TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/062689/06268900.070

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 102 lines

BOOKS, Page 83

A Monster Brought to Life

By Patricia Blake


    LET HISTORY JUDGE
    by Roy Medvedev
    Translated by George Shriver
    Columbia University
    903 pages; $57.50

    When Roy Medvedev's momentous study of Stalinism, Let History
Judge, was first published in the West in 1971, readers marveled.
How could a Soviet citizen, laboring in Russia, have produced a
work so rich in documentation, so scrupulous as scholarship and,
above all, so harrowingly vivid in its recounting of the calamities
inflicted by Stalin on his country? In the West there was nothing
to rival it in scope. In the Soviet Union, where the book
circulated among scholars, it restored a long-abandoned standard
of professional integrity to Soviet historiography. As one Russian
practitioner lamented, "Stalin beat out of us the capacity to think
independently and to doubt, without which there is no search for
truth."

    Medvedev paid a stern price for publishing his book abroad. He
was threatened with arrest, and his files were seized by the KGB
in 1971 and again in 1975. His phone was cut off for a year, and
all his international mail was confiscated until 1987. Still, many
witnesses to Stalin's crimes, heartened by news of the book,
offered Medvedev a bonanza of new information. Old Bolsheviks who
had suffered at the dictator's hands came to Medvedev's Moscow
apartment to bring him the unpublished memoirs they had squirreled
away in despair. Victims of the Great Terror and their friends and
relatives told him of their personal ordeals. A host of young
researchers volunteered to hunt for Stalin-era documents in the
official archives to which Medvedev had been denied access. After
the author's twin brother Zhores, a distinguished biochemist and
author, was exiled in 1973, he managed to send Roy from Britain
scores of important works of Western Sovietology that were
unavailable in Russia.

    Now, after reading, reflecting, rewriting and adding 100,000
words, Medvedev has turned Let History Judge into virtually a new
book. Coincidentally, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost has
nudged the door ajar for its publication in the Soviet Union;
abbreviated versions of four chapters were printed early this year
in the magazine Znamya. Last month Medvedev came even closer to
acceptance in his homeland when he was elected to both the new
Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, the nation's
parliament.

    Medvedev likes to quote another historian, Jules Michelet, who
defined his profession as "the action of bringing things back to
life." Scarcely anyone does that better than Medvedev. All existing
portraits of Stalin, even one drawn by a great novelist like
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seem bland in comparison with the real-life
killer who charges through the pages of Let History Judge. Although
the statistics amassed by Medvedev are overwhelming -- he
conservatively estimates that no fewer than 5 million Soviet
citizens were arrested from 1936 through 1938 -- it is the telling
human detail that brings alive Stalin's wickedness.

    Medvedev shows the dictator and his secret-police chief during
the Great Terror as they sat for hours hunched over the lists of
hundreds of names Stalin would okay for execution, one by one,
before the working day ended. Stalin was fond of lavishing kindness
on his friends, even as he meticulously planned their arrests,
torture, trials and death. When one high official, I.A. Akulov,
received a near fatal concussion while skating, Stalin rushed
foreign doctors to the U.S.S.R. to treat him. As soon as the skater
recovered, Stalin had him shot.

    Members of the dictator's entourage were always at risk. On
Stalin's orders, the wife of Mikhail Kalinin was arrested and
tortured while her husband continued to serve as the country's
titular President. The wives of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov
and of Stalin's personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev were also
imprisoned. Meanwhile, the secretary endured other kinds of hell.
"One New Year's Eve," Medvedev recounts, "Stalin rolled pieces of
paper into little tubes and put them on Poskrebyshev's fingers.
Then he lit them in place of New Year's candles. Poskrebyshev
writhed in pain but did not dare take them off."

    How could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the
Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier
position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road
to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian
has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now
suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American
Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully
confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when
Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the
ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for
Stalin's usurpation of power." Addressing the readers he ultimately
hopes to reach, the Soviet people, he warns that "if socialism is
not combined with democracy, it can become a breeding ground for
new crimes."

    Medvedev's assertions point straight to Gorbachev's fundamental
problem: how to realize the "democratization" he has proclaimed
within the totalitarian institutions of the one-party Soviet state.
Unfortunately, it is not in the power of even so perspicacious a
historian as Medvedev to resolve that fateful dilemma. Perhaps that
is why he has become, at 63, a fledgling parliamentarian.