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In his new book, Robert Service attempts to go beyond previous portraits of Stalin as an intellectual fraud or a gray bureaucrat

Closing In on Stalin
Josef Stalin preferred to be seen from afar -- larger than life, inaccessible. In a major new biography, Robert Service tries to cut him down to human size.

By Sheila Fitzpatrick
Published: April 15, 2005

There have been so many new biographies of Josef Stalin lately that we may almost be reaching the point of Stalin fatigue. Not that the subject has become fully comprehensible -- far from it -- or that any of the biographies has the instant-classic status of Ian Kershaw's two-volume "Hitler." Simon Sebag Montefiore's contribution from last spring, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," added a new dimension with his lively and highly readable, but still well-researched, portrait of Stalin in the company of his political associates and in his social and family milieu. Service, who thanks Montefiore in his preface and was warmly thanked by him in Montefiore's introduction, has taken another tack. Already the author of a history of Soviet Russia, Service sets out to give us Stalin in his historical context.

Although Service is well-equipped for this task and has done his homework in the archives, including the newly opened Stalin papers, the dictator's personality seems to elude him. Again and again he dutifully lays out alternative motivations for Stalin's actions, a procedure which, fair-minded and historiographically useful though it is, doesn't necessarily help the reader understand what kind of man Stalin was. Still, he offers some valuable corrections to a number of the received opinions about Stalin. Service's Stalin is highly intelligent, even intellectual, despite what Leon Trotsky said about him. He was never a "gray blur" or colorless organization man, as Nikolai Sukhanov wrote. And he was absolutely not, as Trotsky liked to claim, a mere cog in the bureaucracy, but rather someone who very definitely ran the show.

All of these points are well taken, and it is particularly useful to have the ghost of Trotsky's interpretation, once hegemonic in leftist as well as Sovietological circles, chased away. No one who has looked at the new archival materials could doubt Stalin's intelligence. Moreover, it's clear that he thought like an intellectual (that is, analytically), read prodigiously and widely, and had the habit when faced with a new political task -- thinking about Soviet diplomatic options in Europe in the 1930s, for example, or directing the Soviet military effort in World War II -- of systematically researching the topic in preparation. It turns out that not only was he an intellectual, he was a compulsive and professional editor who corrected any manuscript that crossed his desk for style and grammar as well as for ideology.

Stalin's sense of national identification has been the subject of much speculation. In Service's version, Stalin was not particularly hung up on this question, being neither a passionate and absolute convert to Russianness, as Robert C. Tucker argued, nor, as others have suggested, an unreconstructed Georgian whose bloodthirstiness as a ruler can be explained in terms of age-old Caucasian patterns of machismo and revenge. Service's sensible comment is that, like many other people who live somewhere other than their birthplace, Stalin had a sense of himself as both Georgian and Russian, the balance between the two changing according to circumstance. In addition, he was a serious Marxist, whose commitment to internationalism effectively ruled out any form of passionate nationalism.

Service's take on Stalin's relations with Vladimir Lenin, especially in the difficult years of Lenin's last illness, when Lenin became increasingly critical of Stalin and finally pronounced him unfit to be general secretary, is particularly interesting. This is a topic Service knows well from his work on "Lenin: A Biography," in which he showed clearly how much Lenin's intellectual coherence and emotional balance were affected by his strokes. Telling the story from the other side, Service presents Stalin as largely a victim of Lenin's unreasonableness and his own obligations as a Central Committee go-between. This applies not only to the famous "rudeness to my wife" incident, in which Lenin, already seriously ill, rebuked Stalin for his behavior to Nadezhda Krupskaya, but to Lenin's criticism of Stalin's interpretation of Soviet nationalities policy, which many historians have taken to be rational and justified, rather than the confused intervention by a sick and angry man.

This interaction between Stalin and a dying Lenin is a comparatively rare example in Service's biography of an episode in which Stalin appears more sinned against than sinning. The only other similar case is Stalin's relations with his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, where Service, like Montefiore, foregrounds her difficult personality and psychological fragility. Stalin may have been a neglectful husband, like many another man in public life, but their correspondence when he was absent shows him as the more affectionate and conciliatory partner in what was clearly a volatile marriage. Understandably, Stalin had a sense of betrayal, as well as grief and loss, when she committed suicide in 1932.

Any biography of Stalin must try to explain key episodes in his career, including the dramatic initiatives of the Great Break at the end of the 1920s, when Stalin embarked on all-out collectivization and industrialization; the Great Purges of the late 1930s; the ups and downs of wartime leadership; and the swing into anti-Semitism of the postwar years. Service sees the purges as an intensification of rather than departure from Stalin's earlier patterns, pointing out what many other scholars have missed -- that Stalin distinguished himself by ruthlessness and indifference to the scale of casualties as early as the Civil War. (This may be another occasion where Trotsky's picture was misleading. As the other great Bolshevik proponent of bloodshed from this period, he presumably had little interest in identifying this as one of Stalin's notable characteristics.)
On other big issues, however, Service has fewer insights to offer. What propelled Stalin into the wildly ambitious gambles of the Great Break and the First Five-Year Plan remains obscure, as does the mechanism by which he gathered his team of devoted executants. Vyacheslav Molotov appears suddenly in the narrative as a totally reliable No. 2 to Stalin, though all the reader has previously heard of him is that he and Stalin clashed in 1917 before Lenin's return from exile. As for the postwar period, the biography really trails off here. Service doesn't regard Stalin as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, probably correctly, but leaves the reader uncertain as to why he made the lurch into covertly state-supported anti-Semitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Stalin's striking retreat from hands-on leadership in the last years of his life, apart from a few favored issues which almost certainly included the anti-Semitic demarche of the Doctors' Plot, gets only perfunctory discussion.

Service had the laudable intention of writing a biography that would show Stalin as a human being rather than as a stereotypical personification of evil, but he only partially succeeds. His Stalin does seem human, though unattractive, and Service does not take the easy way out of suggesting that his suspicious and even paranoid characteristics amounted to madness. But Service fails to achieve the kind of vivid recreation of a personality that leads the reader to feel he has finally understood what made Stalin tick. Why was he so bloodthirsty as a ruler, and why did his associates follow him even after the debacle of the German attack in June 1941, when Stalin clearly expected to be overthrown? Service's historical landscape is quite precisely drawn, but the protagonist who inhabits it remains shadowy and distant -- which is no doubt the way Stalin, a great editor of his own personal archive as well as other people's manuscripts, intended it.

Sheila Fitzpatrick is the author of "Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia," to be published by Princeton University Press this summer.
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