from which it never recovered...

...It is possible that Stalin's mother prostituted herself to support the family, and Joseph's biological father may have been the local police chief...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W Service Without a Smile OMMUNIST MONSTERS have fared far better among historians than have Nazis...

...It is not just that after more than 600 pages, the reader longs to escape the nightmare world the dictator created and his Stalin: A Biography by Robert Service (HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 715 PAGES, $29.95) Reviewed by Harvey Klehr ROBERT SERVICE B O O K S I N R E V I E W unspeakable acts of cruelty...

...Within the Communist Party he deferred only to Lenin, and only the latter's illness and death in the early 1920s saved Stalin, who had insulted Krupskaya, Lenin's wife...

...His childhood was harsh with a drunken cobbler father, who beat both mother and son...

...UNLIKE HITLER WHO MURDERED PEOPLE because of their membership in some group or class, Stalin was far more unpredictable...

...For nearly two decades Stalin was a dedicated Bolshevik militant, in and out of prison and often living on the run...

...The Soviet Union carefully restricted access to all of its official papers, as well as to personal materials on its leadership...

...he never traveled to visit factories or collective farms and rarely met with delegations of workers or farmers...

...He had few scruples, either political or moral...

...Vyacheslav Molotov, longtime Foreign Minister, was among his most devoted and craven supporters...

...He frequently shuffled their positions and responsibilities and played them off against each other...

...Stalin's own errors and miscalculations added to the toll...

...its worst "perpetuated self-righteousness mixed with selfishness...

...Stalin often felt undervalued...

...Not all of Service's judgments or conclusions are equally plausible...

...Driven by an ideology that sanctioned the use of terror and repression in the name of the utopian goals of socialism, Stalin was not troubled at all by the casualties he exacted...

...Bullied as a child, Stalin grew up to be a bully himself, but he was a good student at a religious high school and then at a seminary in Tbilisi, where he studied secular as well as religious subjects...

...His revolutionary activities began shortly after he dropped out of the seminary in 1899, just prior to completing his studies...

...Troy writes as if he knew the persons about whom he is writing...

...The industrial facade built at such a great cost concealed the "theft, corruption, nepotism, informal patronage, misreporting and general disorder" that left the USSR a hollow shell nearly 50 years after the dictator's death...

...Likewise, his lack of experience as a worker or farmer did not inhibit him from pronouncing judgment on all sorts of technical questions and issues...

...Despite the loss of faith that had led him to leave the seminary, he married his first wife in a Georgian Orthodox ceremony in 1906 (she died two years later...

...In his last testament, Lenin urged Stalin's removal from his Party position, but Stalin persuaded his colleagues to suppress the document and then picked them off, one by one, over the next decade...

...The record will also show that Ed Rollins was not the White House political director in 1981 and that Jimmy Carter, though he may have studied nuclear physics, was not a "nuclear engineer...

...His second wife, suffering from mental and emotional illness, committed suicide...

...One paragraph pretty much epitoJUNE 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...

...Contrary to later claims by his enemies that he was an obscure provincial in the Party, Stalin was prominent enough to serve as a delegate to Party conferences in Finland, Sweden, and London in the next few years...

...He was a competent writer and editor, an "obsessive intellectual dilettante...

...Although Service strains to make a plausible argument about why Stalin might reasonably have failed to anticipate Hitler's decision to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet pact and attack in 1941, Stalin's blunders came close to costing the regime its life...

...At times, the book be-comes as much a political history of Russia in the 20th century as a biography, an understandable outcome when writing about someone who so dominated a regime, but a problem when the person slips from view because of the felt need to recount the history of the nation he dominated for so long...

...While kulaks (wealthy peasants) were targeted, along with 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2005 other class enemies, Stalin also destroyed imaginary enemies within his own party...

...Service also recounts that in 1921 Stalin made a rare visit to his mother, and in response to her question about whether he had the Tsar's blood on his hands, he "made the sign of the cross and swore that he had had no part in it...

...Stalin has always been an enigmatic human being...

...The man-made famines that cost cost millions of lives...

...He lived most of his life after rising to power insulated within the Kremlin...

...One was an angry letter from Lenin demanding Stalin apologize for treating Krupskaya with disrespect...

...Bushism, not a Reaganism...

...Together they capture the life and times of Joseph Stalin, a gangster, a killer, a Marxist-Leninist...

...although familiar, it never fails to horrify...

...He enjoyed demeaning his guests, frightening them, and getting them drunk to see what they would blurt out...

...In 1949, Stalin arrested Molotov's wife and sent her to the Gulag...

...The regime was never popular, had enemies all around, and could not afford to loosen its grip without losing its hold on authority...

...Nancy had better ways of showing her anger...

...Fellow prisoners in Siberia found him self-indulgent, heedless of others, uncouth, and determined to be the center of attention...

...The collapse of the USSR and the decision of Russian President Boris Yeltsin to open its archives resulted in an out-pouring of new material on Stalin...

...He bitterly resented the condescension with which other Bolsheviks treated him...

...Only Stalin's death probably saved him from a purge...

...Neither was Nancy Reagan a shrieker, as Troy also would have us believe...

...Western academics have engaged in heated debates about the extent of Stalin's responsibilities for Soviet repression and credited him with prodigious feats of nation-building, albeit at a terrible cost...

...Service suggests that the Cold War was started by the Marshall Plan, "a dagger pointed at Moscow," rather than by Soviet decisions to test Western resolve and Stalin's own Marxist-Leninist mind-set, which anticipated inevitable and continuing conflict with capitalist nations...

...Unfortunately Morning in America is filled with too many of Troy's opinions that he asserts as facts...

...After Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's leadership, some exposes appeared from Russian sources, and his daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, contributed some insights after her flight to the West...

...Despite his lack of military training, he was supremely self-confident, behaving "as though he had a monopoly on military judgment and that those who opposed him The man-made famines that were either fools or knaves...

...Stalin delighted in inflicting small and large indignities on others...

...First arrested three years later, he quickly became both a leader and a disruptive figure in the Georgian Marxist movement, joining Lenin's Bolsheviks...

...Old ties and loyalties meant little to him...

...At his all-male drinking parties, he humiliated subordinates...

...the coldblooded policies that targeted entire classes of human beings for extermination...

...Service reports that three notes were found in Stalin's desk after his death in 1953...

...60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2005 from turgid political or ideological treatises...

...The newest and most comprehensive biography of Stalin is by Robert Service, a British academic who has also written an acclaimed biography of Lenin...

...Service struggles to find a language appropriate to describe the man who orchestrated this horror show: "an extremely sensitive bully," a man of "gargantuan hypocrisy," a gangster who surrounded himself with thugs and deviants, a "village sorcerer who held his subjects in his dark thrall...

...Less filling...

...Moreover, Stalin killed many of the people who knew him best before the Bolsheviks seized power, and during his lifetime he deliberately concealed details about his life, infrequently granted interviews, or engaged in unscripted meetings with foreigners...

...His published writings rarely strayed Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University...

...Local NKVD offices had quotas to fulfill, and being arrested, even shot, was often just the (bad) luck of the draw...

...In fact, when Reagan reprimanded, which was seldom, he could better have been described as a low key reprimander...

...More disturbing than the mistakes or the mischaracterization of Reagan as a bellower and thunderer are Troy's all too frequent criticisms of Reagan, both as a person and as president...

...Well-written, insightful, and often witty, it still is not an easy or enjoyable book to read and lacks the dramatic panache of Montefiore...

...We will mercilessly annihilate everyone who by his actions and thoughts (yes, thoughts, too) assails the unity of the socialist state...

...After World War II, Stalin demoted him...

...Many others profess admiration for his accomplishments, which are alleged to include the industrialization of the Soviet Union, the disciplining of a fractious nation, the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the transformation of the USSR into one of the world's superpowers...

...One particularly chilling pronouncement he made at a Kremlin reception is a stark reminder: And we will annihilate every such enemy, even if he were to be an Old Bolshevik...

...The most informative material about him frequently came from Russian exiles, former opponents lucky or shrewd enough to escape his clutches...

...I know...

...the monumental cruelty that condemned millions of innocent people for imaginary crimes are all laid out...

...Fearing the popularity of the greatest Soviet general of World War II, Marshall Zhukov, Stalin had the war hero sacked on charges of looting German goods, which could have been brought against virtually any high-ranking officer...

...New insight into the decision-making process within the regime has emerged from his correspondence with other Soviet officials, while previously closed archives and previously restricted documents have been opened to scholars...

...Several books on Stalin have appeared in English, the best of which is Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Knopf, 2004), which provides a riveting account of the fate of Stalin's circle of friends from the early 1930s, when he launched his purges...

...True, every Reviewed by Lyn Nofziger now and then Troy has a word of praise for Reagan, but much more frequent are his words of denigration...

...But you'd never know it if you only read the first 346 pages...

...He would have us believe, for instance, that Reagan "thundered" when defending his administration against charges of racism and "bellowed" in stating his belief that an unborn child is still a human being...

...Once started, the Soviet purges swallowed up millions of people on the most spurious of grounds...

...He did not eat dinner until at least 9 p.m., after which he would work into the early morning...

...The wives of several other high-ranking officials were arrested...

...And almost any Republican could have told him that "the vision thing" was a George H.W...

...Although Service has little doubt that Stalin was a moral monster, he also notes that the only way the Bolsheviks could have taken power or survived in power was to employ brutal and dictatorial means...

...He underestimates Stalin's anti-Semitism, attributing many of his attacks on Jews and Judaism to political expediency or to the rigidity of the Marxist lenses through which he viewed the world, rather than to hatred of Jews per se (although he does admit that the Doctors' Plot, the attack on B O O K S I N R E V I E W "rootless cosmopolitans," and the plan to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia in the last years of Stalin's life make the case for anti-Semitism "plausible...

...Neither a riveting speaker nor an intellectual, he cultivated an image as a hard apparatchik After the revolution, he directed a harsh campaign of terror in the Northern Caucuses and Volgograd, earning a reputation as one of the most bloodthirsty Bolsheviks...

...As dictator, he carefully monitored a variety of cultural fields...

...Stalin was, he concludes, a "deeply disordered personality," "as wicked a man as has ever lived," and a "pockmarked little psychopath...

...Millions of Russians remain nostalgic about his reign...

...Small bands of Hitler admirers have never been able to generate much popular support in the last 60 years...

...And this is mild...