>
> --- Peter Lavelle <untimely_thoughts at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > Stalin is a very different question. The peoples
> of
> > the Soviet Union defeated Hitler - with or without
> > Stalin's "help." When Russians can agree on this,
> a
> > healthly Russian nationalism will come into place.
>
Hey, what did you think of John Dolan's review of Service's Stalin bio in he eXile? It was oddly compelling.
An Ordinary Joe By John Dolan ( dolan at exile.ru )
"Stalin: A Biography"-by Robert Service
Harvard University Press 2004
The conceptual problem that ruins this book was blurted out by a visitor whom my wife and I were showing around Moscow a couple of years ago. After hearing a guide describing the slaughter of clerics in the 1930s, the visitor shook her head and said solemnly, "That Stalin has a lot to answer for."
Which is true enough. But he can't answer for it, any more than Attila could answer for the trail of burned villages he left behind him. We want the great killers to have the mark of the beast somewhere on their preserved pelts. And they don't. They aren't monsters. Nor are they "banal," in Arendt's idiotic, endlessly misapplied cliche. They're just prime specimens of their type -- smart, ruthless, tough guys. Attila was a great steppe chieftain, no more and no less. You could put him through a thousand CAT scans, strap him down on a shrink's couch for a month, and learn nothing -- because there's nothing to learn. All that can be said of him is what Sam Elliot says of the Dude: "He's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there."
And Stalin was, self-evidently, the man for his. Service's biography collapses into the Attila paradox: writing the biography of a man who wasn't nearly big enough for the big, smoking crater he left in history.
Service seems to have a dim, intermittent sense of his problem. He chafes now and then against a Stalin-centric view of Soviet history, reminding the reader that Stalin's worldview was not idiosyncratic -- it was, in fact, the standard, shared perspective of most high-ranking Bolsheviks. Therefore Stalin's character can't explain the course of Soviet history.
But in making this point Service is essentially objecting to his own genre, the Great Man's Biography. His book is so focused intensely on Stalin that its very shape reinforces the centrality of the man himself, no matter how many times he tells you to look away from the little man with the big mustache to the bigger picture.
The conventional view is that Stalin's rise was bad luck; that if Trotskii or Bukharin had won the struggle for power after Lenin's death, the GULAG would have been smaller and cozier, at least. It's a dubious notion for all kinds of reasons. The most fundamental is one of those valid tautologies: Stalin was clearly the man most suited to win because he won. If he was also the most cruel and suspicious of the contenders, then those traits were obviously crucial to winning.
It wasn't an unlucky accident that Stalin won, and it's unlikely he was very different from the other contenders, any more than Attila was different from other Steppe chieftains. The men at the top of any hierarchy, from Bishops to real-estate developers, are pretty much alike. In fact, as Service notes, Stalin was the moderate, "democratic" voice in many crucial disputes with Trotskii. Trotskii wanted the workers' unions abolished, since the state now served their members' interests. Stalin did his best to preserve them.
Any genuinely thoughtful or compassionate Bolsheviks, like Bogdanov, had been purged or quit long before the succession struggle began. So doing psychobiography of the contenders is roughly like psychoanalyzing the first hyena to reach the wildebeest's carcasse. That's why so much of Service's admirable research into Stalin's obscure youth seems pointless. By uncovering the details of Stalin's childhood in Gori and adolescence in Tbilisi, he aims to prove that Stalin was "damaged" by his father's brutality, failure and descent into alcoholism. As if to signal his own uneasiness with this overreading of the evidence, Service usually couches it in unusually awkward, negative clauses: "That Joseph developed a gross personality disorder can hardly be denied..."
It's not very convincing. For starters, psychology, which was riding high when Stalin was alive, has crashed and burned. Nobody much buys the Freudian phantasmagoria any more, and the neuro-chemical model which has replaced it isn't going to be much help in Stalin's case.
Then there's the problem of the changing norms of childrearing in the past century. Stalin's childhood seems rough by the standards of the Western middle class in 2000, but it certainly doesn't stand out among working-class childhoods more than a century ago. If you want really epic beatings and whippings, try Gorkii's memoirs. Stalin's father Beso was more interested in getting drunk than devoting himself to thrashing his wife and son.
Of course, Beso's abandonment of his family offers another easy psychological explanation for Joseph's bad character. A dad who was literally distant, and a smothering, coddling mom -- that's the short version of the early life of Joseph Djugashvili. Unfortunately for the biographer, it's also the early life of every European born before 1945. It was the norm, and whatever pathology it produced was also the norm.
Which brings us to another problem with writing Stalin's biography: the idea that our norms work for him. We forget so easily what crazy, violent people Europeans used to be. If we imagine Europe as it really was until 1945, the problem of Stalin vanishes. He was like that because THEY were like that.
He was cruel, remorseless, totally lacking in compassion -- like Churchill. It's worth remembering that Churchill was an utterly savage man, an outright fascist who endorsed the use of poison gas against Kurdish villages in Iraq because it was a weapon especially suited to deployment against, and I quote, "the lower races." If we didn't lie to ourselves so much about swine like Churchill, we'd be much less puzzled by Stalin.
Service digs and digs, looking for proof that Stalin was mean, conceited and dumb as a boy. He cites friends' recollections to prove that the boy Djugashvilii fought dirty, hated losing, played cruel pranks and stole food. He was envious and vindictive, and once "deadlegged" another boy who out-danced him in front of friends.
In other words, he was just like every other boy ever born.
As hard as Service tries, there's not a single incident he uncovers that suggests anything abnormal in Stalin's childhood. Not since Augustine admitted stealing fruit has there been so underwhelming an account of boyish sin.
Service seems to know this. He's always qualifying his attempts at psychobiography. Summing up his account of Stalin's childhood, Service waffles: "[Stalin as a boy] was volatile, shy and resentful. But nobody yet felt that these features existed to an abnormal degree." Perhaps because they didn't.
Service concedes, "The upbringing of young Dzhugashvili did not predetermine the career of Joseph Stalin...Yet without the childhood experienced by Joseph there would have been no Stalin. For the tree to grow there had to be a seed."
In other words, for Stalin to grow up he had to be a child first. This argument, puerile in every sense, marks the point where Service's biography falls into a conceptual black hole. We may toss around the commonplace that "the child is father to the man," but we have no idea exactly how. And when we can't accept the norm that produced the man, the desperate attempt for nonexistent evidence of abnormality revs up, even when the poor biographer knows better.
If childhood can't account for Stalin's alleged abnormality, then we resort to ethnicity. Here again, Service writhes between the need to find a pyschobiographical reason for the GULAG and the fear of offending an entire ethnic group (or region). Was Stalin cruel because he was Caucasian? The evidence for this seems a bit better than the account of his boyhood habits. "Koba," which Joseph adopted as a nickname in adolescence and kept in adulthood, was the name of the outlaw-hero in a Georgian story which Joseph adored. Service quotes Koba's signature line, "I'll make their mothers weep." That sounds like a pretty serious influence to me.
But it makes Service uncomfortable, since it seems to partake of the stereotype of Georgians as vengeful and obsessed with personal honor. So Service dodges the question with a pious platitude, "The history of the twentieth century would have been a lot less bloody if Joseph Dzhugashvili had been a better Georgian."
Yes, but if little Joey had been "a better Georgian," embracing entrepreneurship, home and family, we'd never have heard of him. He and his family would have been buried in a mass grave, by some high-ranking Bolshevik came to power by being "a bad Georgian" -- or Russian, or Jew, or Tatar.
So we look for evidence of ruthlessness and cruelty in the young Stalin because that's the kind of man the grown-up Stalin was.
This dismal tautology at the heart of the book drags the whole work down with it, into a meticulously-researched Oprah interview with the dead Koba.
Maybe the only way to really get the disproportion between the little man with the big mustache and the vast chaos he conducted is through comedy. The best versions of Stalin might be John Cleese's role in Erik the Viking, or the hero of Voinovich's story, "Koba and His Friends."
No sane, normal researcher of the early 21st century is ever going to get Stalin right. To do that, we'd have to want to understand his era. And that's the last thing we want. We're like Scott Evil, happy to come into our ill-gotten inheritances as long as we don't have to meet our horrible, long-lost dads.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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