When Roy and Zhores Medvedev write that Josef Stalin stopped getting regular medical checkups before his death in 1953 because "his personal physician was in prison," they're not telling Stalin jokes. By this time, making Stalin's acquaintance was no longer considered a growth opportunity. For instance, if you had been elected to the Communist Party Central Committee along with him in 1934, there was only a one-in-three chance that you wouldn't be physically eliminated. So it seems likely that replacement doctors weren't banging down the chairman's door.
The Medvedev brothers, who are twins, have been on Stalin's case for decades, but think that the "understanding of Stalin's era and his role in history is just beginning" -- so thoroughly did Stalin's successors destroy archives that presumably implicated them in the crimes they would later publicly denounce. This suppression of documents certainly reduced our understanding of the era, yet in "The Unknown Stalin," a collection of essays on the actuality and aftermath of the dictator's regime, the two dissident historians argue that it also constituted the crucial "first step in the process of liquidating the Stalin Cult." Although Stalin was officially honored into the late 1950s, no would-be successor ever vowed to carry on his work.
The process of political rehabilitation started immediately. By the end of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev had emerged as the new Soviet leader and given his historic anti-Stalin speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Conference, and almost every political prisoner had been freed by more than 90 separate commissions whose work remains unpublished. Estimates of the number of cases of living and dead political prisoners that they handled range from 500,000 to 2 million.
But the secretiveness that surrounded Stalin's rule also slowed renewal down. Stalin had maintained such a comprehensive monopoly of knowledge -- "the effective source of his unlimited power," in Zhores' estimation -- that not one of his successors really understood how the Soviet system worked.
Chief among the gray areas was the country's nuclear weapons program. With Stalin gone, no one person knew the extent of the atomic and uranium gulags, the prison camps whose inmates had built the country's nuclear weapons and power industries, and mined its uranium -- generally without knowing what it was that they were digging. More than half of the 700,000 people involved in the atomic project in 1950 were prisoners, in the book's estimation. Moreover, concentration camp labor continued to be used to mine uranium into the '60s, and the "uranium cities" remained "closed" until the Soviet Union ended.
The new leaders were also unaware how important a part espionage had played in producing the first Soviet atomic bomb. Igor Kurchatov, the scientist who headed the bomb project, was credited with a "halo of genius" for his ability to come up with answers to complex problems without doing calculations. In reality, however, he knew the answers all along but was not at liberty to reveal how he knew.
There are lighter moments in the Medvedevs' book. Those Westerners whose first images of the Soviet Union and the Cold War came from the pages of Mad magazine will enjoy the Stalinist "Let Us Restore the Truth" campaign, which asserted that Russians had actually invented "the steam engine, bicycles, zeppelins, aeroplanes, electric lamps, etc." -- and an early version of baseball too, if I remember right.
And there are heavier moments, featuring scoundrels such as NKVD Colonel Andrei Sverdlov, son of Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov, who became known for slamming doors on prisoners' fingers during interrogations and writing police textbooks like "The Origins of the Right-Trotskyist Underground in the U.S.S.R. and Its Annihilation." When Army Colonel Yevgeny Razin was arrested following publication of a Stalin article that disagreed with him on military theory, Sverdlov knocked out six of his teeth. Stalin himself knew nothing of Razin's incarceration -- the arrest of a general required his personal okay, but not that of a colonel -- and three years later he inquired after Razin while brushing up on his military theory for a meeting with Mao Zedong. Panicked underlings got Razin out of prison, promoted him to major general and asked him to forget what had happened. Sverdlov's career continued unimpeded for decades.
No book on Stalin can ignore Leon Trotsky, and Zhores Medvedev finds "a certain credibility" to "Trotsky's claim that Lenin had in fact chosen him as an heir." While he sees Lenin and Trotsky as favoring "authoritarian political methods" and "quite prepared to rely on terror," he ultimately believes that "Lenin had been a leader rather than a dictator." As far as Stalin goes, he certainly was a dictator, but a hard-working one. He really did write the books and articles that bore his name and read the books in his 20,000-volume library, decorating his living quarters with pictures cut from newspapers.
While most of Stalin's personal effects were lost or destroyed, the Medvedevs later learned from an aide of Khrushchev that five letters from his desk had been overlooked. Two of the letters aide could not recall. The third was from Lenin, complaining of Stalin's treatment of his wife. The fourth, from Yugoslavia's leader Josip Tito, warned Stalin to "stop sending assassins to murder me" or "I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another." The fifth letter came from Nikolai Bukharin and, in Roy Medvedev's telling, makes for the most interesting and vivid chapter.
Bukharin was as Bolshevik as they got. He joined the Party in 1911, and, by the Revolution, the journalist John Reed was reporting in "Ten Days That Shook the World" that there were those who thought him "more Left than Lenin." Bukharin had edited Pravda, headed the Communist International and literally written the book on Marxism-Leninism -- "The ABC of Communism."
But Stalin's drive for control was inexorable. Potential rivals were steadily destroyed, most famously in the three Moscow show trials from 1936 to 1938. Bukharin survived until the final trial, but by 1930 he had already lost the power struggle. Overwhelmed by the suicide of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work he had published in Pravda, Bukharin briefly considered the same. Instead, he lived out the better part of the decade in impending doom.
But even doom could not be taken for granted in Stalin's Soviet Union. When, in 1936, Bukharin was told to vacate his Kremlin apartment, the eviction was cut short by a call from Stalin, who asked Bukharin how he was doing and told him that he should just tell the housing department "to go to the devil."
We want to know what made such a creature as Stalin tick, but he remains opaque in the Medvedevs' book and perhaps always will. Bukharin, on the other hand, wrote a prodigious amount during his last months in prison in an attempt to explain himself, including a long letter to his wife that she only received in 1992, nearly 55 years later. The final letter was the one Stalin kept in his desk. Addressing him by his nickname, Bukharin began, "Koba, why do you need me to die?"
"The Unknown Stalin" -- if only!
Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco-based writer.
The Medvedev brothers, who are twins, have been on Stalin's case for decades, but think that the "understanding of Stalin's era and his role in history is just beginning" -- so thoroughly did Stalin's successors destroy archives that presumably implicated them in the crimes they would later publicly denounce. This suppression of documents certainly reduced our understanding of the era, yet in "The Unknown Stalin," a collection of essays on the actuality and aftermath of the dictator's regime, the two dissident historians argue that it also constituted the crucial "first step in the process of liquidating the Stalin Cult." Although Stalin was officially honored into the late 1950s, no would-be successor ever vowed to carry on his work.
The process of political rehabilitation started immediately. By the end of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev had emerged as the new Soviet leader and given his historic anti-Stalin speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Conference, and almost every political prisoner had been freed by more than 90 separate commissions whose work remains unpublished. Estimates of the number of cases of living and dead political prisoners that they handled range from 500,000 to 2 million.
But the secretiveness that surrounded Stalin's rule also slowed renewal down. Stalin had maintained such a comprehensive monopoly of knowledge -- "the effective source of his unlimited power," in Zhores' estimation -- that not one of his successors really understood how the Soviet system worked.
Chief among the gray areas was the country's nuclear weapons program. With Stalin gone, no one person knew the extent of the atomic and uranium gulags, the prison camps whose inmates had built the country's nuclear weapons and power industries, and mined its uranium -- generally without knowing what it was that they were digging. More than half of the 700,000 people involved in the atomic project in 1950 were prisoners, in the book's estimation. Moreover, concentration camp labor continued to be used to mine uranium into the '60s, and the "uranium cities" remained "closed" until the Soviet Union ended.
The new leaders were also unaware how important a part espionage had played in producing the first Soviet atomic bomb. Igor Kurchatov, the scientist who headed the bomb project, was credited with a "halo of genius" for his ability to come up with answers to complex problems without doing calculations. In reality, however, he knew the answers all along but was not at liberty to reveal how he knew.
There are lighter moments in the Medvedevs' book. Those Westerners whose first images of the Soviet Union and the Cold War came from the pages of Mad magazine will enjoy the Stalinist "Let Us Restore the Truth" campaign, which asserted that Russians had actually invented "the steam engine, bicycles, zeppelins, aeroplanes, electric lamps, etc." -- and an early version of baseball too, if I remember right.
And there are heavier moments, featuring scoundrels such as NKVD Colonel Andrei Sverdlov, son of Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov, who became known for slamming doors on prisoners' fingers during interrogations and writing police textbooks like "The Origins of the Right-Trotskyist Underground in the U.S.S.R. and Its Annihilation." When Army Colonel Yevgeny Razin was arrested following publication of a Stalin article that disagreed with him on military theory, Sverdlov knocked out six of his teeth. Stalin himself knew nothing of Razin's incarceration -- the arrest of a general required his personal okay, but not that of a colonel -- and three years later he inquired after Razin while brushing up on his military theory for a meeting with Mao Zedong. Panicked underlings got Razin out of prison, promoted him to major general and asked him to forget what had happened. Sverdlov's career continued unimpeded for decades.
 Itar-Tass Together with his brother Zhores, historian Roy Medvedev has been demystifying Stalin for decades. |  |
| |
While most of Stalin's personal effects were lost or destroyed, the Medvedevs later learned from an aide of Khrushchev that five letters from his desk had been overlooked. Two of the letters aide could not recall. The third was from Lenin, complaining of Stalin's treatment of his wife. The fourth, from Yugoslavia's leader Josip Tito, warned Stalin to "stop sending assassins to murder me" or "I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another." The fifth letter came from Nikolai Bukharin and, in Roy Medvedev's telling, makes for the most interesting and vivid chapter.
Bukharin was as Bolshevik as they got. He joined the Party in 1911, and, by the Revolution, the journalist John Reed was reporting in "Ten Days That Shook the World" that there were those who thought him "more Left than Lenin." Bukharin had edited Pravda, headed the Communist International and literally written the book on Marxism-Leninism -- "The ABC of Communism."
But Stalin's drive for control was inexorable. Potential rivals were steadily destroyed, most famously in the three Moscow show trials from 1936 to 1938. Bukharin survived until the final trial, but by 1930 he had already lost the power struggle. Overwhelmed by the suicide of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work he had published in Pravda, Bukharin briefly considered the same. Instead, he lived out the better part of the decade in impending doom.
But even doom could not be taken for granted in Stalin's Soviet Union. When, in 1936, Bukharin was told to vacate his Kremlin apartment, the eviction was cut short by a call from Stalin, who asked Bukharin how he was doing and told him that he should just tell the housing department "to go to the devil."
We want to know what made such a creature as Stalin tick, but he remains opaque in the Medvedevs' book and perhaps always will. Bukharin, on the other hand, wrote a prodigious amount during his last months in prison in an attempt to explain himself, including a long letter to his wife that she only received in 1992, nearly 55 years later. The final letter was the one Stalin kept in his desk. Addressing him by his nickname, Bukharin began, "Koba, why do you need me to die?"
"The Unknown Stalin" -- if only!
Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco-based writer.