The human monster

Some readers, no doubt, will object to Service's dedication to "humanizing" his infamous subject by focusing on his ordinary and even congenial qualities: Beyond the troubled childhood, the youthful poetry and the fondness for trees and flowers, the Stalin we meet in his book can be a charming if mercurial host (who relished "crude masculine humor"), has a nice baritone singing voice and likes to play with children. (In his games with daughter Svetlana, she pretended to be the supreme dictator, writing him letters ordering him to take her to the movies. He wrote back: "All right, I obey.")

Service pleads guilty as charged, arguing that it's both naive and dangerous to depict Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the other great mass murderers of history as inhuman monsters. They all lived much of their lives as "normal human beings," which does not mean that their official conduct was normal at all. (Hitler, famously, loved his dog -- probably more than he loved any human being.) If we fail to recognize our essential kinship with such people, Service suggests, we will be unable to spot the next Stalin or Hitler who emerges among us.

For years after his death, Stalin remained less a historical figure than a political totem to be repeatedly repudiated, buried and then partway dug up again. He haunted the left like an especially bad conscience. To this day, cultish Stalinist organizations like the Workers World Party and its front groups (International ANSWER, the International Action Center, etc.) are treated by the American activist left with far more respect than they deserve. It's as if some misty nostalgia for the original goals of revolutionary socialism can still cloud some people's minds to the unforgivable crimes committed in its name. This is every bit as disgraceful as Trent Lott's sentimental attachment to the era of white supremacy.

For socialists and other leftists, Stalin had to be apologized for or explained away or consigned to oblivion; there were idiotic debates about the precise moment when the Russian Revolution took its fateful turn toward totalitarianism. Perhaps understandably, the anti-communist left fled in the other direction. If some progressives have never confronted Stalin's legacy honestly, others have ritualistically abased themselves, vowed their undying loyalty to American capitalism and sworn never ever to follow a bad god again.

For many on the right, including those founders of the neoconservative movement whose intellectual origins lie in communism or socialism, the Red tsar has been a useful cudgel with which to batter their political opponents. Look, they could say, holding up the dictator's rotting head, here is the endpoint of all so-called progressive politics: the Gulag, the prison-state, the regime of lies. (That's pretty much what David Horowitz, former editor of the Marxist magazine Ramparts, would tell you today.)

Service's cold-eyed appraisal evades all these traps. He accomplishes the remarkable feat of painting Stalin as a believable human being, one who had sympathetic qualities but also suffered from a "gross personality disorder" that made his collision with history especially dire. This can be no consolation to Stalin's millions of victims -- nor indeed to the Russian nation, still in many ways trying to overcome his legacy -- but he carried his wounds with him to the end and, like anyone else, held at least the possibility of other outcomes within him.

Among a very small cache of private papers found after Stalin's death (including an angry note from Lenin demanding that Stalin apologize to Lenin's wife for being rude) was his last communication from Nikolai Bukharin, the most adventurous intellectual among the original Bolsheviks. Stalin hounded him for years after taking power, and in March 1938 made him the star defendant in the last big show trial of the Terror. Bukharin had humiliated himself, confessed to imaginary anti-Soviet plots and pleaded for mercy. From his execution cell in Lubyanka Prison he wrote to Stalin, using a Georgian nickname only the dictator's oldest colleagues knew: "Koba, why is my death necessary for you?"

Service assumes that Stalin kept this to gloat over his onetime foe, and felt a "frisson of satisfaction" while rereading it. That's a natural conclusion. But its proximity to the Lenin note, which can only have stung him, is intriguing. Was some small part of him, whatever of the teenage Georgian poet had not been burned away, troubled by the question?

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