Stalin

Evil has always been more comprehensible to me as an absence than as a presence, and Stalin to me has always stood as a prime example of a man who, in many important ways, just wasn't there. Certain wires that should have connected Stalin to feelings of shame, remorse, or pity, were simply never hooked up. His emotional vocabulary was limited to ambition and jealousy; and though he could simulate tender feelings in public, a talent he used to great effect during the funerals of Lenin and Kirov, he was in reality numb to them.

Robert Service's biography of Stalin does an excellent job of tracing the long career of this strange and frightening political figure and placing it within the larger context of Soviet revolutionary politics and Russian political history. Service begins with Stalin's difficult childhood. Like Hitler, a man whose ruthlessness in handling opposition Stalin admired, Stalin had a violent father and a doting, overprotective mother. Though Stalin later cultivated a reputation among his Bolshevik colleagues of being an unsophisticated Georgian hick, Stalin was in reality a voracious reader, and, by his early twenties, a published poet.

The real meat of the book comes later, though, after the October Revolution. When men like Stalin or Hitler or Mao rise to power, all of us wonder how they managed. Why didn't anyone see the disaster coming? Service's portrait of the culture of the early Bolshevik era gives us a great many clues.

Stalin's politics were extreme, and Stalin's methods as General Secretary and Commissar for Nationalities were often violent and cruel, with an emphasis on punishment; but Bolshevik political rhetoric in general tended to be violent and extreme, and other leading Bolsheviks of the era--Lenin, Trotsky, and Dzerzhinsky--were given to cruel action in prosecuting the revolution and the civil war that followed. In another era, or a different environment, Stalin's mask of sanity might have slipped more obviously, but context and fortune favored him.

Stalin was a gifted maniuplator. He knew the value in being underestimated. Stalin allowed his rivals in the Bolshevik party--Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky--to believe that they were smarter and more sophisticated than he. (Even Lenin, whose relationship with Stalin was volatile, for reasons having to do as much with Lenin's temper as Stalin's eccentricities, thought that Stalin was a hayseed who sucked on his pipe too loud.) He knew how to form alliances, how and when to betray them, and how to use the potential of a party split to shore up his position. He displayed an uncanny sense of what his nearest allies and enemies were thinking, while allowing even those closest too him no access to the contents of his head. Of the leading Bolsheviks, only Lenin came to recognize what Stalin was before Stalin took power, and by then, Lenin was too sick to stop him. Of those who figured Stalin out later, none survived.

But Stalin was more than simply a manipulator whose time was ripe. Service argues that he did hold a genuine, if frightening, ideology of power. It was based in Leninism, but Stalin altered Lenin's ideology to accomodate an older, Tsarist notion of political power. For examples, Stalin looked to Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, and, most importantly, Ivan the Terrible and Genghis Khan. In these leaders, Stalin saw evidence that it took great sacrifices, and often mass death, to advance Russian civilization. Combined with the Marxist certitude of the inevitablity of a communist golden age, this ideology provided Stalin with the intellectual justification for the violence of the first Five Year Plan and the Great Terror.

The private Stalin, in Service's work, is as strange as the public one. He's a remote figure to those who tried to get close to him. Those who knew him in his younger days considered him a difficult man to socialize with, because he insisted upon constant adulation. His sense of humor, to the extent that he had one at all, centered on the embarrassment and humiliation of his subordinates. He had virtually no relationship with any of his children, and his second wife, Nadya, (in an eerie similarity with Hitler's one true love, Geli Raubal) committed suicide. His most notable personal quality was a complete unwillingness to forgive any perceived insult. This led to grudges that would sometimes last for decades (and which usually ended in the death of the offender).

There are some faults in Service's biography. He does, on occasion, make assertions without showing the facts that might back him up. This was most glaring to me when he stated that there was no convincing evidence of a rift, or any political distance, between Stalin and Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov in 1934. Historians do fight over this, and since Kirov's murder, and Stalin's long suspected complicity in it, marked the starting point of the Great Terror, it seems like too important a relationship to glide over the way Service does. But Service nevertheless captures much about the character of Stalin and his times.

Service reports that among Stalin's papers, found at the end of his life, was a note. It contained what may have been the last words of Stalin's one-time rival, the urbane and sophisticated Bolshevik economist Nikolai Bukharin. They were: "Why is my death so necessary to you?" It's a question that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and indeed, the entire Russian population could have asked. In a time where the Kremlin is once again suspected of political murder, it's a good thing we have Service's book to guide us toward an answer to that question.