Book Review: Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator

Stalin: New Biography of a Dictatorby Oleg V. Khlevniuktranslated from the Russian by Nora Seligman FavorovYale University Press, 2015Readers rightly terrified by the appearance last year of Stephen Kotkin's enormous biography of Joseph Stalin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 – a thousand pages long and but the first third of the whole! - might breathe a sigh of relief at the appearance of Oleg Khlevniuk's Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, which manages to cover the whole of Stalin's appalling life and reign in just under 400 pages.The story is of course unchanged: seminary student from Georgia muckrakes for a few years, helps found the Politburo, works the Russian Revolution to his advantage, rises to sole dictatorial power through the canny maneuver of shooting everybody who came within 100 feet of him, helped the Allies to win World War Two mainly in the hope of betraying whoever was left standing, personally ordered the execution of more people than any single human being had done since Genghis Khan, would have been girlishly flattered if you'd pointed that out (and then would have shot you), ruled the Soviet Union for thirty years of unrelenting, omnipresent tyranny, sickened suddenly in 1953, became the last head of state to be treated with leeches, and died on March the 5^th, leaving a thoroughly traumatized nation of nearly 200 million people living cringing, oppressed lives at roughly the same level as their 8^th century ancestors. Imagine Hitler with four times the body-count and none of the sincerity and you'll just about have it.There's a vast array of former Soviet archives for all this, and those archives have steadily been opening to Western researchers, who've encountered an embarrassment of riches. Some writers – like Kotkin, obviously – confronted with such riches, have lost their grip on reality. Long-time researcher in the Soviet archives Oleg Khlevniuk, under commission from Yale University Press to write a book of a trim enough length not to sprain your sacroiliac, opens his new book with a somewhat wistful comment about the “size and structure” of his biography:

Restraints in the former have inspired innovations in the latter. Exhaustive details had to be forsaken. References and notes had to be kept to a minimum, so priority has been given to the attribution of quotes, numbers, and facts. By no means all of the worthy works of my colleagues have been mentioned, for which I offer them my apologies. Such economies leave me ambivalent. I regret the omission of many telling facts and quotes, but I am glad for the reader. I know how it feels to gaze wistfully at stacks of fat tomes that will never be conquered.

Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator isn't a fat tome. It's healthy-sized, and even better, it's a fantastic read, full of deep-reaching insights and a mordant, very Russian wit. He follows Stalin through a long series of archives, diaries, memoirs, and histories, always remembering that he's dealing with a monster and very often using choice quotations to let Stalin hang himself:

Stalin claimed to have had no part in his own atrocities. He told the renowned Soviet aeronautical engineer Aleksandr Yakolev that it was all [secret police chief Nikolai] Yezhov's fault: “Yezhov was a beast! A degenerate. You'd call him at the commissariat, and they'd tell you 'He went to the Central Committee.' You'd call the Central Committee, and they'd tell you, 'He went to his office.' You'd send someone to his house, and it turns out that he's lying in bed dead drunk. Many innocent lives were lost. That's why we shot him.”

Khlevniuk handles all of this sprawling expanse of material so smoothly that you'll finish his book feeling no urgent need to read an account of the same material at fifteen times the length. And Khlevniuk is very good on the creepy ways Stalin's oppression extended beyond his death, having conditioned an entire people to oppress themselves:

Most people had been trained to keep their opinions to themselves. The ubiquity of informants and the habit of fear kept free expression to a minimum, to say nothing of more demonstrative forms of protest. The choice was simple: either accept – or pretend to accept – official values or find yourself in a camp or face to face with an executioner.

This is a wonderfully companionable biography of one of the most wretched human beings ever to draw breath; it's a brightly readable history of one of the darkest intervals of human history; and, as noted, it isn't long enough to put you through your own Reign of Terror.