A Monster Brought to Life

By Patricia Blake

LET HISTORY JUDGE

by Roy Medvedev

Translated by George Shriver

Columbia University

903 pages; $57.50

When Roy Medvedev's momentous study of Stalinism, Let History Judge, was first published in the West in 1971, readers marveled. How could a Soviet citizen, laboring in Russia, have produced a work so rich in documentation, so scrupulous as scholarship and, above all, so harrowingly vivid in its recounting of the calamities inflicted by Stalin on his country? In the West there was nothing to rival it in scope. In the Soviet Union, where the book circulated among scholars, it restored a long-abandoned standard of professional integrity to Soviet historiography. As one Russian practitioner lamented, "Stalin beat out of us the capacity to think independently and to doubt, without which there is no search for truth." %

Medvedev paid a stern price for publishing his book abroad. He was threatened with arrest, and his files were seized by the KGB in 1971 and again in 1975. His phone was cut off for a year, and all his international mail was confiscated until 1987. Still, many witnesses to Stalin's crimes, heartened by news of the book, offered Medvedev a bonanza of new information. Old Bolsheviks who had suffered at the dictator's hands came to Medvedev's Moscow apartment to bring him the unpublished memoirs they had squirreled away in despair. Victims of the Great Terror and their friends and relatives told him of their personal ordeals. A host of young researchers volunteered to hunt for Stalin-era documents in the official archives to which Medvedev had been denied access. After the author's twin brother Zhores, a distinguished biochemist and author, was exiled in 1973, he managed to send Roy from Britain scores of important works of Western Sovietology that were unavailable in Russia.

Now, after reading, reflecting, rewriting and adding 100,000 words, Medvedev has turned Let History Judge into virtually a new book. Coincidentally, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost has nudged the door ajar for its publication in the Soviet Union; abbreviated versions of four chapters were printed early this year in the magazine Znamya. Last month Medvedev came even closer to acceptance in his homeland when he was elected to both the new Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, the nation's parliament.

Medvedev likes to quote another historian, Jules Michelet, who defined his profession as "the action of bringing things back to life." Scarcely anyone does that better than Medvedev. All existing portraits of Stalin, even one drawn by a great novelist like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seem bland in comparison with the real-life killer who charges through the pages of Let History Judge. Although the statistics amassed by Medvedev are overwhelming -- he conservatively estimates that no fewer than 5 million Soviet citizens were arrested from 1936 through 1938 -- it is the telling human detail that brings alive Stalin's wickedness.

Medvedev shows the dictator and his secret-police chief during the Great Terror as they sat for hours hunched over the lists of hundreds of names Stalin would okay for execution, one by one, before the working day ended. Stalin was fond of lavishing kindness on his friends, even as he meticulously planned their arrests, torture, trials and death. When one high official, I.A. . Akulov, received a near fatal concussion while skating, Stalin rushed foreign doctors to the U.S.S.R. to treat him. As soon as the skater recovered, Stalin had him shot.

Members of the dictator's entourage were always at risk. On Stalin's orders, the wife of Mikhail Kalinin was arrested and tortured while her husband continued to serve as the country's titular President. The wives of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and of Stalin's personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev were also imprisoned. Meanwhile, the secretary endured other kinds of hell. "One New Year's Eve," Medvedev recounts, "Stalin rolled pieces of paper into little tubes and put them on Poskrebyshev's fingers. Then he lit them in place of New Year's candles. Poskrebyshev writhed in pain but did not dare take them off."

How could such a monster gain absolute ascendancy over the Soviet Union? In this book Medvedev backs away from his earlier position that Stalinism was essentially an aberration on the road to a more benevolent Communism envisioned by Lenin. The historian has re-examined the totalitarian system created by Lenin and now suspects that Stalinism sprang from Leninism, as many American Sovietologists have concluded. Though Medvedev never fully confronts this issue, he emphatically makes one crucial point: when Lenin banned all opposition groups and factions in 1921, the ensuing one-party dictatorship was "a very important condition for Stalin's usurpation of power." Addressing the readers he ultimately hopes to reach, the Soviet people, he warns that "if socialism is not combined with democracy, it can become a breeding ground for new crimes."

Medvedev's assertions point straight to Gorbachev's fundamental problem: how to realize the "democratization" he has proclaimed within the totalitarian institutions of the one-party Soviet state. Unfortunately, it is not in the power of even so perspicacious a historian as Medvedev to resolve that fateful dilemma. Perhaps that is why he has become, at 63, a fledgling parliamentarian.