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...HISTORY JUDGE by ROY A. MEDVEDEV translated by COLLEEN TAYLOR 566 pages. Knopf...
...quite 20 years after Stalin's death, a Soviet scholar has produced the most comprehensive and revealing investigation of Stalinism ever to appear anywhere. Roy Medvedev, 46, is a schoolteacher turned historian. Like his twin brother, the prominent geneticist Zhores, he is a dedicated Communist and patriot, who believes in Marxism-Leninism and its vision of the future.* When he set about writing Let History Judge, Medvedev was motivated neither by disillusionment with the Bolshevik experiment nor by a desire to discredit the present regime. What he wanted, instead, was to enlighten fellow Soviet Communists about 50 years...
...Medvedev quotes from a private family archive an eyewitness account of how Stalin personally led the interrogation and humiliation of his purged Ukrainian party chief, Stanislav Kosior. There is also an authoritative description of the death of Stalin's prewar Aviation Minister, Mikhail Kaganovich, a Jew whom Stalin accused of collaborating with the Nazis. The man was summoned to the office of Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin's most durable aides and later Foreign Minister and President of the U.S.S.R., now retired and writing his memoirs. When Kaganovich was confronted with the false evidence against him, he asked...
...faithful Communists were to live with the truth that an estimated 20 million murders had been committed in their name by the Stalinist bureaucracy between 1934 and 1953. Khrushchev denounced Stalin as an evil genius who was able to seize control of the party by some terrible historical accident. Medvedev's view is less simplistic. He argues that in every social upheaval there is a fanatical fringe whose idealistic elements can easily be infiltrated by opportunists and criminals. Stalin, according to Medvedev, was both-a man typical of the "unstable and dishonorable people who join a revolutionary movement...
Khrushchev took the line that Stalin's perversion of the Soviet system started with the purges of the '30s. Medvedev is probably the first and certainly the most distinguished Soviet historian to agree with Western critics that Stalin had already begun to corrupt the party during Lenin's lifetime. In one of his few but significant criticisms of the U.S.S.R.'s founding father, Medvedev suggests that Lenin's "natural enthusiasm for people" kept him from recognizing Stalin's villainous character until it was too late...