Bolshevik Legacy
FRIEDBERG, MAURICE
Bolshevik Legacy_ The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny By Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko Harper & Row. 376 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Head, Department of Slavic-Languages and...
...Having had access to much information about Stalin's personal habits and off-the-record pronouncements, he wrote the present book out of a conviction "that to remain silent about Stalin today is to betray...
...Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Head, Department of Slavic-Languages and Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign One-time Soviet ambassador, military leader and secret police official Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko fell victim to Stalin's murderous purges of the late 1930s...
...Heangrily declares that "no one did so much as [Stalin] to discredit Communism...
...Alas, the author's assertion that he has at long last really grasped the essence of Stalinism is not borne out by his book...
...Nearly all...
...His widow committed suicide in prison, and his son Anton spent 12 years in Soviet labor camps...
...We learn that "Stalin never missed a chance to humiliate his mother publicly....Toward his father, Soso [Stalin) nursed a ferocious hatred...
...Vissarion Dzhugash-vili, the drunkard and debaucher, used to beat this wayward son unmercifully...
...Many of Antonov-Ovseyenko's accounts are not attributed to specific sources for obvious reasons, but they have a ring of authenticity...
...Buried among the sinister anecdotal material relating to Stalin himself is a personal recollection of Anton's...
...I have striven for truthfulness, and not only from a historian's sense of responsibility...
...He spoke from personal experience: "In Baku in 1908, it was with his boots that Koba [Stalin] knocked his pregnant wife, Keto, around...
...In the period from 1935 to 1941,19 million were arrested...
...The collectivization of agriculture, 'dekulakization,' and the repression and famine associated with those events cost the lives of 22 million people...
...Now over 60 and nearly blind, the younger Antonov-Ovseyenko lives in Moscow...
...One day, perhaps, a new edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations may include his pronouncement on the subject of footwear: "Boots are really comfortable things...
...Antonov-Ovseyenko bristles with sarcasm and hyperbole about his subject: "After the War, when he was really bored, only clinically verified idiots were promoted to top positions...
...For me, a youth of 19, Stalin's name was sacred...
...Errors were possible in such matters, but Stalin had nothing to do with it...
...Lest anyone doubt him, he quite logically assures us in the Preface that "nothing in my book has been made up...
...The truth is horrendous enough...
...That was how I had been trained...
...There are no fabrications in this book...
...In three decades, the Gensek [Stalin] didn't utter one intelligent word or carry out one good action...
...This adds up to a hundred million...
...In my portrait of Stalin," the author continues, "I have tried to expose his criminal essence, to reveal the gangster and hoodlum that he was...
...Would that it were so...
...The failure of subsequent Soviet leaders to punish, or even name, the accomplices to the Stalin era's crimes adds urgency to his task, as does the gradual restoration of the dictator to the Communist Pantheon...
...He is a historian by training and, as the orphan of a leading Bolshevik victim of Stalin, well connected with many people once close to the despot's entourage...
...What would be the need...
...And useful...
...Raping a 13-year-old and impregnating Lazar Kaganovich's 16-year-old daughter (dutifully delivered to the Great Leader by her daddy) are mere samples of the Generalissimo's routinely sordid behavior...
...The repressive operations that were continued during the War and postwar periods (1941-53) took the lives of another 9 million...
...Yet the bombast does not detract from the author's somber indictment: " Let me repeat the figures and round them out: In the civil war, 18 million people died as a result of the fighting, the 1921-22 famine, and the repression...
...Short sections in the book bear such revealing titles as "Provocateur," "Coward" (Stalin's teeth rotted because the thought of going to a dentist terrified him) and "Criminal...
...Indeed, muchof what follows reads likethestory of a particularly bloodthirsty godfather who delighted in murder and sadism for their own sake...
...That is how I thought in those days...
...He had been and remained the Great Leader...
...As for the executions of the enemies of the people, what could you say...
...The dictum that power corrupts, Antonov-Ovseyenko declares, "does not apply to Stalin: He was absolutely corrupt even before he seized power...
...He dealt the world Communist movement a carefully calculated, crushing blow, from which it has never recovered...
...Its title and the repeated claims in the text notwithstanding, this book does not deal with Stalin's entire reign, nor does it explicate the Stalinist brand of Communism...
...What an ocean of suffering I had to go through before I saw clearly...
...Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko blames Stalin most for besmirching Communism's nobleideals...
...You can kick someone in the head with them-so hard he' 11 never find all his teeth...
...Not all those arrested in the repressive campaigns perished, and not all who perished were on Stalin's 'conscience.' But nearly all...
...The War against Hitler's Germany cost the victors 32 million lives...
...Instead, we are given an astonishingly rich collection of incidents and scenes involving the Soviet leader himself and his sycophants, one that will prove invaluable to historians...
...As a guide at an exhibit named "Stalin in Soviet Fine Arts," his job was to show visitors a pictorial tribute to the dictator: "A year had not passed since the death of Antonov-Ovseyenko, and his son was glorifying his murderer...
...The state had the right to defend itself...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 19
