Servant into Master

STALIN: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (600 pp.)--Isaac Deufscher--Oxford ($5).

In 1915, Joseph Stalin, professional revolutionist, was exiled to Kureika, Siberia. At 35, he had given all of his adult years to underground Bolshevik work, and it seemed they had been spent in vain. To Olga Alliluyeva, his future mother-in-law, he wrote a letter thanking her for food parcels and asking only for a few picture postcards: "In this accursed country [of frozen tundras] I have been overcome by a silly longing to see some landscape, be it only on paper."

This is Stalin's only available private letter, one of the few occasions when he is known to have indulged in spontaneous human sentiments. In later years he was not to waste much time with such "silly longings." As portrayed in Isaac Deutscher's painstakingly researched and austerely written biography, Stalin has spent most of his life cultivating a steel fagade and suppressing any public sign of human frailty or fraternity--proper training for a modern dictator with pretentions to omniscience.

The Way to Power. Actually, no real biography of Stalin is yet possible. How did he feel when his lifelong colleagues were sentenced to death in the Moscow trials? What did he say when his treaty partner, Hitler, attacked Russia? No one in a position to speak freely knows, and until such questions are answered, all a biographer can do is to rework the public record. Biographer Deutscher, an ex-Communist who now writes for British weeklies, has done this with taste and scholarship. Though less exciting and brilliant than Trotsky's acrid biography of Stalin, Deutscher's book is more reliable and objective.

Stalin was the one important Bolshevik who was not an intellectual, a fact which seems to have filled him with poisonous envy. The other leaders had reputations as brilliant writers and orators, he began as a clumsy writer and tepid speaker. But he thought of himself as a man of the people (his parents had been serfs) and a practical organizer who would transform the intellectuals' fantasies into reality. He concentrated on building a personal political machine--first in the underground and then in the Soviet state. In the end, he liquidated the intellectuals. Deutscher sees this as a "betrayal" of the revolution, though most U.S. readers are likely to think if the most natural outcome in the world.

The Way to Empire. Stalin deliberately cultivated the role of the featureless party functionary. He had no private vices; he loved neither money nor pleasure, neither drink nor women. His only vice was public: an insatiable lust for power. This he cultivated with a talent incomparable in modern history, and in a way which certainly contradicts Trotsky's intellectualistic verdict that Stalin was a mere mediocrity. Moreover, his uncanny coolness with the Nazis at the gates of Moscow showed that, whatever else he might be, he was a leader of titanic strength.

Yet his leadership led inexorably to the spilling of blood and the enslaving of men. "Like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon," concludes Author Deutscher, "he started as the servant of an insurgent people and made himself its master. Like Cromwell he embodies the continuity of the revolution through all its phases and metamorphoses . . . Like Robespierre he has bled white his own party; and like Napoleon he has built his half-conservative and half-revolutionary empire and carried revolution beyond the frontiers of his country."

In his ultimate purpose, which is to show what makes a modern dictator tick, Biographer Deutscher has not completely succeeded; neither has any other writer. But his verdict on the Stalin regime is clear enough: Stalin undertook to drive barbarism out of Russia by barbarous means. In a fresh demonstration of one of the oldest lessons in history, the result was a new barbarism.

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