Years of Terror

...To some extent the author's theories influence his presentation of events...

...The more he acquired authority, the less he appeared in public...

...And he pays notable attention to the cultural transformation that took place in those dismal years, providing us with instructive examples of Socialist Realist plays, films and novels...

...What Tucker says may be entirely true, but is it not necessary to place greater emphasis on the conditions that enabled a Stalin to carry out his criminal acts...

...Yet it is difficult to trust even themost intelligent observers, forpower is enormously seductive, and Stalin certainly was powerful...

...Since he liked to hold forth in almost any circle, his vulgar, repulsive thoughts arewell recorded...

...It would be difficult, though, to contend that Stalin went so far as to purposely create grain shortages in the cities...

...Rather he gives us an analysis of Stalinism that is firmly grounded in empirical material...

...This ascribes too much credit to the foresight of the autocrat...

...Had Stalin been a different sort, he says, the peoples of the Soviet Union would have suffered less...

...After all, psychologically damaged people are common, yet rarely do they come to rule a huge nation...

...Thus in discussing the reasons for collectivization, Tucker singles out the war scare, probably consciously manipulated by Stalin, and gives relatively little weight to the procurement crisis that was, according to most historians, the immediate reason for his forcing millions of peasants into collectives...

...Reviewed by Peter Kenez Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz Adolf Hitler was an actor who loved the stage...

...He devotes much more space to Stalin's elimination of the Bolshevik leadership, for instance, than to collectivization and the mass murder of "kulaks...

...Heportrays him as a man with a wounded ego and little self-confidence —someone who compensated for his deficiencies by projecting them onto others and by trying to create an impression of himself as the greatest of revolutionary heroes...

...It is easier to maintain that Stalin did away with the Old Guard because of his own psychological needs than to show that "dekulakization" occurred as a result of those needs...

...Stalin was certainly guilty of having millions murdered, but there is little reason to suppose that he sought to bring the peasants to heel by starving massive numbers of them to death...

...It is more likely that for a while Stalin seriously thought popular front policies could succeed in lessening the threat of the war that he obviously, and with good reason, feared...

...He also closely examines Soviet foreign policy in the context of the international milieu during the decade prior to World War II...

...Tucker's excellent book is the fruit of years of study and contemplation by a mature scholar at the height of his intellectual powers...

...A vast amount of surviving newsreel footage shows his histrionic poses and the hypnotic effect his rambling speeches had on huge audiences...

...We can only deduce his motives from his actions, and these are open to conflicting interpretations...

...He insists that there is no gainsaying Stalin's" capacity for evil...

...The author's assessment of Stalinism rests on two major propositions...

...Its center is the most detailed description to date of the great purges, incorporating the results of interviews and newly published Soviet sources...

...Although there is nothing wrong with this analysis, one wonders whether it is possible to explain the extraordinary developments in the Soviet Union by pointing to the neurosis of one person...

...For another—and Tucker stresses the point —he intentionally copied what he understood to be the methods of such Tsars as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, regarding himself as their heir...

...The history of Stalin is the history of the unfortunate country he ruled...

...Being increasingly cut off from reality had to influence his judgments and acts...

...To be sure, many knowledgeable people who met Stalin came away impressed by his charm, simplicity and business-like manners...

...If this book included a discussion of the tremendous social and economic changes that took place as a result of terror andindustrialization, it would be a complete account of the USSR in the 1930s...

...In Tucker's opinion, the political effect of collectivization and the purges was to return Russia in many ways to its distant past...

...It has not made it necessary for Tucker to rethink his analysis of the course of Soviet history...

...Tucker believes, too, that Stalin's behavior requires a psychological explanation...

...The first is that it is a Russian phenomenon: Stalin was not an errant Marxist, but a Russian tyrant...

...In Stalin in Power, the second and pivotal volume of his monumental trilogy, Robert C. Tucker, the dean of American Soviet experts, does not attempt the impossible...

...They fail to tell us ho w he changed as the overall situation changed, and as he achieved maximum authority...

...Tucker himself rightly notes that by the end of the ' 30s Stalin came to judge what was going on in the country on the basis of movies he saw...

...Those who knew the falseness of his claims he humiliated, broke and physically eliminated...

...In addition, Tucker's Stalin is almost always a determined actor and hardly ever a victim of circumstances...

...For one thing, his distinct brand of tyranny could occur only in a country as economically, socially and politically backward as Russia...

...Nor is Tucker impressed by the arguments of such scholars as Arch Getty, Roberta Manning and Gabor Rittersporn, who in writing what they call non-Stalin oriented history, mitigate his crimes...

...But the fact is that in the early '30s Stalin was a different and more able politician than he was a decade later...

...Stalin in Power, moreover, confirms the correctness of the path he set out on in Stalin as Revolutionary, published in 197 3. Newly available material has added some bits of information to our knowledge...

...The matter may be as simple as Lord Acton put it: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely...

...But even as it stands, it is one of the best studies of the Soviet Union in that crucial period...

...Further, he demonstrates how nationalism was resurrected and how, in the process, Soviet Russia assumed characteristics of Nazi Germany...

...Tucker's second proposition is that history cannot be reduced to the conflict of impersonal forces—individuals and their decisions do matter...

...He apparently does not accept the view of Robert Conquest, who in The Harvest of Sorrow maintained that Stalin engineered the great famine of 1932-33 to break the resistance of the peasantry, and ofthe Ukrainians in particular...

...It is impossible, in short, to write a traditional biography of Stalin...

...He was an indifferent speaker, a skillful manipulator and, above all, extremely secretive...

...Conclusions based on psychology create a rather static Stalin...

...The historian is in no better position than novelists like Aleksandr Solzh?nitsyn and Anatoly Rybakov, who have drawn fictional portraits of the Soviet ruler...

...The actors who played the dictator in Soviet films were chosen not because of their similarities to him, but because they were tall, spoke without an accent and did not have pock-marked faces...

...In other words, the organizer of the propaganda apparatus became its main victim...

...They treat the purges, for example, as a consequence of factional struggles, confusion, and Moscow's lack of control over the countryside—a perspective entirely contrary to the approach of this disciplined work...

...The suggestion that he foresaw and worked for years to achieve the NaziSoviet Pact seems an overestimation as well...

...We know next to nothing about his inner world, his thoughts or how he rationalized his policies...

...It is therefore not hard to" understand" Hitler...

...He did not like to see himself as he was, demanding instead an idealized image...

...Josef Stalin was altogether different...

...Tucker, to my mind correctly, dismisses much of recent Western scholarship on Stalin without comment...

...But on balance mine are minor cavils...