"Revolutionary, Statesman, Monster"

...And Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem," her elegy for Stalin's victims, is more durable than Khrushchev's secret speech...

...I think Ulam also overestimates Stalin's diplomatic skill...

...Were Gibbon alive today, I think he would agree with this somewhat narrower obverse of his proposition: If a man were called to fix the period during which the condition of the human race in a contemporary state was most unhappy and miserable, he would, perhaps with some hesitation, name that which elapsed in the USSR from the initiation of the forcible collectivization to the death of Stalin...

...But the point is overdrawn, even if there is something to it...

...Ulam develops an ingenious, though not wholly convincing, argument that Stalin behaved "normally'' when dealing with foreign affairs because he had no control over them and therefore had to retain a sense of reality...

...Life must not appear a placid affair, with myriads pursuing their humdrum activities, with real treason and sabotage only extraordinary and rare occurrences...

...In Stalin, the Man and His Era, Adam Ulam quotes these poets quite often...

...Ulam stresses that Stalinism was not just murderous: "Pompous slogans, grotesque rituals, doctored production figures, literature and art and scholarship harnessed by senseless formulas, the whole style of the period one of contrived vulgarity as well as of contrived unctuousness, an all-pervasive bureaucracy that was at once the most meddlesome and the most frightened of any in history—these are also important aspects of Soviet reality in Stalin's day...

...Deutscher...

...He claimed that he wrote it with "old-fashioned objectivity...

...At the same time, he stressed that a historian must demonstrate "the inevitability of the historic process with which he is concerned," and from that standpoint argued that Stalin's ruthless butchering of his opponents, followers and others was something that could not be avoided...

...As for his style, it is delightfully readable, lucid, urbane, and ironical...

...visiting professor of history, Stanford University IN The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon took the well-being of a people as his criterion for evaluating its ruler...

...In the early '30s, at the beginning of Stalin's terroristic reign, Osip Mandel-stam wrote that "everywhere is heard the voice of the Kremlin mountaineer, the destroyer of life, the peasant killer...

...He gives a skillful analysis of the interaction between Stalin's personality and social and political developments, that is, the external reality Stalin invented, produced and—when there was no other possibility—faced...

...Confronted with the criticism that he had justified Stalin's record, Deutscher retorted that the struggle of the regime's opponents, although doomed to failure, was also inevitable: "Some of the proudest moments in man's history are those when he struggles against the inevitable...

...He is concerned with reality rather than ideological mystifications, and he tries to avoid the pitfalls of both hagiography and demonology: "The explanation of his life is as banal as many of Stalin's own speeches: he was corrupted by absolute power...

...platitudes being worshipped as sublime wisdom...

...Moreover, even within the myopic vision of a revolutionary romantic, it can hardly be maintained that the coerced recantations and false "confessions" of the Old Bolsheviks constituted "some of the proudest moments in man's history...

...Even those who recoiled in horror asked 'Why' when they should have said, 'Not only is this evil, but it does not make any sense.'" Ulam's Stalin is not a man with fixed personality traits, but one whose character developed in the course of his progression from youthful revolutionary conspirator to aging paranoid dictator...

...To deny this struggle would have been to strip Communism of all its uplifting meaning...

...As Ulam puts it: "Soviet Russia of today is still much more Stalin's than Lenin's...

...The generation of Russian revolutionaries which perished in resisting Stalin's autocracy represented no less than he did an historic necessity, but one of a different kind...

...Whereas Trotsky considered him "a great blur" and others saw in him an intellectual nonentity, Ulam, on the contrary, views his subject as quite an extraordinary person...

...Ulam genuinely tries to explain why so many innocent people (no less than under Hitler) died during the Stalin era...

...That many of those absurdities persist today is testimony to the imprint of Stalin's personality on the Soviet mentality and Soviet institutions, and demonstrates that Stalin's legacy has remained the dominant factor in the two decades after his death...

...clearly, could put the problem in a Marxist perspective only by somehow justifying the fate of the millions who had perished in prisons and forced labor camps...

...Stalin's orphans" were of course numerous, yet the era is best summed up by Russia's poets...

...The issue, however, involves not just the efforts of Stalin's opponents in the '20s, but the destinies of innumerable people...

...Like Nadezhda Mandelstam, Ulam answers this question by referring to the existentialist-religious craving inherent in the revolutionary faith, and to the need to preserve it by all means, including terror: "Without terror, who would have failed to notice the patent absurdity of Stalin's rule—the whole Soviet nation and many in foreign parts prostrating themselves before one man...

...He does not resort to Deutscher's slick formula that "Stalin undertook to drive barbarism out of Russia by barbaric means...

...It sticks to plain facts, does not indulge in grandiose historical rationalizations, Marxist or otherwise, and successfully incorporates into its narrative the new material on the old tyrant that has accumulated in the period from 1953-73...

...Ulam provides a sober view of a somber era...

...His is the first full biography of the Soviet ruler since the pioneering study by Boris Souvarine that has Gibbon's humanistic perspective...

...But in general he is very careful, and when he indulges in speculation he both indicates that the evidence is insufficient and elaborates the basis for his tentative conclusions...

...Ulam knows barbaric means do not produce civilized attitudes, and he spells out specific reasons for, as well as the more general significance of, the unnatural mortality rate under Stalin: "They died so that life should prove the truth of dogma...

...Life must be seen as a constant struggle between forces of light and darkness...

...For the past 20 years, the most controversial biography in this field has of course been Isaac Deutscher's...

...As Robert Payne said in his recent book on Hitler: "Wherever there is absolute authority, the temptation to indulge in terrible fantasies is always present...

...Absolute power turned a ruthless politician—but within the Soviet context not unusually ruthless—into a monstrous tyrant...

...This humanistic viewpoint made him single out the age of the Antonines in the 1,400 years he was scrutinizing: "If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Corn-modus...

...Indeed, his follies make it difficult to explain his achievements as a statesman...

...Thirty years later, after the dictator's death, Aleksandr Tvardovsky described him in a similar vein: "Like a dread spirit he stood over us...

...His deeds left an indelible mark on his subjects, who were forced to convince themselves that they loved him, and to surrender themselves to the vicarious glories of his personality cult...

...Although he avoids any direct polemics, Ulam makes short shrift of all such nonsense by pursuing ethical, political and historical premises that are diametrically opposite to Deutscher's...

...This brings him to the critical question: "What elements of greatness enabled Stalin to overcome the effects of his own crimes and obsessions and die in old age worshipped and feared by so many...

...And faith in the creed of Marxism-Leninism endowed him with a sense of his historic mission and enabled him to stifle any scruples and inhibitions in protecting that power...

...But once Stalin was gone, only the direct beneficiaries of his rule—those who owed their positions to him—indulged in nostalgia about the good old times...

...and thus his struggle, too, is inevitable...

...Thus Deutscher maintained that "in order to save it for the future and to give to it its full value, history may yet have to cleanse and reshape Stalin's work," but Ulam does not look at history as a detergent...

...Occasionally, he tends to deduce explanations from logical considerations and reasonable assumptions, although he himself points out that many of the tyrant's acts had little to do with reason or logic...

...The question is not only what enabled and impelled one man to impose so much suffering as well as to evoke so much heroism from his people, but also why he exacted and they endured so much that was merely preposterous...

...The rest hovered between a conditioned-reflex of awe for a departed father-figure and a realization of the misery he had caused...

...In fact, it is especially suitable for his subject, since irony is the only way to deal adequately with the surrealistic absurdities of Stalin's reign...

...he simply declared that he stood by the interpretation of Stalin and Stalinism given in his book...

...During that time, the Soviet Union was dominated by one individual to an extent rarely, if ever, seen in the history of states...

...Some of Ulam's interpretations are necessarily controversial, since the material throwing light on Stalin's motives is relatively scarce...

...Deutscher did not explain the nature of the difference between these two kinds of "historic necessity...

...so many people ready to accept a vision of the world in which a Witches' Sabbath of 'traitors,' 'wreckers,' and 'murderer doctors' is continuous...

...Stalin's successes in this field were due more to the ignorance, naivete, or plain political obtuseness of his rivals and opponents than to his personal abilities...