“Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy”, by Dmitri Volkogonov

 

642 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802111654

Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy is billed – right at the top of the dust cover – as “The First Glasnost Biography”, meaning its supposedly the first honest look of the blood-drenched sonovabitch by the Russians during the time Gorbachev was furiously trying to save the Soviet system from collapse – and NOT trying to bring freedom and democracy to the Soviet Union, as his many Western lickspittle apologists claim to this day. But just who wrote this thing? Well, I’ll tell ya: Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov was the chief of the Red Army’s psychological warfare department who spent a whole lotta time in in secret Soviet archives gathering information on several important Soviet leaders, Stalin (obviously) among them. Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist–Leninist ideologue for most of his adult life, Volkogonov came to repudiate communism and the Soviet system within the last decade of his life before his death from cancer in 1995. Interesting, no? Makes one wonder if his books slamming the Reds of old are sincere or some kind of intricate counterespionage-thing he cooked up. I dunno; maybe I’m just being paranoid…unless…that’s what they WANT me to think…oh, bother; let’s move on, shall we?

I dearly wanted to like this book, but Volkogonov wasn’t a professional historian (claims to the contrary aside) and he certainly wasn’t a great writer. His work, though well-researched and meticulous, fails to either capture the general reader or to impress anyone looking for a clear analysis of causes and consequences. He has no sense of how to connect his various narratives together, how to build a sense of continuity, or how to make us feel like we are really inside the events he is describing. He leaps back and forth in time at will, without bothering to explain why, while also wasting ink on picayune details before leaping over giant topics with barely a word. As for his politics…while reading Stalin never forget that, while Volkogonov may or may-not be a reformed Stalinist, he remained an unrepentant Leninist to the last. Time and again he makes it clear that, if only the saintly Lenin had lived all would have been wonderful in the worker’s paradise. Only Stalin was a bloodthirsty monster; everyone else was a glorious revolutionary. To blithely ignore the countless crimes committed by Lenin – that Stalin excused and expanded upon – is to live with Red blinders on.

Perhaps Volkogonov’s greatest merit is to have been able to access, thanks to his position in the Red Army, the USSR’s impenetrable archives and to have revealed to the world a deluge of details and documents. Some of them are immensely controversial in their potential consequences – the statements made by Stalin before the German attack that war was inevitable; or Zhukov’s plan for a preventive strike against Germany – and for that reason alone this book deservedly appears in most bibliographies on the USSR and the Russo-German war and has provided the academic community with valuable insights for further analysis on Stalin and Stalinism. But it is probably more suited for an historian than for a general reader.