Stalin, by Isaac Deutscher

[p023] Stalin. By Isaac Deutscher. Oxford Paperbacks, 10s. 6d. This is a paperback issue of the political biography of Stalin first published in 1949. It costs 10s. 6d. and is about the best value for money one could hope to get. The scholar- ship, scrupulous regard for the evi- dence, and meticulous attention to detail that have gone into this book all make for a work of the highest order. Add to this a mastery of the English language and a skiiful use of metaphor and imagery, and there emerges a work in which the interest of the reader is always sustained— even through the long passage of events with which many are familiar. Underlying all this and enriching it is a profound sense of the sweep of events and historical continuity and the spirit of the Russian people. The work deals with the period from the birth of Stalin in 1879 to the immediate post-war period. It was, of course, written before the well-known revelations made by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU and therefore before the first: major breakthrough of the Stalinist ice-age; probably for this reason the work is informed by a sense of the inevitability of the triumph of Stalin and the ideology that goes with his name. In his introduction to the present edition, Deutscher deals with this criticism of ‘inevitability’ by arguing that fron the historian’s point of view (as opposed to the partisan’s) the events leading to the triumph of Stalinism were irreversible. This begs the question, all the same. Too little emphasis is placed on those crucial moments in history when a continuation of the revolutionary process might well have been possible and with it the earlier demise of Stalinism—for example the possibility of revolution in Germany in 1923, in China in 1927; the possibility of preventing Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and the mobilisation of power- ful radical trends in the masses in Western Europe in the late 1930s which in fact was aborted in the Popular Front movement. Deutscher does not ignore these events, nor the revolutionary potential in them—it is simply a question of lack of

[p024] 62 emphasis where emphasis is above all needed. Significantly enough, in the intro- duction to the present edition the author acknowledges that if he were to write the book anew he would probably do it in somewhat different style, differently in detail and with shifts of emphasis; though on the whole he would stand by the inter- pretation of Stalin and Stalinism given in the work. The development of Stalinism is traced predominantly from the angle . of the backwardness and isolation of Russia, the weariness of the Russian masses, the failure of the European revolution and the pressure of world imperialism on Bolshevism. All this is well-authenticated and documented. There is very little of the other side of the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism, namely, the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste which usurped the political power won by the masses after 1917, battening on their poverty, and for whom Stalin emerged first as spokesman, eventually as supreme tyrant—that is, the treatment of the social basis of Stalinism in Russia itself is, on the face of it, deficient in this regard. The whole work is enriched by teference and allusions to the Great French Revolution and the lives and roles of Cromwell, Robespierre, Napoleon and the great Tzars of Russian history. This sense of historical continuity probably does a lot to commend the book to a wide audience and commands the respect of those who take a very different political standpoint to that of the author. Deutscher shows consum- mate skill in weaving Stalin’s personal strengths and weaknesses into the Soviet body politic which in turn moulded his character, sapping the revolutionary strain, elevating minor tendencies and traits into dominant characteristics, setting his stamp on an entire generation. The picture emerges of a man—with an iron will, sly, aloof, suspicious, self-sufficient, ruthless, essentially pragmatic with a profound contempt .for revolutionary theory, possessed of a shrewd knowledge of the practical psychology of the ordinary people, supremely resilient, in a word well qualified as the most successful absolute despot of our time—the embodiment of Russian traditionalism - Napoleon.’ LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 and yet the stern and terrible guardian of the essential fabric of the October revolution; but not without the final prognosis ‘ But in order to save it for the future and to give to it its full value, history may yet have to cleanse and reshape Stalin’s work as sternly as it once cleansed and reshaped the work of the English revolution after Cromwell and of the French after RS. Close type, open verdict