The human monster

Joseph Dzhughashvili didn't make many friends in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (as the future Communist Party was then known), but he distinguished himself through hard work and ideological commitment. While Lenin and most of the party's other leadership lived in exile in Polish or Swiss or French villas during the years before 1917, Dzhughashvili was repeatedly arrested by the tsar's secret police. He served several prison terms and was sent to Siberia three times, only to escape. (He seems to have treated this as an object lesson: There were few escapees from the Siberian Gulag under his reign.)

Trotsky's famous claim that Stalin was a nonentity who "missed the Revolution" is not accurate. He made his way back to Petrograd after four years in northern Siberia just before the fall of the tsar in February 1917, and became one of Lenin's most loyal lieutenants. As Trotsky must have known, Stalin -- he had been using that name since 1912 -- was elected to the party Central Committee and was an editor of Pravda, the party newspaper. He played a key organizational role that October, when the Bolsheviks (Lenin's revolutionary faction of the party) seized power, and became a commissar in the new government.

If anything, Trotsky was trying to conceal the extent to which Stalin was already competing with him for Lenin's favor. In the civil war that followed the Revolution, Stalin first became known for his brutality. He seized command of the Red Army near the city of Tsaritsyn (later to be called Stalingrad), ordered deserters shot, treated his own troops and the enemy mercilessly and had to be restrained from sinking a barge crowded with White Army POWs in the Volga.

By the time Lenin was felled by a stroke in 1922 (he would live for two more years, but take little part in running the nascent Soviet state), Stalin had positioned himself perfectly. If Trotsky was more charismatic and radical in tone, Nikolai Bukharin had more intellectual heft, and other Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev had more seniority, Stalin had established himself as a muscular leader devoted on the one hand to Leninist doctrine and on the other to preserving the Soviet revolution against its enemies (which at this early stage meant virtually the entire world).

As Service makes clear, this was exactly what the other Bolsheviks were looking for, and Stalin could never have emerged from the leadership struggle without widespread support. It's true that Lenin grew mistrustful of Stalin, and sought to denounce him near the end. But Lenin's famous "Testament," while urging that Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary -- more because Lenin saw him as "crude" and "uncouth" than because of any brilliant political foresight -- failed to endorse Trotsky or Zinoviev or any other plausible candidate.

Stalin sat "pale as chalk" during the reading of Lenin's Testament at the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. But in the end, Kamenev and Zinoviev supported him, and Trotsky wasted his last, best chance. So Stalin survived. After he emerged as the party's sole leader a few years later, many of those in the room that day would not be so lucky.

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Virtually since Stalin assumed power, the left-wing line has been that the Georgian usurper had abandoned Marxism and betrayed the true promise of the Russian Revolution. There are grains of plausibility in this, Service argues, but not much more. A Trotsky-led Soviet Union might have been less repressive than Stalin's, with more cultural freedom and some gestures toward "worker's democracy" (although Service wonders how long it would have survived). But Stalin never lost his faith in the Marxist-Leninist doctrine that global communism was inevitable, and everything he did, no matter how brutal or irrational it seemed, conformed to his understanding of Marxist theory.

On the other hand, Stalin's understanding of Marxism was very much his own invention. He introduced the heretical notion of building "socialism in one country," which Lenin and Trotsky had always insisted was impossible. In fact, he announced that it had been accomplished, in November 1936, after his program of forced industrialization and the mass collectivization of agriculture had mostly been completed -- causing a horrific famine in western Russia and the Ukraine in which somewhere from 6 million to 10 million people starved.

But the final stage, Marx's classless workers' paradise of communism -- even the great Stalin couldn't see that far. During the dictator's 24 years in power, the Stalinist state certainly showed no signs that it might "wither away," in Lenin's famous phrase. Stalin's task, as he saw it, was to defend his existing socialist state from all enemies, whether real, potential or entirely hypothetical. If that took an iron fist, well, so be it. He was the man for the job, and the worldwide proletariat would thank him for it one day.

In that context, Service's reading of the Great Terror of 1936-38 is more nuanced, if that's not an inherently offensive idea, than that of most other historians. He agrees that most of those arrested in this massive purge -- among them Stalin's longtime colleagues in the original Bolshevik leadership, including Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev -- had done little or nothing to threaten the regime. The conspiracies they were tortured into confessing were entirely fictitious. But by the late '30s Stalin had come to see his own survival as crucial to the possibility of global communism, and Service believes that he also understood how widely dissatisfaction with his brutal regime had spread.

Next Page: Stalin to his wife: "I miss you so much  I'm as lonely as a horned owl"

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