I Kill, Therefore I Am
ROCHE, JOHN P.
I Kill, Therefore I Am Stalin: Breaker of Nations By Robert Conquest Viking. 346 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by John P. Roche For over 40 years Robert Conquest has been the terror of...
...Conquest's definitive inquest overwhelms any notion that Stalin was an instrument of a higher force...
...by a nest of spies, saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries...
...Conquest, like the great 14th-century Christian philosopher William of Ockham in a different context, infuriated one and all with his impeccably documented demonstrations that Stalin's actions could best be described in the simplest form: I kill, therefore I am...
...Bureaucratic collectivism...
...I recall the old Mensheviks and German Social Democrats in New York in the late 1930s and '40s desperately trying to find the appropriate definition of Stalinism...
...The only comparable work is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich, a ruthless portrait etched in acid by a man who, like Conquest, is also a novelist and a poet...
...there was no rational pattern...
...it was his natural style...
...Conquest coldly and clinically charts Stalin's achievement of complete control, not as an instrument of History but as a demonically talented gangster, a do-it-yourself capo d'i tutti i capi...
...Leaving the Stalinists and Trotskyites off in a corner disputing the apostolic succession from Lenin, there have been essentially two Unes of interpretation: First, by those heavily imbued with Marxism, who kept searching for historical rules and forces that would provide a solid theoretical basis for Stalin's ascendancy or usurpation...
...Years ago someone made the argument that the Marshals must have been guilty because if they were not, they were incompetent clowns...
...Similarly, why didn't Trotsky...
...The late Max Shachtman, a friend after he became a Democratic Socialist and forgave me for my 1940 wisecrack that Trotskyites were "agents of a nonexistent foreign power," told me Trotsky constantly wrestled with the implication of Engels' inanity, which seemingly gave Stalin the imprimatur of History...
...True, unlike Stalin, Lenin didn't get his kicks from executions, but he (and Leon Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin, and...
...as FDR did...
...Shub and Dallin...
...In short, Conquest's Stalin is a magnificent, even poetic, act of historical retribution...
...The rational actor theorists, by contrast, simply could not accept the premise that Stalin would, for instance, destroy Russian and Ukrainian agriculture to eliminate the peasantry as a social force...
...Like the mad dictators in some Latin American novels, his only love was personal authority, and the peoples of his evil empire paid the sanguinaryprice...
...but that Trotsky and other old Bolsheviks (who were in fact "cosmopolitan" in the proper sense of the word) assumed loutishness was proof of stupidity...
...These utilitarians took even the purges in stride with the infamous motto, "You have to break eggs to make an omelette...
...that was a matter of chance...
...had no qualms about mass-murder "to advance the Revolution," i.e...
...When Conquest later entered the fray, suggesting that Stalin was a sadistic monster who looked on dialectical materialism as a murderer assesses a surgeon's knife, the sneering was audible...
...Indeed, it is possible that as Ramon Mercader's ice-ax pierced his skull Trotsky was meditating on Friedrich Engels' ex cathedra observation: That "Napoleon...
...in this anomic, psychotic universe...
...in their view, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for example, "bought time...
...Now he has returned for a encore that can best be described as a brilliant 327 page anti-eulogy...
...What rational actor would murder 80 per cent of his top military leadership with war threatening on two fronts...
...Time magazine's 1943 "Man of the Year" is now demonstrably the energumen who turned most of Eurasia into a "state of nature" that surpassed even Thomas Hobbes' catastrophic view of the human condition...
...to keep themselves in power...
...The whole thing made Kafka look like a leader-writer for the Economist...
...have some friends out to pop "Koba...
...How could Lenin ever have made it to power surrounded...
...rather, he sharply chronicles Stalin's road to total, megalomaniacal power, and has the advantage of access to heretofore inaccessible Kremlin archives...
...A continuation of Leninism...
...Lord, even the German General Staff officers, not noted for deviationist tendencies, tried to take out Hitler...
...Stalin let him make speeches, and meanwhile set about colonizing the apparat with his (to use a great Elizabethan word) "creatures...
...merely another Mayor of Chicago with an overactive police force...
...did Mikhail Bakunin leave no spiritual heirs...
...But in default of a Napoleon, another would have filled his shoes, that is established by the fact that whenever a man was necessary, he has always been found...
...As Trotsky's writings to his day of death show, he never knew what hit him...
...Was it "state socialism...
...Because he took Engels too seriously...
...he just loved to kill people, and decided that if necessary he might have to kill everybody to retain power...
...Hence their vigorous publicity and support for the factories in the fields, the collective farms where the benighted mujiks could achieve and luxuriate with happy tractors in true proletarian bliss...
...no pacifist...
...Reviewed by John P. Roche For over 40 years Robert Conquest has been the terror of Sovietologists...
...Things got extremely foggy as the deep-thinkers sought the Marxist philosopher's stone...
...The term I recall was "vulgar reductionism...
...Second, by the "rational actor" pilgrims, who assumed that Stalin must have had a model that determined his actions...
...A degeneration of Leninism...
...Yet at the end when Stalin was dying those capi Lavrenti P. Beria and Georgi M. Malenkov did not have the cojones to put a slug into him and finish it off...
...The NL's "Levitas Salon" had known Lenin at close range and barely escaped...
...this particular Corsican...
...As was emphasized in Stalin's day by Boris Souvarine, Victor Serge, and Anton Ciliga in Europe, not to mention The New Leader's resident sages, Raphael Abramovich, Boris I. Nicolaevsky and the two Davids...
...with all of its noble and savage dimensions...
...He makes no effort to write a comprehensive biography...
...He wastes little time flaying Lenin's "useful idiots," the apologists who accepted the Leninist-Stalinist myth and the legitimacy of the regime that the two launched...
...There was an old Russian tradition of assassinating autocrats...
...Only in the'90s are we witnessing what it is like to have a rebirth of humanity...
...No review can catch the richness of this study, but Conquest's description of ho w Stalin took out Trotsky is a vignette of the uses of boorishness...
...Besides, no rational person would fabricate an elaborate confession...
...Over the years Robert Conquest has made mincemeat out of the "science" of So vietology with his classic studies of The Great Terror, the famines, the Kirov murder, the Arctic gulags, the genocidal nationalities policy, to mention only a few...
...This was obviously not the route to professional popularity...
...according to their later forced confessions...
...Although I'm sure Conquest wants to abandon this genre, one more analysis would be fascinating: his understanding of why there were no real plots against the monster...
...Conquest got a far warmer reception in The New Leader ambience than was generally the case, largely, I think, because of his contention that Stalinism was vintage Leninism: When in doubt, shoot the opposition...
...Not that Stalin feigned being a lout...
...But he has vindicated the struggle of those, mostly dead now, who tried to alert the West to the horrendous consequences of considering Stalin...
...should have been the military dictator made necessary by the exhausting wars of the French Republic...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
