Stalin's Mysteries: Some Answers, Many Questions

“To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed... there is nothing sweeter in the world.”

^{Josef Stalin, remark before signing}

some 40,000 death warrants.

There are those who argue, as does Robert Thurston (Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, Yale University Press, 1996), that Josef Stalin, Leader and Teacher, The Sun of our Planet, Coryphaeus of Science and Technology (appellations bestowed on Stalin in the USSR during his lifetime) was not the cause of Russia’s Great Terror of 1935-38. They might argue, as Thurston does, that Stalin was simply reacting to events around him. That, even though terror was part of the Soviet system, and Stalin was “one of history’s leading murderers,” events were not of Stalin’s design -- “events had spun out of control.”

The argument is greatly forced and does not wash with the facts as we know them. The facts show that Stalin was a venal, maniacal, power-hungry thug and the most heinous murderer of our age, responsible for in excess of 15 million murders. Through his agents and actions, he personally directed and incited a nationwide reign of terror that broke down the fiber of Russian society – from which it is only beginning to recover.

To argue anything less than this is to fly in the face of known fact. The kind of fact in Eduard Radzinsky’s exceptional new biography, Stalin. This new work gives us a psychological portrait like no other to date of Stalin and of his empire of fear. It profits greatly from the author’s research in previously-closed, secret archives, adding many new facts and theories about the force that ruled Russia for thirty years.

Radzinsky made his name in Russia as a highly successful playright. He made his name in the US with his runaway bestseller, The Last Tsar (1994), an account of the final days of Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family.

Stalin is equally, if not more, engaging than The Last Tsar. Radzinsky writes with the close-clipped clarity and attention to character and ego you would expect of a playright. His disarmingly conversational style turns an often macabre history into a tale recounted between friends. But what makes Stalin important is the mysteries Radzinsky has unravelled as a result of his interviews and toils in secret archives.

Radzinsky offers revealing insights into the pre-1917 Stalin, who at that time went by the name of Koba. He paints a compelling portrait of Koba’s life and activities in Georgia, offering strong circumstantial evidence (his strange elusion of capture and ability to travel freely in Georgia and abroad, both before and after his exile) that Koba was a double agent for the Bolsheviks and the Tsarist police.

Radzinsky also uncovers Stalin’s mysterious role during the 1917 coup. He shows him to have been, as Stalinist histories aver, at Lenin’s side. But not, as those same histories note, at Smolny, in the center of the battle. Neither Lenin nor Stalin were at Smolny when the coup was won. Lenin was in hiding in the Petrograd apartment of V. Fofanova, with Stalin keeping him informed of events, acting as shadow and fixer.

^{Radzinsky challenges the common historical assumption that Stalin played only a small supporting role in the subsequent events of} 1917 ^{and the Civil War.  Stalin, he argues, was Lenin’s adjutant, one Lenin repeatedly trusted to “get things done,” often by the most brutal means.}

By the mid-1930s Stalin (Radzinsky now calls him The Boss, from his most common Russian title at the time, Vozhd) had vanquished opposition to his rule and could enjoy the sort of monolithic power he seemed to be striving for. And yet, during 1935-38 he unleashed a bloody purge, first of the Party, then of the military, leading to the emasculation of both (of course, the broader society was not spared either). Why?

^{Because, says Radzinsky, after veiled resistance at the 17th Party Congress (at which nearly 20% of delegates voted against Stalin in a secret ballot), he realized that “they would never let him create the country of his dreams -- a military camp where unanimity and subservience to the Leader reigned.” Radzinsky then demonstrates how Stalin personally directed these purges, often to incredible detail.}

But even after these purges and a devastating World War, Radzinsky argues, Stalin felt the need to shed more blood. There was another, final act in the paranoid drama The Boss was scripting.

Drawing from interviews and newly-released documents, Radzinsky asserts that Stalin’s 1953 anti-Semitic campaign -- the infamous “Doctors’ Plot” -- whose immediate goal was mass deportation of Jews to internal exile, was a prelude to his plan to launch a third world war. The Plot would point to foreign imperialists targetting Stalin himself. And the Boss’ status as Living God would warrant preemptive military attacks.

This plan was staunched, Radzinsky claims, only by The Boss’ sudden death in March 1953. About which he also has something to say. Namely that there is good reason to believe that his Party henchmen (especially Beria) killed him by not aiding him medically when he was stricken by a stroke.

Historians may bridle at Radzinsky’s unacademic style of writing. And he is good at pulling together compelling, yet circumstantial evidence, then posing intriguing theories that can never be proven or disproven. And he does often confuse the reader by slipping in and out of chronological order to prove a point. Still, Radzinsky has uncovered many important, new facts and unraveled many mysteries. And he has added some of the clearest evidence yet of Stalin’s personal direction of the terror that gripped the USSR for a quarter century.

Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives, by Eduard Radzinsky, translated by H.T. Willetts. Doubleday, April 1996, $30.

Further reading:

Fear, Anatoly Rybakov. Little, Brown & Company, 1992. $24.95.

Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, Veronique Garros, Natala korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen, eds. The New Press, 1995. $27.50.