Stalin the Tyrant
Randall, Francis B.
Stalin the Tyrant STALIN. THE MAN AND HIS ERA, by Adam B. Ulam. The Viking Press. 760 pp. $12.95. STALIN AS REVOLUTIONARY, 18791929, by Robert C. Tucker. W. W. Norton. 519 pp. $12.95....
...He has taken immense care to be accurate on all the incontrovertible facts as well as on the controversial ones...
...His book replaces Isaac Deutscher's substantial but badly flawed, hitherto best-selling biography of Stalin...
...Actually, the book could easily have been pruned of its creaking framework of unnecessary psychoanalytic ideology and terminology, the better to reveal Tucker's scholarly, complex, and thoroughly substantiated commonsense views...
...The millions "died so that life should prove the truth of dogma...
...Ulam has mastered all the older material that scholars had compiled during Stalin's lifetime, in spite of Stalin's censorship, and the new material— all the beans that have been spilled in Russia since Stalin's death...
...He sets all this unobtrusively in an intelligent, interpretive framework, and he writes with clarity and wit...
...Knowing, in some sense, that he was that way, he thought his enemies, opponents, and indeed his supporters operated that way, too, which to him justified his total terror...
...Although Georgian, he came to insist that he was Russian...
...Here I can only discuss some of the interpretive framework...
...Absolute power turned a ruthless politician — but within the Soviet context not unusually ruthless — into a monstrous tyrant...
...He had a tremendous need for admiration—hence the cult of personality after 1929...
...Stalin poses a terrible question to us: how can one be a decent, peaceful liberal or an ethical, nonviolent radical in a world where the greatest of revolutions loosed such a devil upon mankind, and how can we reconstruct an authentic progressivism for ourselves and posterity, untainted by the ghastly perversion of Communism...
...It was the disregard of the cost that was "uniquely Stalin's...
...What does it mean...
...Hence his later vindictiveness in taking bloody revenge on people years after for petty aspersions...
...he believes there is something deep about depth psychology...
...It is informed by the only sound ideology—no ideology at all, in the empirical, pluralist, Anglo-American tradition...
...In fact he was full of faults and deficiencies, and he partiy knew it...
...Tucker alleges to be much influenced by Freud, Horney, and Erik-son...
...reviewed by Francis B. Randall These excellent books do not speak to the young, who are so pathetically ignorant of the horrors of Stalin that they have no idea why good men and bad, Norman Thomas and Richard Nixon, Nehru and Chiang, judged Stalin and his Communism to be absolutely unspeakable, morally equivalent to Hitler and his Nazism...
...The overall effect of both books is discouraging: there is no hope for us from the East...
...He comes close to claiming to be the first to examine Stalin's personality development stage by stage...
...Rather, as he attained supreme power in the 1920s, he saw himself as a revolutionary hero who had earned his rise to the position of the great successor to the great Lenin...
...It is not clear that Stalin wanted to become a tyrant," writes Tucker, with sly understatement...
...These books should be in every library and should be read by everyone seriously concerned with the subject—and everyone should be seriously concerned with their subject...
...Randall teaches Russian history at Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of "Stalin's Russia: an Historical Reconsideration...
...It is not these sound and common judgments of Stalin that make the book so valuable, but the full and learned detail with which they are illustrated...
...Ulam, in particular, who recently wrote the best biography of Lenin, ever, has now written the best biography of Stalin, ever...
...he was molded and evolved, step by step, in the Communist movement that Lenin created and so terribly misguided...
...In this volume, at least, Tucker does not open much of that fascinating can of worms called paranoia...
...Adam B. Ulam of Harvard and Robert C. Tucker of Princeton are distinguished specialists on Communism...
...He allows himself 739 pages of small type text, so he can be full and rich, though not endless...
...Stalin as Revolutionary is a rich biography of Stalin's first fifty years...
...One may disagree with some of their ideas, but they present them intelligently, and with impressive reasoning and evidence...
...THE MAN AND HIS ERA, by Adam B. Ulam...
...This sounds flat and jacket-blurbish, but it is true...
...The psychology of tyrants, after all, has been fully known since Herodotus and Plato...
...Mr...
...Stalin was not born a monster...
...Stalin the Tyrant STALIN...
...In Ulam's judgment, "The explanation of his life is as banal as many of Stalin's own speeches: he was corrupted by absolute power...
...Stalin collectivized and industrialized Russia—his "war against the nation"—not only out of a thirst for power, but out of "ignorance and obsession" shared by many Communists...
...As for the many purges, "the terror was necessary, not only to keep men obedient, but even more to make them believe...
...But to avoid the agony of facing the facts, he increasingly deluded himself that he was truly great...
...although a vulgarian, that he was a genius...
...Both Ulam and Tucker are decent liberals, but in these books they do little to prevent a reactionary from using their books to argue that all socialism, that all revolutions, that any effort for social justice lead surely to hellish totalitarian police states—• just as this review might serve reaction, if it ended with the previous paragraph...
...Tucker's book is the first of perhaps three volumes on Stalin, not a straightforward biography, but "a study in history and personality," a "psychohistory...
...They speak to the middle-aged, who lived through some or all of Stalin's tyranny and therefore know its nature, and who still wonder how, at bottom, such monstrous evil was possible, and whether it can come again, there or here...
...The other side of his swollen self-esteem was Stalin's painful sensitivity to whatever he interpreted as a slight...
...Stalin solidified Lenin's domination of the Communist Party and nation, and multiplied Lenin's mass-killings beyond all expectation, but not beyond relation to the Leninist heritage...
Vol. 38 • March 1974 • No. 3
