Human Resources

...Even as head of the secret police, Dzierzynski retained a hint ofthat adolescent purity...

...Literature and the other arts, particularly the cinema, were to serve the people, that is, the state—that is, Stalin...

...Neither of those two reasons account for his actions...

...Jews wanted revenge for the pogroms that commenced in the 1880s, he maintains...

...He should be careful, as Andropov pointed out in a poem that turns a great truism on its head: "All power" said a moron in his cups, "Tends inevitably to corrupt...

...We do not grasp how he kept his court in thrall, and that after all was the secret of his power...

...The Soviet atomic project, a saga in itself, deserves more space than Rayfield allots— not least because it was run by Beria, who, most of the scientists agreed, was an effective manager...

...It is as hard to imagine a Trotsky who is not Jewish, he argues, as to conceive of a Stalin who is...

...Vladimir Mayakovsky advised young people to model their lives on Dzierzynski's, though in the end the poet chose another path, taking his own life in part because of disillusionment with Soviet Russia...

...But an oil-rich nuclear power with a past of greatness cannot stay sidelined for very long...

...Stalin may have been hurried from life by Beria, Khrushchev and the rest, but we will never know for sure...

...Cautious by nature, Stalinnever came close to using the atomic bomb...

...Russia, he contends, has never undergone the complex process, at once social and spiritual, of coming to terms with its own sins: "Until the story is told in full, and until the world community insists that the legacy of Stalin is fully accounted for and expiated...

...All that matters is where he takes the country...

...When Rayfield explores what drew Stalin's henchmen to him and what prevented any serious attempts on his life, the result is similarly elusive...

...Rayfield's book is a valuable contribution to the recently accelerated project of evaluating Stalin—an undertaking, he rightly remarks, that should not be confined to Russia itself...

...Already there are signs that it is plotting its course for the 21 st century based on the exigencies of the moment, choices made by President Vladimir V. Putin, and larger factors of its history...

...A professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London and the author of The Literature of Georgia: A History, Rayf ield makes much of the fact that Stalin and his toughs were a literary bunch...

...Why has true de-Stalinization never transpired...

...The group includes the heads of the secret police from Felix Dzierzynski, its founding father, to Lavrenti P. Beria, its longest serving chief and the only one to survive Stalin (albeit not for long...

...For a time Russia may remain at the margins of our consciousness, since the Axis of Evil has replaced the Evil Empire...

...Much of their behavior remains inscrutable, though, if only because it is impossible for a sane person to comprehend why some men can send millions to their death and not realize that they themselves, in their predecessors' wake, would meet the same fate...

...One of the most ruthless mass murderers in history now possessed the world's most lethal weapon...

...His objective, he explains in his Preface, is "to examine Stalin's path to total power and the means— and the men—that enabled him to hold on to it...

...Of the five main leaders of the secret police, Dzierzynski and Menzhinsky were of Polish extraction, Genrikh G. Yagoda was Jewish, and Beria was a Georgian...

...was a universal genius—a scholar and an artist as well as a strategist...

...There was a sort of mutual admiration fostered between secret policemen and poets, who were drawn to each other "like stoats and rabbits—often with fatal consequences for the latter group...

...Politics and literature have rarely been as tightly intertwined as they were in the USSR, but Rayfield sometimes goes too far with this connection, as in his discussion of Stalin's crackdown on culture in the mid-'30s: "Stalin was now preparing to deal with the intelligentsia, but because he regarded himself as a creative mind, because he depended on writers, cinematographers and composers for his entertainment, he moved stealthily...

...In his native Georgia, he had been brought up to believe the "ideal ruler...

...Other members of his inner circle— Khrushchev, Lazar M. Kaganovich, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, et al.—appear on center stage, but the focus always reverts to "those willing not just to die, but to kill for him...

...A voracious reader all his life, Stalin wrote poetry in his youth...

...The same was true of Dzierzynski, the son of a math teacher whose pupils had included Anton Chekhov...

...Yet in their case what mattered was a certain cast of mind, not a knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish, or adherence to religion...

...After Stalin's death in 1953, Beria turned out to be surprisingly liberal and might have proved a reasonable interim ruler...

...Revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky, Lev B. Kamenev and Grigori E. Zinoviev had few if any ties to their Jewish ancestry and culture...

...Nor does this seem to greatly interest the author...

...Rayfield's account of Stalin's decline focuses in on social pathologies like the anti-Semitic campaign that culminated in the infamous Doctors' Plot...

...Although Nikita S. Khrushchev's attacks on Stalin and Stalinism were more than mere political maneuvering, says Rayf ield, they were neither deep nor comprehensive, and they were buried by the resurgent, if sluggish, Stalinism of his successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev...

...Russia will remain spiritually sick, haunted by the ghosts of Stalin and his hangmen and, worse, by nightmares of their resurrection...

...He telescopes the last seven years of Stalin's life into 30 pages, giving his death the short shrift of one paragraph...

...Some revelations of the perestroïka era helped restart the process, but disillusionment with democracy and its attendant inequalities has made the image of a leader who is feared and respected at home and abroad more attractive to the ruling class and a significant portion of the population...

...The author also sheds new light on Stalin and Soviet history by studying the dictator through the shifting perspectives of the men he surrounded himself with: "If Stalin had genius, it was as a personnel officer...

...Why minorities—prisoners in "the prison house of nations," as Lenin called Tsarist Russia—were attracted to Communism's universalist message is no mystery...

...Some of his explanations for Jewish prominence are persuasive...

...Nothing that happened in those years, however, was as crucial as Russia becoming an atomic power in 1949...

...oddly, it was instead the anti-Stalinist Khrushchev who would approach the brink...

...His successor, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, was the author of a well-known novel, Demidov's Affair, which, Rayfield tells us, contains the "blend of depravity and socialism that we find in Oscar Wilde...

...Rayfield quotes the crack that the Russian Revolution was "made by Jewish brains, Latvian bayonets and Russian stupidity...

...Clever men should think astutely, And not repeat a thought so feeble, Power in fact is corrupted by people...

...Indeed, Donald Rayfield's new book concludes that the legacy of Josef Stalin is shaping a state again ruled by criminals and secret policemen...

...During the 45 years of the Cold War, it was a constant presence in the news and in our lives...

...only Nikolai Ezhov was Russian...

...Now it only merits attention when something outlandish happens— the jailing of the country's richest man or the slaughter of innocents in Beslan...

...For Stalin Dzierzynski's only defect was fastidiousness: He disliked fabricating evidence...

...And absolute power corrupts absolutely...

...At the moment, Putin seems intent on accruing more and more power...

...He recruited apparently mediocre men and used them to great effect...

...So there is nothing unprecedented, or un-Russian, about a former secret police chief reigning from the Kremlin...

...In 1982 when former KGB Chairman Yuri V Andropov became the leader of the Soviet Union, many Russians were hopeful his background in intelligence signaled that he was well-informed, realistic, competent...

...Reviewed by Richard Lourie Author, "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel," "Sakharov: A Biography" Russia is slipping from our minds...

...He also cites an unsourced statistic that in 1922 Jews "reached their maximum representation in the Party (not that they formed a coherent group) when, at 15 per cent, they were second only to ethnic Russians at 65 per cent...

...Especially in the early years of the Revolution, Stalin's hangmen and the Party's inner circle were composed of a disproportionate number of nonRussians...