Word: stalins
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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...
...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...
BOOKS: A Russian historian updates the evils of Stalin...