Turning Marxism Against the Russians : LET HISTORY JUDGE The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism <i> a revised and expanded edition by Roy A. Medvedev; translated by George Shriver (Columbia University Press: $57.50; 800 pp.; 0-231-06350-4) </i>

It was a cold and wet evening in what passed for spring in Moscow in 1976 when I first met Roy Medvedev. My wife and I had made our way to his apartment on the far edge of the city, by Metro, bus, and finally on foot, feeling like underground conspirators and hoping we were not followed. Medvedev then was one of the Soviet Union’s three best-known dissidents, along with Andrei Sakharov and the then recently exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Today, living testimony to the Gorbachev revolution, Medvedev is not only published openly in Soviet newspapers and journals but has been elected along with Sakharov as a deputy to the new Congress of the People and to the Supreme Soviet, where he has become an eloquent voice for democracy. In December he is scheduled to come to this country and to address the convention of the American Historical Assn. in San Francisco.

Medvedev became world famous when his magnum opus on Stalinism, the original edition of “Let History Judge,” was smuggled out and published in English translation in 1972. In the next few years the work appeared in the other major Western languages and even in Japanese and Chinese. In response, the Brezhnev government deprived Medvedev of both his job and his Communist Party membership, and the KGB subjected him to constant surveillance and harassment.

That was an era when the aging Communist bureaucracy was bent on rehabilitating the memory of Stalin, clouded ever since Nikita Khrushchev’s well-known “Secret Speech” of 1956. They were doing everything they could to perpetuate Stalin’s totalitarian system of rule, even if their scale of arrests and killings was more modest. Critical inquiries and exposes of the historical truth such as Medvedev devoted himself to were intolerable to the party hierarchy.

The wonder is that Medvedev was never actually arrested and jailed or deported like Solzhenitsyn, or like his own twin brother, Zhores Medvedev. Zhores, an eminent biologist as well as political critic in his own right, was deprived of his Soviet citizenship in 1973 while he was on a research visit to England, where he still lives and supervises the foreign publication of Roy’s work.

Speaking with Medvedev that night 13 years ago, I asked him how he managed to produce such a monumental work as “Let History Judge,” along with the flood of writings that followed, considering the difficult conditions of his life and work. “I don’t do it all myself,” he explained. “People are bringing me materials all the time. I have a whole institute.”

As Medvedev observes in the preface to the new edition of “Let History Judge,” “A person who works openly on the subject of Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union inevitably becomes a center of attraction for many who wish to express their opinions or impart testimony on this question, which is still a very sore subject in Soviet society.” Nonetheless, it was with extraordinary courage and rare insight that Medvedev took on the unique task of marshaling and telling the historical truth about Stalinism, from inside the system.

As a book written from the inside, where “dangerous” source materials were shut away in the “special preserves” of the libraries, and the major Western works were available only when they could be smuggled in, “Let History Judge” was an extraordinary accomplishment, both of description and of explanation. Although, as Western reviewers noted at the time, Medvedev was reluctant to dispute the merits of Lenin and the 1917 revolution, he produced a compelling and original account, “a history of a disease,” showing how the revolution went wrong in Stalin’s hands, and how the tyrant found support for his “usurpation of power” and his annihilation of the Communist Old Guard among the same sort of “petty-bourgeois” elements of society who supported fascism in Western Europe between the wars. To be sure, Medvedev retained the overall Marxist schema and language about history and society--he still does--but as he pointed out to me, “The Marxist frame of reference is the only one Russians know, thanks to their indoctrination, so the only way to reach them with new ideas is within the Marxist framework.”

Today, under Gorbachev’s perestroika --”restructuring”--and glasnost --”openness”--Medvedev enjoys vastly more positive conditions for his work. Oceans of new information, both Soviet source material and the accumulation of Western studies, have become available to him. At the same time, the Gorbachev era has put Stalinism in a new perspective, giving it an end (so it seems) as well as a beginning, which makes it possible to look at that era in a more historical way.

These circumstances have not required Medvedev to alter his basic beliefs. As he emphasizes in the preface to the new edition, “The author of this book has modified his views in many respects to make them more precise, but he has maintained his adherence to socialist ideals,” to the discomfiture of critics on both the far left and the far right. This ideal, he notes toward the end, “does not guarantee full equality of material possibilities or an equal position in society to everyone, because people differ individually. Socialism must, however, ensure substantial progress toward equality in the most important sense--equality of rights and obligations, just treatment of all, and equal opportunity for all to discover and develop their talents and abilities. It must reduce the flagrant material inequality that exists under capitalism, eliminating both excessive wealth and humiliating poverty.” Medvedev still regards Stalinism as nothing but “barracks pseudosocialism,” distinguished by its overgrown bureaucracy, its deception of the masses, and the hypocritical and corrupt pursuit of elite privilege.

The nature of Stalin’s rule, including his mammoth crimes in the collectivization of the peasants, the artificial famine of 1932-33, and the purges of 1936-38, is now well known and beyond dispute, to Soviet historians as well as Westerners. There are only more gory details that keep coming out about this story, which Medvedev recounts in full. What remains more debatable is explaining how Stalin could establish the kind of system that permitted him to commit these monstrosities, “even worse than Hitler,” as another eminent Soviet scholar recently remarked to me.

This question was raised as long ago as 1956 when the Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, asserting his own independence, took issue with Khrushchev for putting all the blame on Stalin’s demented personality. “The true problems are evaded,” Togliatti charged in a famous interview shortly after the “Secret Speech” was made public by the United States government, “which are why and how Soviet society could reach and did reach certain forms alien to the democratic way and to the legality which it had set for itself, even to the point of degeneration.”

There are some in the Soviet Union who now argue, like many Western writers, that Communist ideology has been the key to the Soviet tyranny all along. One such critic is Alexander Tsipko of the Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System in Moscow, a hotbed of progressive and critical thinking, who openly puts the blame on Marx’s Communist utopia combined with the abstract messianism of the pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals. Tsipko rejects the notion of betrayal or counterrevolution under Stalin, echoed by writers from Leon Trotsky to Medvedev himself, on the ground that this theory detracts from the responsibility that should rest on the revolutionary thinkers who preceded him.

While that argument is persuasive at first glance, it does not stand up against the actual story of Stalin’s rise to power between 1917 and 1929. Here, in a major expansion of his book based on Western studies, Medvedev shows how Stalin was opposed at one time or another by practically every other leading Russian Marxist, not to mention innumerable Social Democrats and Communist schismatics outside the Soviet Union. It is too much to credit Stalin, as his sycophants did, with being the highest oracle of Marxist truth; Medvedev conveys the far more realistic picture of a cynical, opportunistic, and above all egomaniac power grabber who learned early on how to manipulate Marxist-Leninist doctrine to entrap or bamboozle the true believers. By the time of the purges, he now concludes, “Stalin wielded such power as no Russian tzar or any other dictator of the past thousand years has possessed.”

This, however, does not bring us any closer to understanding how it was possible for such a warped and vicious man to take over the Brave New World. Medvedev demolishes the view that Stalin was merely the implementation of Lenin, but like most newly liberated Soviet historians, he still tiptoes around the question of Lenin’s responsibility for the one-party system and the centralized party bureaucracy that set up the country for Stalin’s takeover. “De-Leninization,” it seems fair to say, remains the last hurdle for perestroika in Soviet history.