Kotkin's book from Oxford Univ. Press on the Soviet collapse is quite
good,
"Armageddon Averted, "
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/RussiaFormerSovietUnion/?ci=0195168941&view=usa
Title: Truth and Consequences , By: Kotkin, Stephen, New Republic, ,
3/31/2003
Database: MasterFILE Premier (EBSCO)
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
By William Taubman
(W.W. Norton, 876 pp., $35)
Beria--My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin
By Sergo Beria
(Duckworth, 397 pp., $26.95)
> ...DE-STALINIZATION WOULD SEEM to be a secure feather in Khrushchev's
> cap, and yet his historic claim has been questioned. Huge uprisings in
> the Gulag in 1953-1954, when it held at least 2.5 million prisoners, had
> to be put down with tanks and fighter planes, demonstrating that
> Stalin's terrible legacy would confront his heirs whether or not they
> confronted it themselves. Also, Khrushchev initially resisted efforts to
> probe and to criticize Stalin's rule, seeking instead to scapegoat Beria
> for the millions of arrests, executions, and deportations. And it was
> Beria who initiated de-Stalinization, in the months between Stalin's
> death in March 1953 (happy fiftieth anniversary!) and his own execution
> in July--that is, three whole years before Khrushchev's secret speech at
> the Twentieth Party Congress. Stalin was barely cold when his police
> chief Beria acted on his own to repudiate the Doctors' Plot and other
> falsified cases, to release Gulag prisoners en masse, and to launch
> numerous self-serving but unorthodox initiatives in domestic and even
> foreign affairs, such as an unauthorized rapprochement with Tito and a
> proposal to cashier East Germany.
So was Lavrenti Beria, notorious rapist and torturer, the true "liberal reformer," and Khrushchev merely a schemer--not to mention an anti-Semite--who tweaked and therefore in effect preserved Stalinism? Such was Amy Knight's "revisionist" argument in her serviceable if overwrought biography, Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant, which appeared in 1993. Such is also the contention of an unusual work that Knight uncomfortably denounced (in the Times of London) for its attempt to rehabilitate Beria, but that uncannily conveys the flavor of its subject: namely, Beria--My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin. Sergo Beria's inevitable apologia for his father, who here stands for everything good and opposes everything evil, is too absurd to warrant refutation. Anyway, Sergo--who was born in 1924 and named for Sergo Ordzhonikidze, his father's main patron and the commissar for industry under Stalin-- refutes his own book. "The reader may be surprised that I have remembered so many of my father's remarks," he writes, adding, "I was so very fond of him that every word of his is imprinted forever in my memory." This is doubtful, to say the least; and then he admits that "my father never confided his real intentions to me," and that "my father never expounded to me his views on our regime." Among the multitude of sensations not otherwise mentioned in the avalanche of revelations since 1991 but supposedly discussed in the admittedly highly placed Beria household is that Stalin had a thing for opera singers and fathered two more children after the war "with a redhead."
And yet it must be said that the younger Beria saw a great deal, thanks to a career in intelligence and military technology. He was in Iran in 1941 and 1942 to arm the Kurds so that they could be deployed to protect Soviet oil fields in Baku. He transferred to the central NKVD laboratory to study radio--the same installation, he discovered, that bugged Politburo members. In 1943, Sergo found himself in Tehran typing up translated transcripts for Stalin of the secretly recorded conversations of Roosevelt and Churchill. Two years later he performed similar duties in Yalta. Having learned German in school and from his nanny, Sergo baby-sat the captured German commander at Stalingrad in 1943 and met with rounded-up German scientists in 1945. On top of all these experiences, he came to know the regime by observing his father, and by mixing socially as well as professionally with the military elite, state functionaries, and their gossiping wives and offspring--no less than did Khrushchev's son. Indeed, his memoir aims to undo the Khrushchev family's blackening of Beria by re-directing the bile. This Beria family memoir enacts its own principal insight: that bitter hatreds formed the very essence of the Soviet regime.
Sergo draws back the curtain on a world of elite animosities. His account is premised on the genuine insight that Stalin established innumerable parallel groups on every significant issue or task. Why deliberately cultivate inefficiency? Because competitors engaged in mutual denunciations, ensuring a steady flow of information to the despot, who never became dependent on a single individual in any crucial sector. In turn, the success and even the survival of functionaries depended not just on Stalin's favor, but on the quality of their Stalin-fostered enemies--along the lines of "my father drew the conclusion that [Marshal] Konev was a shit rather than a madman." Sergo further explains that Beria's arch-enemy was Andrei Zhdanov, the party's top ideologue and a Russian chauvinist whose pretensions Beria openly mocked. But after Zhdanov came under serious attack for war-related fiascos, Beria defended him because, Sergo writes, he preferred such a worthless adversary to a more formidable replacement. In fact, when Zhdanov died in 1949, his position was effectively taken over by his protege Mikhail Suslov, who despite a castrato voice proved more dangerous to Beria owing to his indomitable capacity for work. Francois Thom, who supplies helpful notes that question and occasionally confirm Sergo's recollections, remarks correctly upon a "hideous world, made up of petty intrigues and great crimes," a "regime of blackmailers."
-- Michael Pugliese