Veteran journalist and author
Joseph C. Goulden reviewed Stephen Kotkin's Stalin for the Washington Times.
What caused Joseph Stalin to become one of history’s
most notorious mass murders? Unlike Adolph Hitler, whose victims were anonymous
Jews and other “undesirables” whom he did not know, Stalin’s victims included
persons from his inner circle, fellow leaders of the Soviet Communist party.
Such is the grisly story
related by Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton University professor, in the second
volume of a planned trilogy on the Soviet tyrant. Even readers acquainted with
Stalin’s blood-stained career will find sickening details that Mr. Kotkin gleaned
from previously secret files. His academic work at times is more terrifying
than a Stephen King novel.
“Confessions” that the
innocent were forced to sign with their own blood. High officials of Stalin’s
“inner circle” watching their wives hauled into captivity for non-existent
“crimes against the state.” Stalin scrawling “execute” on a list of thousands
of “traitors” which he would review (supposedly) in several hours.
Insecurity apparently ruled
Stalin’s psyche. The crown of Vladimir Lenin, who brought communism to Russia,
rested uneasily on Stalin’s head. Lenin left a written legacy proclaiming
Stalin to be his successor, then waffled somewhat in a later oral statement
Thus Stalin spent his first
years as dictator with a slippery grasp on power. His solution: destroy
contemporaries (even those who were close friends) who might challenge his
right to authority.
Once a few thousand murders
established his rule, continuation of the terror was reflexive. As Mr. Kotkin
writes, “Tyranny has a circular logic: once a dictator has achieved supreme
power, he becomes keener still to hold it, driving him to weed his own ranks of
even potential challengers.”
Of the 1.58 million persons
arrested 1936-1938, 683,000 were victims of extrajudicial killings. To Stalin,
“murder was an administrative tool,” Mr. Kotkin writes. He viewed close
associates as comprising a “nest of spies.”
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