Portrait of Joseph Stalin as the Class Bully

In a scene from Richard Lourie’s novel “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin,” Stalin, not yet sole dictator of Soviet Russia but tirelessly working his way to the top of the new power structure, has been put in charge of ensuring that reluctant farmers in the south send their grain to feed hungry proletarians in the north. Stalin is a man who gets the job done, no matter what. Far from having to steel himself to use harsh means to attain his ends, the Georgian-born Joseph Dzhugashvili, who took the name Stalin to express his steely character, enjoys finding new ways to cajole, manipulate, terrify and break people.

Emulating one of his favorite role models, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin rounds up a handful of prisoners and asks them for a reason to spare their lives. One man, a farmer, says he regrets not having supported the Communists and promises to give them all his cattle. Another, a Jew, says he was wrong to have been apolitical and promises to hand over a stash of gold he had put by for a rainy day. Another, a Cossack, promises he will now fight as fiercely on behalf of the Communists as he formerly did on behalf of the tsar: besides, he argues, he is not a Jew.

Stalin cogitates: Although he likes the Cossack best, one fighter more or less will make no difference to the Reds, whereas the farmer’s cattle will feed hungry soldiers and the Jew’s gold can help buy more rifles. He’s promised only one prisoner will survive, but why not spare two and get the money and the food? “The solution satisfied my reason,” Stalin tells us, “but somehow irritated me. What good was unlimited power if you had to obey the dictates of reason?” So he has all of them but the Cossack shot.

The author of several suspense novels about East-West relations, Lourie has written nonfiction works about Russia and has served as Mikhail Gorbachev’s translator. In “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin,” he has taken what is known about the first 60 years of Stalin’s life and fashioned from these broadly substantiated facts an all-too-believably diabolical portrait of a man single-mindedly determined to bow to no one and no thing but his own will.

Writing from the vantage point of the late 1930s, Lourie’s Stalin has risen to the pinnacle of power, banished his rival Trotsky and obliterated most of the original Bolshevik leaders in the purge trials. But he cannot rest easy while Trotsky, the one man still capable of taking his place, is alive. Himself a killer, Stalin is sure Trotsky is planning to kill him. And just as bad, Trotsky is working on a biography of Stalin that will expose his crimes. Thus, Stalin plots to eliminate Trotsky while writing his own version of his life history.

In some ways, Stalin might seem a fit subject for Dostoevsky, who brilliantly anatomized the convoluted psyches of nihilists in great novels like “The Possessed.” Yet the real Stalin may well have been more like Lourie’s: simpler, cruder, less interesting than Dostoevsky’s tortured radicals but just as chilling. Lourie’s novel is hardly in Dostoevsky’s league, but it does help to illuminate a chapter of history. This Stalin is a man filled with resentment for anyone who might conceivably consider himself his superior. Unlike the revolutionary idealists who dreamed of a better world, he sees the revolution merely as the means by which someone like himself can rise from the bottom of the social order to the top. He’s ruthless, cunning, patient, amoral and--the price he pays for a life of crime and defensive vigilance--increasingly paranoid.

Unlike his confrere in genocide, the truly bizarre Hitler, Lourie’s jovial, pipe-smoking, devious, hardheaded and hardhearted “Uncle Joe” is somewhat more “ordinary.” He might be a crime boss, a drug kingpin, a gang leader, a power-mad magnate, a sadistic prison warden or a schoolyard bully. This, perhaps, is the most frightening thing about him.