Brutality under a microscope

This is an extraordinary book, by two extraordinary people. The Medvedev twins have had different but in some ways complementary lives. Roy was trained as a historian. Zhores is a biologist-geneticist. Roy was one of the most famous of dissidents in the post-1970 Soviet period. Zhores was sent to one of the notorious secret police “psychiatric hospitals,” and Roy got him out. While Zhores was in England attending a scientific conference, his Soviet citizenship was revoked. Roy made striking public complaints about this, calling it “illegal and absurd,” but Zhores had to live in England until the collapse of Moscow’s Communist regime.

“The Unknown Stalin” makes no pretense of being coherent or comprehensive. It is, in fact, a collection of essays on a scattering of themes, but there is something for everybody. A long piece on “Stalin’s Mother” is in its way very interesting, though it adds little to the central story. On quite a different line, “Stalin’s Personal Archive” is a splendid investigation into the still-often-obscure fate of many documents. On the terrors of the 1930s, we get “The Murder of Bukharin,” a striking set piece on the great 1938 trial and its background.

“Stalin and the Blitzkrieg,” which focuses on the dictator’s role in World War II, is clear on his political and military failures before and during the first phase of the war. It is concerned, too, with denying (not very convincingly) the story of Josef Stalin’s brief breakdown at the end of June 1941, a minor yet interesting example of the controversies still with us. But, whatever Stalin’s military and political mistakes, his reforming -- and purging by execution -- of shattered units in the summer of 1941, and his ruthless toughness in general, can be seen as crucial to victory.

The Medvedevs argue that Hitler had no chance of winning, at least after the failure to take Moscow in October 1941. This opinion is not shared by other historians -- and it is, of course, impossible to prove. But Stalin himself thought Leningrad was on the point of collapse in 1941. And in 1942, he issued a desperate “backs to the wall” order. Some commentators argue that even at that point, if Hitler had not diverted part of his effort to the attempt to obtain oil in the Caucasus, the Germans might have succeeded.

But the Medvedevs are most concerned with the argument that Hitler would have been able to attack as planned in May if his forces hadn’t been diverted and worn down by the unexpected Yugoslav and Greek campaigns. The Medvedevs reject this on the grounds that a German blitzkrieg had to be over quickly, but this is not an entirely convincing view.

When it comes to the Cold War, three sections of “The Unknown Stalin” are devoted to some aspect of nuclear weaponry, presenting interesting details on, for example, how much the Soviet investment in manpower on the project exceeded that of the United States. “Stalin and the Atomic Gulag” looks at the use of forced labor in this field. Much of the scientific history, though, is beyond the scope of this review and needs checking against David Holloway’s masterful “Stalin and the Bomb.” Andrei Sakharov figures prominently in the book’s three atomic chapters, and the Medvedevs note in one episode the inability of this leading nuclear physicist and Yakov Zeldovich, one of his closest colleagues, to help a pregnant friend facing imprisonment and exile. We are also told how another of the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicists, Lev Landau, was later -- after Stalin’s death -- recorded by secret police bugging devices as saying that the chief danger to world peace was Soviet fascism.

“The Unknown Stalin” is useful for reminding readers of the way in which Stalin-style ideology produced pseudo-science. The ludicrous and agriculturally destructive story of Trofim Lysenko and pseudo-biology is naturally the concern of Zhores Medvedev, who gives much personal detail on the Soviet science apparatchiks. Roy Medvedev deals with the less known but even odder pseudo-linguistics of Nikolai Marr. Roy Medvedev cites a 1937 attack, which was to prove fatal, on genuine linguist E.D. Polivanov. A daring critic of Marr’s linguistic theories, Polivanov was described in the attack as a “kulak wolf hiding in the skin of a Soviet professor.” The Medvedevs’ book would not be complete without a long chapter on the circumstances of Stalin’s death, which gives most of the known facts but rightly avoids a conclusion. The power struggle that followed led to the last of the major blood purges -- this time of secret police veterans.

There are occasional slip-ups, from which no book of this sort is free. It is said, for example, of the trial of Mir Bagirov, a senior adherent of Lavrenty Beria’s who had briefly figured at the highest party level, that “there was nothing in the press and no public explanation of any kind.” In fact, the verdict, giving at some length his and his accomplices’ crimes, appeared in the Azerbaijan Bakinski Rabochy of May 27, 1956 (and was reprinted in my book “Power and Policy in the USSR”).

The post-Stalin Soviet Union in which the Medvedevs found themselves in their late 20s was uniquely misshapen, and they were faced with what a good Hegelian might see as “contradictions.” One factor was the vastness of the Stalin Terrors. There was hardly a family that had not been hit. Moreover, almost all the victims were innocent, even by Soviet standards. So, given their chance, they (or posthumously their families) sought some recompense, or at least rehabilitation.

The other legacy of Stalinism was the large and omnipresent apparat -- an “establishment” by any sociological standards. Moreover, it had become increasingly clear that the notion of state control of the economy was failing. But this had not become clear to Stalin’s successors.

In “Stalin’s Secret Heir,” the subject is Mikhail Suslov, who did more than anyone to prevent any genuine de-Stalinization. In fact, the partial “re-Stalinization” of Soviet society, attributed by the Medvedevs to Suslov in particular, had taken over. This occurred despite the repudiation, at the time, of at least the intra-party massacres under Stalin’s rule. In fact, for some years there was no official story, true or false, about the fate of many in the 1930s. Individuals from the faked Bukharin trial had been rehabilitated, but others were left denounced. But they had been sentenced as fellow plotters!

It was into this post-Khrushchev, but not quite post-Stalin, period that we see the rise of the great dissidents who, often silenced and victimized, nevertheless marked the crumbling of the regime’s self-confidence. Roy Medvedev came to public notice -- internationally, as well as among the Soviet intelligentsia -- with his remarkable book “Let History Judge” in 1968. One of the most devastating examinations of Stalinism, the book shocked the apparat. On the other hand, it remained orthodox on Leninism. So what were the post-Stalinists to do? For attacks on Stalin had been made, and in the name of a superior Communist conscience. Nikita Khrushchev had even allowed the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

“Let History Judge” was in those days, inevitably, based on a variety of sources, some firsthand, others not -- the usual condition of the officially silenced historian. His thoroughly detailed and humanely devastating presentation raised objections from some Western academics who, even in the 1980s, held (in the words of one of them) that “none of Medvedev’s informants was close enough to the center to be of real use” -- though one important source was the only surviving member of the famous Menshevik trial and another was the archives of Politburo member Grigori Petrovsky. Medvedev was also censured for his occasional use of undocumented sources, or even what were decried as “rumors” -- that is, firsthand, often eyewitness accounts.

One of the reasons given for Roy Medvedev not being repressed, as so many dissidents were in the 1970s and 1980s, was that he operated alone, with a typewriter and five carbons; the secret police needed a conspiracy to work on. The dissidents were by no means a united force. And Roy Medvedev, like some of the others, was involved in traditional Russian intelligentsia infighting. There were disputes with Sakharov, who came to oppose the whole system, while after glasnost Roy was reinstated in the party and elected to various state political bodies -- in fact, was “rehabilitated,” as were his books. But this, as “The Unknown Stalin” exhibits, in no way affected his and his brother’s activity on the Stalin phenomenon, which still looms large over Russian, and Western, consciousness. *