Kinda reminds me of.....
Posted on 04/13/2005 5:18:45 AM PDT by OESY
Pity the biographer who takes on Josef Stalin. The challenges lie somewhere between daunting and impossible. Stalin took great pains to cover up the facts of his childhood and youth. Aided by state hagiographers, he revised the events of his life multiple times, making it nearly impossible to determine what role he played in the crucial events of the October Revolution and civil war. Airbrushing by state hagiographers added extra layers of obfuscation. Inconvenient witnesses tended to disappear. Secretive, introverted, and paranoid, Stalin made an art of concealing his motives and his methods.
Not surprisingly, Robert Service takes a very slow walk around his gargantuan subject, patiently assembling the facts, sifting through the archival record and judiciously weighing the evidence - some of it new, some of it old, but in Mr. Service's view, poorly understood or misinterpreted.
Persistence pays off. "Stalin," a sequel to Mr. Service's "Lenin: A Biography," presents a richly documented, highly persuasive portrait of the man who transformed the Soviet Union into a modern military-industrial power, terrorized millions and ruled over an empire that would have been the envy of the czars. Mr. Service writes in a colorless, often plodding prose. He is often repetitive. His book lacks the verve, and the penetrating psychology, of William Taubman's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Khrushchev: The Man and His Era" (W. W. Norton). But brick by brick, Mr. Service constructs a solid, accessible work that does as much as one book can to explain Stalin as a human being, and as the architect of a system that still weighs heavy on millions of citizens in the former Soviet Union.
Mr. Service, digging deep into Stalin's early years, finds the Stalin of the purges and the gulag already fully formed as a Marxist revolutionary in Georgia. Arrogant, ambitious, touchy and conspiratorial, he could work with others only by dominating them. Envisioning a revolutionary party that relied on "clandestine activity, illegal propaganda and control over the workers," he was, Mr. Service writes, "a Bolshevik in waiting."
He had a long wait, punctuated by several prison terms in the Russian Far East, but when the revolution arrived he immediately exhibited the pathologies that would come to define Stalinism. Even among Bolsheviks, he was extreme in his appetite for the use of state violence and terror. When Bolsheviks in Estonia sent Stalin a telegram about their efforts to eradicate "counterrevolutionaries and traitors," Stalin answered, "The idea of a concentration camp is excellent!" Enemies, internal and external, existed to be crushed and humiliated. "No one acquainted with Stalin in 1918-19 should have been surprised by his later 'development,' " Mr. Service writes.
Mr. Service emphatically rejects the notion that Stalin was a fringe player in Bolshevik politics before the 1920's, that he was, as the subtitle of one study has it, "the man who missed the revolution." As an up-and-coming Bolshevik working in the Caucasus, he caught Lenin's eye soon after the 1905 revolution, and Lenin, the only political leader to whom he ever deferred, relied heavily on him to develop the party's policy toward the many nationalities of the Russian empire that needed to be won over.
In 1917, Mr. Service argues, Stalin stood at the center of events in Petrograd. Although he did not take the visible public role of colleagues like Trotsky, Mr. Service writes, "he was a dynamic leader who had a hand in nearly all the principal discussions on politics, military strategy, economics, security and international relations." In July and August, before Lenin returned from exile, it was Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov who had run the party's Central Committee.
The also-rans in the power struggle would later dismiss Stalin as a nonentity, a thuggish cipher skulking at the margins. No so, Mr. Service argues. "Stalin was rising in the party without the rest of the party yet knowing," he writes. "But those who concluded that he was a 'gray blank' simply demonstrated their ignorance of central party life." As for the criticism that Stalin was not an original thinker, Mr. Service has a curt riposte: neither were any of the other Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. What he lacked in theoretical brilliance, Stalin made up for in energy, self-assurance and decisiveness. Where others hesitated, he pounced. A master of intrigue, he assembled co-conspirators subject to his iron will and, after Lenin's death, picked off enemies one by one until he had seized the levers of power.
In contrast to Richard Overy, who in "The Dictators" (Norton) emphasizes the broad popular support that Stalin enjoyed, even at the height of the Great Terror, Mr. Service dwells on the instability and precariousness of Stalin's rule, particularly in the 1930's. The nation, hastily cobbled together, was weak, backward and poor. Stalin, morbidly suspicious and fearful of plots, really did have enemies: enemies in the party, enemies among the oppressed peasantry and enemies abroad. He ruled by fear because he and the men around him were afraid.
Even Stalin's fatal misreading of Hitler's intentions in 1941 gets a fair hearing from Mr. Service, who, while acknowledging that Stalin blundered, offers some extenuating circumstances. First, Stalin was not alone in expecting France to fight longer and buy more time for Germany's enemies. Second, he was quite reasonable to believe that Germany would have to invade early enough in the year to avoid the worst of the Russian winter. Unfortunately for him, Hitler invaded anyway.
Was Stalinism the logical extension of Leninism? Mr. Service addresses the issue only briefly, but his answer is a very cautious no. Stalin's peculiar combination of traits amplified and distorted, to an extreme, degree, the malign tendencies of the October Revolution. Dictatorship and mass coercion were in the cards. "Lenin had invented a cul-de-sac for communism; Stalin drove the party down it," Mr. Service writes. But without Stalin, the inevitable wreck might have been a lot less bloody.
New Your Slimes looking for the truth. Now that is a real joke!
I wonder if the book covers Stalin's great American apologist Walter Duranty?
He had a long wait, punctuated by several prison terms in the Russian Far East, but when the revolution arrived he immediately exhibited the pathologies that would come to define Stalinism.
Another good reason to make sure that Saddam is declined his right to breathe.
Kinda reminds me of.....
I believe Saddam is a big Stalin fan.
Both used the NYTimes to help them do just that!
France to fight longer? Since when, The Napoleonic Wars?
"..he was quite reasonable to believe that Germany would have to invade early enough in the year to avoid the worst of the Russian winter. Unfortunately for him, Hitler invaded anyway."
Then why did Stalin think the Wehrmacht was massed against his border in June of 1941!? To keep illegal aliens out of the Reich?!
After France fell he sent Hitler a letter of congratulations over his conquest.
"France to fight longer? Since when, The Napoleonic Wars?"
During the Great War, France, with British help, held out against the "bosch" until Americans began arriving in late 1917-early 1918. It is astonishing--and disgraceful--that France, with such a huge number (over 1 million) men under arms in 1940 wasn't even able to wage a partisan guerilla battle against overextended German troops (and the French resistance never amounted to much until after D-day, when it didn't really matter).
You have to remember that a pretty large segment of France didn't have a big problem with Nazi ideology. They may not have liked having German troops on their soil, but the rule of the puppet Vichy government was just fine with them. If there were even half as many members of the Resistance as there were loyal French Nazis, the Germans would not have been able to invade Russia and occupy France at the same time.
I am not convinced.
Hmmm, no mention of the estimated 10-20 million Ukraines he murdered. That, to me is Stalin's legacy. Any bio or article that fails to mention this aspect seems to imply the author is an apologist. Kinda of like talking about Hitler and failing to mention the gas chambers.
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