The life and death of Josef Stalin.
Stalin was the very embodiment of the worst instincts in man. He was also the living embodiment of the black joke that has come to represent the human condition. Though he lived after Kafka's death, Stalin was still his inspiration. The society he created, with random terror and death behind every closed door, with every corner of every man's mind probed and followed to awful dead ends, the whole world a labyrinthine chamber of paranoia and guesswork?this was the terrible comic world envisioned by Kafka, and it actually existed in living color for 30-plus years. And there has yet to be a writer who took the time out to behold this Martian world and describe it with appropriate awe, the way one marvels at the other terrible creations of God: the shark, the Nile crocodile, the earthquake, the plague.
Other terrible figures in history have their appropriate biographies. Adam Ulam's The Bolsheviks is not only a sweeping study of Lenin, one of the most important figures of this century, but also one of the funniest books ever written. It marvels at every detail of this remarkably humorless figure's rise to power. Like Ulam, Robert Caro simultaneously loathed and admired Robert Moses in The Power Broker; even Australian writer Neil Chenoweth's bio of Rupert Murdoch examines the life of the great, evil media baron through the admiring eye of one watching the extraordinary accomplishments of an indefatigable jungle predator.
Stalin has no such book. The best books about the Stalin era have been written from the point of view of one staring down the barrel of the business end of Stalin's regime, in particular gulag literature, for instance the beautiful and painful Kolyma Tales of Varlam Shalamov. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago series comes closest to capturing the sense of amazement a rational person would feel beholding the might of the Stalin regime. Underneath the pain and bitter hatred that drives Solzhenitsyn's breathless polemic is a kind of wonder and amazement at the nature of the beast that has attacked him, and it is this conflict of feelings under the surface of the narrative that makes the Gulag books great history and great literature.
Roy and Zhores Medvedev's new book, The Unknown Stalin, does not attempt to capture the entire legacy of Stalin. Other writers have tried that one, most notably Robert Conquest with his expansive The Great Terror and current Russian academic celebrity Edvard Radzinsky with Stalin. Isaac Deutscher's Stalin: A Political Biography is also a standard text. All of these books provide a sound basis for understanding one of the most remarkable stories of human cruelty in history; what this new book by the Medvedevs (until now probably best known for their biography of Khrushchev, The Years in Power) does is fill in some of the gaps in the story, using new documents and new interview material to construct plausible explanations for some of the many remaining mysteries of that era.
The book is divided in to 15 essay chapters, each self-standing, covering such topics as Stalin and the atomic bomb, Stalin and his mother, the fate of the Stalin archives, and so on. The two most interesting chapters for the lay reader concern the death of Stalin and the murder of Nikolai Bukharin.
Stalin's death has been something of a mystery for 50 years. It never seemed plausible that the "Broad-chested Ossete," as Osip Mandelstam called him (in private, or so he thought; his impolitic decision to recite this unwritten line of verse at a party led to his exile) could have died of natural causes. The Medvedevs carefully document his last days, in particular the first five days of March 1953. They suggest that Stalin did indeed die of natural causes, but that moves to usurp his power were underway days before he expired.
The authors construct an extraordinary circumstantial case that someone among a group of Seymon Ignatiev, head of the MGB (later the KGB), as well as party bigwigs Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria and Mikhail Suslov, somehow were aware that Stalin had collapsed of a stroke early on the morning of March 1. This, despite the fact that it was not until the senior member of Stalin's bodyguard, Pytor Lozgachev, entered Stalin's room at roughly 11 p.m. the day that the leader's unconscious body was found on the floor of his chambers.
The Medvedevs, incidentally, describe this long wait to enter Stalin's room in hilarious fashion. Despite the fact that special sensors in Stalin's room detected no movement as early as 11 a.m., Lozgachev and MGB Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Starotsin nonetheless vacillated all day long about whether to go in and check on Stalin, afraid of the consequences. "What do you think I am?a hero?" Lozgachev asks.
All the same, one thing is clear: Sometime before 6 p.m. that day, a decision was made to put a halt to Stalin's latest and perhaps most bizarre repression campaign, the so-called Doctors' Plot. Similarly, another campaign, designed to strike a blow into an alleged and no doubt fictional Georgian separatist movement?the "Georgian Mingrelian Conspiracy"?was halted. This was clear because all news of prosecutions on these fronts disappeared from the newspapers on March 2. (The prehistoric printing presses in Moscow made it impossible to put an issue to bed any later than 5 or 6 p.m.) I own a March 2, 1953 issue of Pravda, and it was illuminating to look at that copy, after reading this book, to see what the Medvedevs were getting at.
Such a decision to halt all public propaganda could only have come from Ignatiev and Suslov, who were in charge of "ideological questions." The end of the Mingrelian affair saved the necks of Beria and Malenkov, who were sure to be named in the affair and probably had just a few weeks to live. Stalin's death, in fact, saved much of the leadership below him from disaster. The Medvedevs' detailed descriptions of the visits to the convalescent Stalin, with the sequence of admission to the room indicating their importance, coupled with a subsequent chapter on Stalin's Secret Heir (the plodding Suslov, according to the author), shed a great deal of light on how it was that Khrushchev eventually came to power.
The Bukharin chapter gives the reader a taste of the horrific black comic forces that decided the fate of men in those days. Much of the chapter recalls the blunt psychological violence of the end chapters of The Trial. One scene, in fact, appears lifted straight from Kafka. Readers may recall the end of that book, when K. is taken away and beheaded by two "10th rate actors"; all the way to the grave, he keeps pestering them with questions about what theater they work at. Here, the Medvedevs describe a scene in which Bukharin?one of the best-known socialist theorists, and a key figure in the revolution and the so-called New Economic Policy of the 20s?is visited in his Kremlin apartment by the housekeeping staff, which tells him he has been evicted.
Thinking that this is the end?sure he is being taken away to execution by janitors?Bukharin is terrified when the phone rings and Stalin is on the line. "So, how are things with you, Nikolai?" Stalin asks, as though nothing was wrong. Bukharin timidly replies that he is being evicted. Stalin's bemused response: "Tell them to go to the devil!" The housekeepers retreat, but Bukharin, understandably rattled by this cruel shot across his bow, is left to spend the rest of his days in terror, sure that the end is lurking behind every door.
In another scene, Bukharin, already in disgrace, goes to Red Square to attend a ceremony commemorating the 19th anniversary of the revolution. Stalin spots him waving in the crowd. Immediately, a guard pushes his way to Bukharin, who thinks he is done for. Instead, the guard says, "Comrade Stalin asked me to inform you that you are not in the right place and he requests that you come up to the platform."
It is these kinds of instances of pointless psychological terror?played against the backdrop of such great-terror era Stalin quips as, "Life has become better, Comrades, life has become gayer"?that get to the heart of the insanity of that period. The Medvedevs don't attempt a great-canvas treatment of that insanity, but this new material is well worth reading.