Given the situation in the Ukraine, I thought a brief reminder of the system that shaped Putin might be timely. Putin wishes to reconstitute the Soviet Union and those who would appease him and not treat him like the outlaw he is, need to be reminded of his system and those he admires.
I have no doubt that the title for the most biographies written about any politician would belong to Winston Churchill, but his life compared to Stalin’s was an open book. For Stalin, the ideal time to write a biography with new information is past as his contemporizes die off and the archives are once again closed. Montefiore was the right biographer at the right time at the right place. He has written a biography that is well paced, filled with colorful antidotes and supported by excellent research. Considering his topic, the greatest mass murderer until Mao, this book brings home the ruthlessness of Stalin without exhausting the reader by an impression of overwhelming despair.
There is no doubt that Stalin was a natural master politician; during the early days after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, it was Stalin who volunteered to do the dull administrative work that the brilliant minds of the party distained. Yet from that dull work, Stalin was able to create and populate with his own people, the key positions of the bureaucratic state that was the Soviet Union. He understood well, more so than Lenin, the practical need for a strong leader of the new Communist state and worked towards that end. As time moved on, he was able to form alliances with various Communist leaders in the political power struggles based on various interpretations of Marxists ideology, eliminate first one set of opponents, then turn on his former allies and destroy them piece by piece. Under rated by the Communist “intelligencia” who never really understood the practical application of power, Stalin rose to a position of unquestioned authority to carry out his own view of what the Communist state should be and how it should operate.
The intentional slaughter of millions by starvation in the Ukraine and elsewhere, the ruthless Party purges, the quotas for arrests that each local Party member wanted to surpass (even going so far as simply arresting everyone on certain pages of a telephone directory), led to greater power for Stalin as no one at any level could ever be sure where exactly they stood in his eyes. His model of ruling was very different from that of his contemporary, Hitler, in that Stalin ruled through naked fear. It worked so well that after the German invasion, when Stalin disappeared and was fearful that he would be arrested by his own inner circle, it was they, who feared him so much who realized that only Stalin has the strength to save the Soviet state.
This is a well-researched and written biography, one which should the cornerstone of anyone who wishes to understand the Communist state for its formative years.
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