The Riddle of Stalinism
ULAM, ADAM B.
The Riddle of Stalinism Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism By Roy A. Medvedev Knopf. 566 pp. $12.50. Stalin: The History of a Dictator By H. Montgomery Hyde Farrar,...
...H. Montgomery Hyde's does not...
...Most of them are of course horrifying: For the student of this period who thinks no further details could shake or shock him, Medvedev may well hold a few surprises...
...Medvedev has no answer...
...Not totally free of the same complex, Medvedev extolls the Soviet secret police prior to Stalin's rule...
...679 pp...
...Being an orthodox Leninist of the Khrushchev type (albeit he goes further in his attacks on Stalin than Khrushchev ever did), Medvedev considers Stalinism a grotesque perversion of the true faith...
...Alas, Hyde also leans on several other works that, while not totally worthless, more properly belong under the heading of fiction than of history...
...In addition, he forgets that his special hero, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was not only a ruthless fanatic but one of Stalin's earliest allies and his faithful assistant until felled by a heart attack in 1926 just after finishing a violent denunciation of the General Secretary's enemies...
...Medvedev cannot tell us...
...For some reason the author, who has written a number of interesting and instructive books, this time gave us a bad and pointless one...
...author, "The Rivals: A merica and Russia Since World War 11" Except for their subject, these two books have little in common...
...It is written with genuine compassion for the blood that has been shed in the pursuit of power and in the name of social engineering...
...Stalin, as its author virtually acknowledges, is a rehash of previous biographies with but a very pallid viewpoint of its own, an effort that fails to compensate in style or thought for what it lacks in substance and fact...
...Yet even on his own terms, Medvedev fails to solve the historical puzzles of Stalinism...
...Still, this cannot be the full story...
...Indeed, he takes every evidence of a quarrel with or challenge to Lenin in his lifetime as a sign of Stalin's villainy...
...Rather than impose our own scale of values, we should accept this powerful and angry volume for what it is...
...Stalin: The History of a Dictator By H. Montgomery Hyde Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...Such faults notwithstanding, Let History Judge remains a moving and important book...
...There are other points on which one must take issue with Medvedev...
...Perhaps Orjonikidze's faith in historical determinism, his belief that the Party is always right, made it impossible for him to kill the man who was not only his tormentor and a maniac, but the leader of the Party and of world Communism...
...Let us then dispose quickly of Hyde...
...If Stalin was a mere criminal, how can one explain this strange man's success in accomplishing the goals he set for himself...
...Let History Judge is an impassioned polemic as well as an attempt at historical reconstruction...
...For instance, his certainty that Stalin was involved in Sergei Kirov's murder, though the only available evidence is far from convincing, seems to betray a definite residue of Stalinism: It was politically logical for Stalin to want Kirov out, therefore he must have been implicated...
...He died at 73, worshipped and feared by more people than anyone else in modern history...
...similarly, the future tyrant's rather conciliatory stance toward the Menshe-viks in March 1917 and his defiance of Lenin's instructions at the time throws an unexpectedly favorable light on that Stalin...
...What enabled this man to impose suffering and privations on his own people to an extent unprecedented anywhere in peacetime...
...Medvedev, too, covers some previously explored ground????particularly the Great Terror of the 1930s and '40s, the subject of Robert Conquest's excellent earlier work????but by drawing on a number of unprint-ed memoirs and personal recollections of Soviet survivors from that era, he offers new and important revelations...
...Roy A. Medvedev's study adds considerably to our knowledge about Stalinism...
...Why did Orjonikidze shoot himself rather than Stalin...
...Two of his sources are biographies of real distinction, whatever one thinks of their approach: Boris Souvarine's prewar classic, still valuable today, and Isaac Deutscher's well-known study...
...Despite Khrushchev's attempt to destroy him posthumously, Stalin has been restored to historical respectability, if not to his previous greatness, in the country he had so oppressed...
...When details of this kind were disclosed in Krushchev's day, however, Russians were supposed to be indignant that Stalin had disobeyed Vladimir Ilyich's wisdom, and presumably were expected to condemn this blasphemy as no less heinous than the killing of millions of innocent people...
...To me, for example, Stalin's critical attitude toward Lenin's philosophical writings around 1909 seems more than justified...
...It would be useless to go on...
...Reviewed by Adam B. Ulam Professor of Government, Harvard...
...Perhaps worse, while he has read the memoirs of Stalin's daughter he still parades Rosa Kaganovich as the Soviet dictator's third wife ("her" picture is even included in the book), although as Svetlana Alliluyeva explains at some length, no such person ever existed...
...Thus one who does not share Medvedev's own bias will often be unable to go along with him...
...12.95...
...We are again presented with old and entirely unsubstantiated chestnuts, too, such as Stalin's having been an agent of the Tsarist secret police...
...And it stands as a timely warning against premature enthusiasm for those historic breakthroughs that look so impressive from a distance, or after a short visit, or for those towering and enigmatic figures whose true nature is only revealed years after their deaths...
...Hence his conviction, unacceptable to the non-Communist reader, that there are no precedents or organic roots in Leninism for any of the features of Stalinism...
...It is doubtful that such motifs were inserted to make the book palatable to the present regime, for there is an authentic ring of sincerity throughout...
...He recounts how Stalin hounded and persecuted Gregory Orjonikidze, his erstwhile closest friend and collaborator, to the point that he finally committed suicide...
Vol. 55 • April 1972 • No. 7
