Updating the Tragic History

...The most notable example is Jerry F. Hough in How the Soviet Union is Governed, his revised and retitled version of the late Merle Fainsod's classic study...

...Medvedev further offers the fullest account to date of the circumstances—including a rebuff from her husband—surrounding the suicide of Stalin's second wife in 1932 at the height of the forced collectivization drive...

...Doubtless one can find a modicum of ironic justice in the contrast to the virtual silence marking Stalin's birthday, even if it is impossible to regard the surviving sects of the Fourth International as anything but ghosts from the past...

...The book was conceived and started at the height of Nikita Khruschev's de-Stalinization, but was completed in the much chillier atmosphere prevailing after his fall from power...

...In addition to Trotsky's writings, he has recently had full access for the first time to Western scholarship on Stalinism and, from his superior direct knowledge of Soviet sources, he is able to correct Western authors on many points...

...Medvedev also persuasively refutes with statistical arguments the recently advanced "ethnic" theory of Stalinism, whereby it is seen as the revenge of Great Russians against the alleged victory of the national minorities in the Revolution of 1917...

...Many surviving Old Bolsheviks, for instance, communicated with him after the publication of History, and he frequently reports and quotes directly from their testimony...

...Medvedev's criticism of Trotsky is particularly interesting because 30 years later, in Let History Judge, he echoed Trotsky's insistence on the fundamental discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism...

...He provides evidence that Nikolai Yezhov was not at all the malevolent psychopath he has frequently been pictured as, but was rather an ordinary, quite likeable functionary (the "banality of evil" syndrome again...

...Moreover, he opened closets that Stalin's successors preferred to keep closed, such as Stalin's and the NKVD's involvement in Sergei Kirov's assassination, the excuse for starting the Great Terror...

...Citing the work of Maksudov, a dissident Soviet demographer, Medvedev concludes that the War, the famines resulting from forced collectivization, and the repressive measures killed a total of 22-23 million people...

...Also, while Medvedev is surely correct in asserting that it is impossible to conceive of Lenin ever resorting to mass terror, I regret that he does not extend the same charity to Trotsky: Referring to "some historians" who have said that Trotsky would never have carried out "the appalling terror of the 1930s," he remarks only that "Trotsky should not be idealized...

...Their figure of over 60 million from 1918-53, he maintains, includes natural deaths...

...Medvedev thinks, for instance, that over a million Party members died in the purge...

...The only observances, if they can be called that, are likely to be a few academic conclaves of Sovietologists (Sta-linologists...

...Indeed, he states that On Stalin and Stalinism is intended as an alternative to a full-scale revision of the Let History Judge, that it is designed to correct and enlarge his previous treatment of several subjects on which he has acquired new knowledge or new perspective in the past decade...

...The tone of the present book is markedly different...

...Medvedev also presents new material on matters involving particular individuals...

...Nevertheless, in many ways Medvedev still remained at the extreme outer limits of the earlier official attack on the Stalinist "cult of personality," as the book's editor, David Joravsky, felt constrained to point out in his Introduction to the 1971 English translation...

...attempting to add to our still highly incomplete knowledge of the tyrant's appalling achievements...

...But he does not doubt that Stalin was planning a purge in 1953 that was to be comparable to the Yezhovschina, as well as an intensification of measures against the Jews...

...Although Medvedev is frequently critical of Solzhenitsyn's version of historical events, he accepts in full the novelist's brilliant portrait of the aging, ailing Stalin in The First Circle...

...She means by this that, since the publication in 1969 of his enormous study of Stalinism, Let History Judge, Medvedev has had the opportunity to read the bulletins and literature of the Trotskyist opposition, enabling him to discuss critically Trotsky's reactions during the terrible events of the 1930s...

...Medvedev purposefully overstepped the limits of Khrushchev's campaign, writing not of Stalin's "mistakes" but of his crimes...

...Nowhere in the world will there be dancing in the streets to celebrate the event...

...Trotsky's view, Medvedev shows, was just as defective and clouded by wish-fulfillment as that of other observers who lacked his unique experience and had different ideological commitments...

...In Let History Judge, the author essentially attributed Stalinism to the pathological cruelty of the despot himself...

...October of this year was also a centennial month, that of the birth of Stalin's great defeated adversary, Leon Trotsky...

...Yet if some Western sources have exaggerated the toll exacted by Stalinism, Professor Robert C. Tucker of Princeton has called to my attention the fact that others have greatly underestimated the number of purge victims...

...In her Foreword, Roy Medvedev's translator, Ellen de Kadt, remarks that "this book could as well have been called Trotsky and Stalin...

...Yet the month should not pass unnoticed: It ought to be an occasion for commemorating Stalin's victims...

...Nevertheless, it needs to be added that he fails to note sufficiently that the present bureaucratic authoritarian state might at the very least facilitate the rise of another Stalin should one appear in a strategic location...

...Still, he continues to hold (against Solzhenitsyn) that there is a qualitative difference between them—that the Chekist terror of 1918-21, though harsh and excessive, was in no way comparable to the relentless, planned terror of 1934-37...

...In the present work, Medvedev significantly modifies that position without completely abandoning it...

...He contends, too, that it is utterly inaccurate to describe the current Soviet regime as "Stalinism without Stalin...

...Medvedev does now accept that there was a kind of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism...

...We learn that, according to his son, Mikhail Tomsky, one of the three major figures of the Bukharinite opposition, committed suicide immediately after he denounced Stalin as a murderer to his face...

...The plans were shelved, probably for good...

...Medvedev tells the story of how in 1969, on the 90th anniversary of Stalin's birth, protests inside the Soviet Union and by Communist leaders in Eastern Europe finally deterred the Kremlin from proceeding with plans to rehabilitate him...

...At the same time, the author refutes sensational and widely-circulated tales that Stalin was a Tsarist double agent, that he somehow planned the murder of Lenin, and that he himself was murdered at the instigation of other members of the Politbureau to avert a new Party purge...

...Although he modestly fails to say so, the circulation of Let History Judge, printed clandestinely earlier that year, no doubt contributed to this outcome, and to the silence marking Stalin's centennial...

...He quotes Maksudov's conclusion that "No tyrant, past or present, was able to erect such a mountain of skulls, those of his own subjects as well as those of his bitterest enemies...

...Like Medvedev, 1 believe that the mourning should include the Old Bolsheviks for whom Solzhenitsyn is unable to muster any compassion, along with the legions of nameless Ivan Denisoviches who can only be collectively rather than individually remembered...

...Perhaps Medvedev's most important contribution in this book is his summary of the demographic costs of Stalinism...

...Hough cites "official" Soviet demographers to suggest a figure somewhere between "the low hundreds of thousands" and as few as "tens of thousands...

...Considering this, it was a noble and courageous work...

...I am fully persuaded that he is right in both cases...

...He observes: "Given such extraordinary figures, there is hardly a need for exaggeration, doubling or tripling them as certain emigres have tended to do...

...He argues that Solzhenitsyn and Western writers like Robert Conquest have exaggerated the numbers of people who died during the terror and the War...

...author, "Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses" December 21 of this year marks the centennial of Josef Stalin's birth...

...This occasion was acknowledged by modest ceremonies in a number of countries, including a gathering in Mexico to which some prominent foreigners associated in the past or present with the Trotskyist movement were invited...

...Specifically, he failed to grasp the magnitude of Stalin's terror and how effectively it achieved extinction of all Bolshevik oppositionists...