Stalin has fascinated me as long as I’ve known of his existence. Even in the 70’s, long after Khruschev’s ’secret speech’ my parents, staunch Tories, referred to him as ‘Uncle Joe’. Even now, despite my subsequent reading about him and my knowledge of his hideous crimes, I still need to be on my guard against viewing him as anything other than a monster.
There’s no such problem with Hitler, of course. Martin Amis has written about this: it’s still acceptable to make jokes about the Soviet Union in a way that it isn’t about Nazi Germany; it’s acceptable to wear clothes with the letters CCCP (i.e. USSR) emblazoned on them when it’s unthinkable that anyone but a neo-Nazi would wear a Swastika.
The one thing that has probably sustained my ambivalence about Stalin is my perception that he was effective in several key areas. The first, most obvious, and most relevant to the West was the Soviet war effort. We’re used to thinking that the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge (what everyone else calls the Ardennes Offensive) were the pivotal moments in the war, but there were several key encounters in the Barbarossa campaign that were at least as significant, and almost certainly more so. I’m thinking specifically of the Germans being halted outside Moscow, the battle of Stalingrad and the battle of Kursk, still the largest ever tank battle. He revolutionised the economy of the Soviet Union with the Five Year Plans (the ‘Great Leap Forward’), albeit at the expense of millions of lives, turning the country into a massive industrial powerhouse and left them a nuclear power. The scale of the war production effort is utterly staggering.
I have long given Stalin the credit for the war victories and the ultimate advance on Berlin, and I still think that for all his other faults, he was crucial in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Service here gives a somewhat pedestrian account of Stalin’s panic as the Germans began their invasion, and recounts the always surprising scene where the senior members of the Politburo went to rouse him out of his sulk. They had tentatively agreed that Molotov should take over if Stalin could not continue as leader. One presumes that Stalin never discovered this, or Molotov would surely have been shot. At the time, Stalin seems to have believed that they were there to arrest him. He only recovered his composure once they told him that they wanted him to lead them. Thereafter, he drove the Red Army to the limit: despite their blood-chlling titles, there’s still something awe-inspiring about his orders “Not one step back” and “To the last drop of blood”. As always with Stalin, he meant them literally, and thousands of retreating Russian soldiers were shot by their own side. Many POWs returning to the Soviet Union after the war were sent to the Gulag for surrendering rather than fighting to the death.
The brutality of Stalin’s regime is hard to grasp. Tens of millions of people lost their lives needlessly, including much of the political and military elite, untold peasants and small-holders (the so-called ‘kulaks’). What’s harder to understand is the ruthlessness with which Stalin moved against his comrades: Molotov’s wife was sentenced to hard labour and many other comrades were shot after ludicrous show trials. The entire family of his dead wife were murdered or sent to the Gulag. Despite al this, his colleagues never moved against him while he was alive. Their sense of paranoia was so powerful that they even resisted replacing him when he was dying from the after effects of a stroke and soaked in his own piss.
We are also faced with the troubling fact that Stalin was not a madman, and there are numerous instances of very surprising personal generosity and comradeship on his part. The gradual spread of the so-called ‘cult of personality’ was certainly done at his instigation and with his full approval, and yet he comes across as a modest, hardworking communist much of the time, often making self-deprecating remarks. Contrary to popular belief (stoked by his arch enemy Trotsky), Stalin was no ignoramus. He was very widely read indeed and wrote extensively and, it seems, reasonably well.
Service’s book is a solid one, with only very brief episodes of real insight. It is let down in several places by extended metaphors that become tedious and, in the end, undermine the argument entirely by making it almost completely laughable, and there are several sections that feel as though they were written with serialisation in mind. The writing is often quite leaden, with a tendency towards very short sentences in quick succession.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is all over the place at the moment with his new book ‘Young Stalin’ (to say I was taken aback by pictures of Stalin on the tube is a huge understatement). His first volume focused on the private and social lives of Stalin and his circle and provides a much better idea of Stalin the man (having said that I’ve only read 200 or so pages) from about 1917 onwards. Those who want a picture of what Stalin himself was like as a man, husband and father would be better off with those books. They also seem to make much more creative and insightful use of the only recently opened Stalin archives. Those who want a survey of Stalin’s public career in a traditional biographical format should probably stick with Service.
Surely the most disturbing development in modern Russian politics is the partial rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation. In Moscow, behind Lenin’s tomb (which Stalin shared briefly after his death – he was moved out in the dead of night following Khruschev’s denunciation) is a bust of each of the Soviet leaders except Khruschev. Stalin’s is the last in the line and was, when I visited, covered in extravagant, freshly laid floral bouquets. That, as with so much about Stalin, horrified me beyond words.
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