Reinventing Stalin

...It was Stalin who spearheaded the macabre idea of embalming Lenin's body for public viewing in Red Square...

...The nature of Stalin's own national identity has long been a subject of debate, with assertions that he was a Georgian chauvinist pitted against evidence of his Russian bias...

...Stalin understood self-reinvention in his bones, having been exposed at an early age to the formulaic hagiographies of Orthodox saints...

...Stalin made little distinction between his personal and political life, and as Service demonstrates in this balanced, tightly written work, it is necessary to consider each in the context of the other...

...Up north in Russia's capital, portraits of Stalin are still a rare sight, but the dictator's gargantuan esthetic is making headway...

...There he is, just as Georgians remember him—proudly dressed in military uniform and putting a match to his trademark pipe...

...Service devotes an engrossing chapter to the fundamental austerity of what he dubs the "cult of impersonality...

...As Service sees it, Stalin's indiscriminate terrorizing of his own population was not very different from what we define as terrorism today...

...The problem presented by the Alliluyevs was that they knew him so well," says Service...

...Born in 1878, the son of an alcoholic cobbler with a history of business failures and a penchant for violent outbursts, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as he was christened, would likely have remained in his Georgian hometown of Gori were it not for his mother's determination to have him enter the priesthood...

...When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin immediately began deifying him...

...But it was Stalin who had the idea of using the bad old past to bring modernity about...

...Of course, not all of Stalin's reforms could be sugarcoated with tradition...

...It was the natural culmination of what Khrushchev was to call Stalin's "cult of personality...

...There may never have been another ruler who placed such an emphasis on breaking with the past while constantly drawing on his own background...

...The author does not simply dismiss Stalin as a cynical figure whose system of beliefs was motivated exclusively by a quest for power...

...It is the master of reinvention and nostalgia that Oxford Russian history professor Robert Service brilliantly brings to life in Stalin, his authoritative new biography (Harvard, 715 pp., $29.95...

...After all, they learned the art from Stalin himself...

...In the wake of the botched market reforms of the 1990s and the destabilization caused by the Chechen conflict, that legacy, however misperceived, has become increasingly attractive not only to the predictable diehards still around from the good old days, but to the discontented segments of the younger population...

...By painstakingly deconstructing Stalin's personal reinventions and self-created legacy, Service takes an important step toward revealing the man behind the myth...

...To explain is not to excuse," Service declares while describing the brutal collectivization campaign...

...the Civil War militant who torched villages that failed to comply with Red Army demands...

...And, at a Red Army banquet celebrating its victory, he raised a toast to the Russian people, singling them out as "the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country...

...And this meant they needed a 'tsar.'" Service speculates that Stalin's early introduction to the fixed imagery of the Orthodox Church may well explain "the extraordinarily detailed control over publicly available material" on him...

...By Service's assessment, the hypersensitive and naturally vengeful Stalin fed his propensity toward violence on a diet of distorted Georgian tribal machismo and Bolshevik justifications for terror...

...he quite chillingly resorted to violence when people stood in his way...

...Never abandoning his wide-angle lens, Service shows how Stalin's experiences of religion, nationalism, peasant lore, and imperialism became the channels through which he funneled his radical agenda...

...Service dismisses arguments that the intensification of arrests in the late 1930s was motivated by the need for added slave labor, pointing out that far fewer people would have been killed if this were the case...

...Even as his papers were destroyed after his death, members of the Party Presidium vying for leadership had his body embalmed and placed next to Lenin's...

...In contemporary terms, terrorism is usually portrayed as being inflicted from the outside on an innocent population, but Stalin, whom Service calls the "Great Terrorist" in a meaningful update on Robert Conquest's term for the purges, held on to power by inflicting terror from within...

...In 1943, to rally the country against the Germans, Stalin relaxed his stranglehold over the Orthodox Church...

...Moreover, he felt himself to be in constant danger, and since for him the personal was political, danger to himself meant danger to the country...

...By all accounts he was a believer as a boy, attending church regularly and even leading the choir...

...and the emerging dictator who began his collectivization drive by demanding quotas of grain at gunpoint...

...It is, however, an amalgam of selected Marxist and nationalist tendencies that could be picked over privately to suit his political needs and remade publicly to maintain his cult status...

...Just a short metro ride from Moscow's downtown, the Don-Stroi Construction Company is rearing what it bills as Europe's tallest residential building, a massive eighth sister to the seven gothic skyscrapers Stalin erected across the city...

...A December poll by the independent Levada Center found that 21 per cent of the Russian population believes Stalin was a "wise leader who brought the USSR to power and prosperity...

...Keenly aware that by putting a human face on the monster he is exposing himself to charges of being an apologist, Service nevertheless perseveres in setting the record straight in this comprehensive and landmark biography...

...Much has been made of the connection between tire 1932 suicide of Stalin's second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, and the subsequent outbreak of the purges...

...It is doubtful that Stalin felt a need to fix a national identity for himself in his own mind," says Service...

...It also is certainly significant that President Vladimir V. Putin, in the buildup to his attack on big business and his campaign to centralize power, reintroduced the Soviet national anthem in 2001 with new words by its original librettist...

...But Tbilisi, where he began studying at age 15, was a hotbed of nationalist stirrings, and its Russian-dominated Orthodox seminaries were, as Service puts it, "the finest recruiting agency for the revolutionary organizations...

...Moreover, Lenin and Trotsky had theorized the use of violence to achieve political aims long before Stalin set the standard...

...A good deal of attention has recently been devoted to nostalgia for the Stalin era, and understandably so...

...Perhaps only someone touched by old-fashioned fanaticism could have pushed for so radical a break with the past...

...True, other Bolsheviks agreed that the former way of life required violent overthrow...

...Increasingly he opted for the status of state icon at the expense of a realistic image of himself...

...The precedent of sculpting a Soviet icon out of the raw material of a life proved so effective that one of the first de-Stalinizing actions taken by the Party Presidium after Stalin's own death in 1953 was to scatter his library and incinerate many of his personal writings...

...Stalin, according to Service, had always been violent...

...Stalin set out to smash Russia's traditions...

...Through art, cinema, the press, and literature, Stalin reinvented himself by subjecting his image to a strict set of criteria that had its rival only in the iconographie inflexibility of the Orthodox Church...

...The more the tyrant is exposed for who he was, the harder it will become to wax nostalgic for his times...

...In fact, Stalin had good reason to fear his population, which had revolted under repressive rulers in the past and was proving resistant to his brutal policies...

...He wished to float free of his personal history...

...When his sisterin-law Anna Alliluyeva included some all too humanizing anecdotes about him in a memoir she had received permission to publish in 1946, Stalin had her sentenced to 10 years of labor despite the fact that her family had sheltered him on his return from exile in 1917...

...Stalin was as wicked a man as has ever lived...

...was a line from a poem of his printed to wide acclaim in the local literary magazine Iveria), but he quickly moved on to Marxism, dropping out of the seminary just before graduation to become a full-time revolutionary...

...Despite the intense rejection of Stalinism that followed Nikita S. Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation, Russian society has yet to kick the giant off his pedestal and turn the icon back into a man...

...Rather his priorities were focused upon ruling and transforming the USSR and securing his personal despotism...

...Service sees things differently, calling Alliluyeva's suicide a profound shock to Stalin yet one that merely pushed him further down a familiar path...

...For portraits of Josef Stalin, though, the best place to go is Tbilisi's bustling Rustaveli Avenue, where framed photographs of the dictator are hawked on the sidewalk beside gold-plated icons of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ...

...One of the tasks of a biographer—especially a biographer of a figure with Stalin's criminal record—is to identify the critical turning points in his subject's career...

...Although the religious motifs that Stalin absorbed as a boy were later to be recycled in his cult, the future dictator played with feelings of nationalism early on...

...Service maintains that he was neither a Georgian nor a Russian nationalist, but a "fluid, elusive mixture of both," and that fluidity is exactly the point...

...But it would be delusional and dangerous, he argues, to group figures like Stalin in a separate species to whom normal standards do not apply...

...Writers & Writing Reinventing Stalin By Rebecca Reich When it comes to buying souvenirs from the former Soviet Union, Russians like to say that Vologda is the home of fine lace while Tula is where you buy molded honey cakes and brass samovars...

...Anything having to do with the toppled tsarist rule was anathema in the early 1920s, but by the mid-1930s, Service notes, hard-line rulers like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were hailed as administrative and economic innovators...

...Even as he subjected all sectors of the economy to state control, even as he collectivized peasant farms and consigned millions of citizens to labor camps, he kept his population in check through a blackand-white reinvention of traditional beliefs...

...Each offense he personally incurred was stored away and eventually avenged as an offense against the state...

...The leader who was to gain infamy for arresting and deporting entire populations once actually enjoyed a moderate's reputation for his demand that the new Soviet government guarantee autonomy to its ethnic minorities and his insistence that the era of empire had ended...

...First Stalin turned to patriotic verse ("Flower, oh my Georgia...

...What is surprising, as Service repeatedly points out, is that he was fundamentally so traditional himself...

...Stalin would never have risen to power if his uncanny human intuition had not enabled him to reinvent himself repeatedly by manipulating traditional social themes...

...But, as Service stresses, Stalin's major objective in implementing terror was not to protect his reinvented identity...

...To Stalin's eyes, the mentality of most Soviet citizens had not yet been transformed by the October Revolution," he writes...

...The word "predisposition" is key...

...Rebecca Reich, a previous NL contributor, is book editor of the Moscow Times and former editor of its arts and ideas section...

...the young revolutionary who advised Lenin in a letter to give members of a rival political group "a right good thrashing straight in their gobs—and without respite...

...On a practical level, his removal from the public eye allowed him to play down his ethnic origins by, for example, avoiding public speeches that would highlight his Georgian accent, which he feared might cause resentment among the Russian population...

...Yet even as he reassured the Soviet Union's minorities that the days of Russification were over, he increasingly anchored himself in patriotic Russian themes...

...The author creates a convincing composite portrait of the prepubescent tough who tied a pan to a cat's tail and kicked a boy who could dance better than he...

...Stalin understood the language of religion because he had spoken it from his earliest youth...

...Service captures the sorcery of a dictator who set out to change himself and his country by reinterpreting deeply inbred social convictions...

...Stalin, who was larger than life while head of state, has been subjected to multiple interpretations and commentaries over the 52 years since his death, and being banned from public sight has only raised his voltage...

...Stalin thought of himself as an ideologue, and though in reality he regularly adjusted his ideology to the political situation, he never stopped believing in it as a religious body of law...

...A similar fate met those he saw as obstacles to his personal reinvention—particularly people who had been close to him in his youth...

...If so, Service adds, "it must have reinforced the predisposition of the Marxist-Leninist doctrinaires to secure fidelity to the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin to root out any trace of heterodoxy...

...For Stalin, the imagery of nationalism, like that of religion and imperialism, was personal, but at the same time universally applicable...

...Likewise, it was Stalin who edited Lenin's writings to bring them into almost prophetic alignment with the new regime...

...And he would never have committed his horrific crimes were it not for his singularly vicious nature and grandiose conflation of himself with the state...

...The more the cult was forced on the public, though, the less it actually revealed of Stalin...

...Using archival sources that have only recently become available...

...Still, the religious force of Stalin's cult was such that any successor seeking validation had to climb aboard...

...By withholding personal information to the point of appearing to be more divine than human, Stalin perfected the aura of mystery that had worked so well with the Romanov tsars...

...Appointed People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the 1917 Revolution, he briefly opposed Lenin's plans to create an infinitely expandable federation of republics administered from Moscow, fearing a resurgence of the resentment against the capital that had sparked his own political agitation...

...Without using the term," Service writes, "Stalin suggested that black magic had to be confronted if the forces of good—Marxism-Leninism, the Communist party and the October Revolution—were to survive and flourish...

...Beginning in the early 1930s, he systematically eradicated vast sectors of the population that could serve as witnesses to the bygone ways...

...But Service leaves no doubt that Stalin was also playing for imperial effect...

...He does credit him with an ideology...

...They needed to be ruled, at least to some extent, in a traditional way...

...Neo-Communists and nationalists who invoke his image know very well how effectively symbols from the past can be transformed to suit contemporary purposes...

...Last summer, Olympic team sponsor Zolotaya Bochka advertised its beer with neoSocialist Realist billboards picturing a perfect gold-medalist physical specimen and the patriotic slogan, "Your Victory is Our Reward...

...it was to save his own skin: "Chief among his considerations was security, and he made no distinction between his personal security and the security of his policies, the leadership and the state...

...Indeed, as Service observes, if Marx' Das Kapital and Lenin's works functioned as the Gospels for the Soviet congregation, then Stalin's official biography, released in 1938, took the place of the Acts of the Apostles...