Stalin’s ‘Evil Nature’ Revealed in His Personal Archives : Soviet Union: Above all else, the late dictator lusted for power, and he personally ordered the execution of leading members of the Communist Party.

As Dmitri A. Volkogonov opened the long-sealed boxes and pored over the dusty papers inside, he realized with a sudden horror that he was reading the meticulously compiled lists of Soviet Communist Party officials who were to be executed on the personal orders of the dictator Josef Stalin.

“They were some of our best people of the time, outstanding party leaders, and they were listed for annihilation,” Volkogonov recalled Tuesday. “Stalin reviewed the lists with Georgy Malenkov (a close aide) and approved the executions. And then they calmly went out to watch a movie that night.”

For Volkogonov, the discovery of those lists in Stalin’s personal archives was one of his most frightening moments as he prepared a new biography of the dictator using material released for the first time from government, military and Communist Party archives.

“Stalin wrote few letters or notes, but the inscriptions he made on the documents that he saw were blood-chilling,” Volkogonov said. “For a certain period, I could not sleep. As I went through the archives I was reliving those terrifying events.”

The new information in his lengthy biography, “Triumph and Tragedy,” confirms in detail “the evil, monstrous nature” of Stalin and the system he established, Volkogonov said.

“He was a man of strength, for which some people still admire him, but he had a very vicious mind,” Volkogonov said. “He loved only two things, power and glory, but he loved power more. . . . I know Stalin very well now, and I think that he would do anything for power. He placed his faith in violence, in physical, political and ideological violence.”

Volkogonov, director of the Soviet Institute of Military History, said his research led him to conclude that victims of Stalin’s repression, including three major purges, totaled between 21 million and 22 million people, more than two-thirds of whom were executed or died in labor camps.

He based the estimate on the lists of victims he has found, reports by the secret police and other materials from the archives, all cross-checked with the capacity of the prison camps and the execution chambers used at the time.

For Volkogonov, 61, the figure is not a dry statistic: Among the dead were his father, an agronomist, who was executed, and his mother, who died in a labor camp.

Volkogonov--a lieutenant general in the army, whose previous post as deputy chief of the Defense Ministry’s political administration gave him unrivaled access to the highest levels of the Soviet leadership--said he had interviewed many retired officials who had worked for Stalin and even served under him in the Communist Party Politburo.

His goal, he said, was first to write a political profile of Stalin, drawing on the still-secret material in the archives as well as reminiscences.

“More than 400 books had been written about Stalin, but none with this material and none in the Soviet Union,” he said. “Yet we need to know most of all who Stalin was, what he did, what Stalinism is.”

And it is Stalinism that the biography is ultimately about, Volkogonov acknowledged, for it remains alive in the Soviet Union.

“I exclude a 100% repetition, but history can repeat itself on a different level,” he said. “Stalinism in its pure form will not return--that is an impossibility--but there can be a return to its methods, to its ideas. That is what frightens me.”

To combat neo-Stalinism, a growing concern among many liberals here, “it is necessary to understand the roots of the original phenomenon,” Volkogonov said. “The deeper the crisis in our society, the greater the danger of neo-Stalinism. Physically, Stalin died long ago. Politically, he is still alive. And historically, he will never die due to the mark he left on our society.”

With the Soviet economy in a deepening crisis and politics in the midst of total change, people of the older generation often reproach reformers, saying that under Stalin there was progress. Volkogonov acknowledged some merit in the criticism.

“They are right,” he said, “in that until this time we have not been able to choose the correct course. We perhaps need a strong hand, and Stalin was a strong hand. But who would suggest that we go back to those days?

“Stalinism can be eliminated by enlightenment, by revealing the truth and by real political and economic change, by real success. We have to find real alternatives to the Stalinist development we have had.”

The origins of Stalinism are complex, he said, a reflection of the political turmoil of the early years of the Soviet state, of the absence of any democratic traditions in pre-revolutionary Russia, of the lack of political understanding among peasantry and townspeople, of economic backwardness.

The main reason for the development of Stalinism, in Volkogonov’s view--which is certain to be controversial--was the failure in 1918 to develop a strong multi-party democracy when the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, whose party had polled more votes than the Communists in the first parliamentary elections, pulled out of the government headed by V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader. They were then banished from politics.

“If a parliamentary democracy had developed, there would have been no place for Stalinism,” he said, implicitly criticizing Lenin and thus breaking a political taboo here. “It was the fault of the Bolsheviks and also of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.”

Volkogonov said he is now completing a biography of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s bitter rival and eventual victim, in an effort to fill in the gaps of Soviet history.

“Before, our history resembled a lonely street at night where only one silhouette could be seen,” he said. “One of the important tasks of our historical science is to populate our historical street with those who deserve to be there.”

Volkogonov said he was thinking of writing a political profile of Lenin, whose revered status in Soviet ideology and politics has made a good biography impossible. But he said he will attempt it only if he is given access to all the closed archives about the Bolshevik leader.

“Triumph and Tragedy” has been published by the Novosti press agency, with an initial printing of 300,000 copies. A second edition of 350,000 copies, with additional material, is planned for next year. Contracts have been signed for its publication in 10 foreign countries, Novosti officials said.

BACKGROUND

After the death of V. I. Lenin in 1924, Josef Stalin launched a successful power struggle against his rivals to become the feared and undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union until his death in 1953 at the age of 74. During the nearly five decades of his rule, Stalin dragged his backward nation into the modern world through a brutal industrialization program. He collectivized agriculture at enormous human cost, and he led the Soviet Union in its devastating war with Nazi Germany. The purges and repression during those years cost the lives of as many as 22 million people, two-thirds of whom were executed or died in labor camps.