An Interview with Paul Gregory on new Bukharin Book

Soviet Roulette recently reviewed Paul Gregory’s new book, Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Russia: The Story of Nikolai and Anna Larina. As our readers know, Gregory made a guest appearance on this blog. Gregory also kindly agreed to discuss his book with me by phone.

Dr. Gregory, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969, holds an appointment at the University of Houston’s Department of Economics, and is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is one of the country’s foremost experts on Soviet economics, transition economics, comparative economics, and economic history.

Gregory is also the prolific author of books that range from the Political Economy of Stalinism, Before Command: The Russian Economy From Emancipation to Stalin, Russian National Income, 1885- 1913, to Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Soviet Secret Archives.

Below is my rough attempt to summarize and synthesize a wide-ranging conversation with Paul Gregory about his new book into a few short paragraphs. It is not a literal transcription of the conversation in any sense. I take responsibility for any errors that might appear.

Fur Coat: What is the relevance of Bukharin, qua economist, today?

Paul Gregory: Nikolai Bukharin offered “socialism with a human face.” This approach was naturally attractive to Gorbachev as he attempted to salvage some form of socialism while rejecting command economics. Bukharin offered an alternative to planned socialism, an economy that integrated a market economy with a state that controlled heavy industry. This approach has some relevance to China today, since Bukharin accepted a one-party system and state control of key sectors, but also embraced markets, especially in the large agricultural sector. In fact, Bukharin is better known in China today than he is in the United States.

Fur Coat: Does Bukharin have any relevance to Putin’s Russia?

Paul Gregory: Bukharin is not often discussed in Russia today. However, the current economy is analogous in some ways to the political economy Bukharin described. After all, Russia is a market economy, but the “commanding heights” are firmly controlled by the state or state-friendly oligarchs. Thus, some businesses exist to serve the state rather than vice-versa. And of course Putin is operating in a electoral context which might suggest a single party like the one Bukharin supported.

Fur Coat: Bukharin was originally a Left-wing economist but eventually moved over to offer a “Rightist” economic critique. How are we to reconcile these two different economic philosophies? Are they both relevant today?

Paul Gregory: They really were two different approaches. If was as if there were two different people. At first, Bukharin offered a very radical road to economic development. He rejected the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, wrote the ABC’s of Communism, and supported international revolution. However, after War Communism, and the introduction of Lenin’s N.E.P. economic system, Bukharin had a conversion experience. He was relatively silent for a couple of years but then came out strongly in support of the logic of N.E.P. In my book, Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin, you can still see some of the lasting effects of Bukharin’s conversion. That he, he gained a reputation for being inconsistent and untrustworthy. But this was essentially Bukharin’s only major economic shift and one could have just as easily seen this as evidence of his adaptability.

Fur Coat: How did Bukharin’s supporters or constituents take this change of heart in economic policy?

Paul Gregory: This is isn’t entirely clear. More research could be done in this area. One or two prominent Bolsheviks broke with Bukharin, but the majority of his adherents seemed to have accepted the wisdom of Bukharin’s peasant-friendly policies.

Fur Coat: The interesting thing about Bukharin’s debates with Stalin is that Stalin seems ultimately to take the position that even if Bukharin is right to say his mixed economy will encourage higher overall growth rates for the Soviet economy, it is unacceptable for the world’s only socialist state to allow such a large component of the economy—namely the peasantry—to remain outside of the planned economy.

Paul Gregory: Yes. This is one of the most remarkable things I discovered in the Hoover Institute’s archives. Stalin only admitted this afterward, but it’s true that he eventually conceded that socialist politics outweighed purely economic discussions based only on the Soviet Union’s economic growth rates.

Fur Coat: Changing course a little bit…Your book is about Bukharin and his third wife, but Stalin appears on the cover and is a presence throughout. What emerges from your story is a man who somehow combined an exterior veneer of fairness and moderation with a bloodthirsty and vengeful nature. How does one come to grips with this apparent paradox?

Paul Gregory: Whenever he appeared in public, Stalin tried to appear as the most moderate person in the room. In my book, you’ll see that he tried to be less strident and less radical than his allies. He would say, in effect, that he believed that it was important to be careful and moderate when dealing with people who had wronged the party. That is to say, Stalin would say that he knew that the party was, for the most part, made up of good, loyal Bolsheviks. Of course, by this time, people such as Bukharin understood the technique. Stalin had used this method again and again, and to good result.

Fur Coat: I’m curious if your research seems to undermine or support the notion that Stalin operated under some kind of intellectual or theoretical handicap when dealing with brilliant rivals such as Bukharin and Trotsky.

Paul Gregory: Stalin was very smart, and capable of holding his own in these debates. He was, however, extremely jealous of Bukharin’s pretensions to theoretical primacy. Stalin wanted to be known as the party’s theorist and in later years he chided his followers, implying that he alone was equipped to interpret Marx. Stalin was also extremely good at summarizing discussions and debates and he always used Marx effectively. But as the book argues, Bukharin could often digress into very arcane and technical discussions of Marxism that did not help him politically.

Fur Coat: Your book seems to highlight a period of time in which party leaders knew what was expected of them, knew the political rules of the game so to speak. On the other hand, one would expect great fluidity in a system that was as novel as the Soviet political system was. In your research, were you more impressed by the stability or the fluidity of the Politburo’s concept of collective rule?

Paul Gregory: There was a system. Lenin had invented it and people knew that system fairly well. Party member behavior was well-defined. There were standards of collegiality and methods for the arbitration of disputes. But as General Secretary of the Party, Stalin had become the rule-maker. At any rate, Bukharin unwisely followed Lenin’s rules, while Stalin did not.

I think your question also related to the issue of how collective rule works in general. Under Mao as well as Stalin, you start with a system of collective rule that degenerates into an absolute dictatorship which does very bad things. The dictator dies and there is a return to collective rule. And then, somehow, the revived concept of collective rule is much more robust. This is because the new oligarchs feel that that they only narrowly escaped death under the original dictator. This is why Beria was killed: because the other oligarchs felt that he offered a personally dangerous return to one-man rule. Read Khruschchev’s memoirs. They reveal a leader with very real restraints. The party leader becomes the tie-breaker but not a dictator.

Fur Coat: This book is also a love story and Anna Larina, Bukharin’s third wife, comes across as a remarkable woman. What else does her autobiography tell us about her?

Paul Gregory: Anna was remarkable. Her memoir makes for excellent reading. And she was clearly an extremely intelligent woman, capable of following complex political debates when she was only 10-13 years old, and capable of holding Bukharin’s attention in the midst of a very busy political life. Anna’s relationship with her father was very close as well. I should say that Anna’s memoir always puts Bukharin in the best light. Bukharin was heroic, but he was flawed as my book demonstrates, and Anna doesn’t dwell on this. She doesn’t, of course, mention that Bukharin, despite his brave recantation at his trial, often disappointed supporters by fawning over Stalin or sacrificing his former allies and friends. She also doesn’t spend time talking about his first two wives. On the other hand, almost everything we know about Anna comes from her autobiography. And this shows that she was loyal to her husband despite two decades of suffering in the gulag. Hopefully someone will do more historical research on Anna’s life.

Fur Coat: Thank you so much for the opportunity to interview you. I hope to read many more of your books and articles in the future.

The World According to Garp(achev)

How did Mikhail Gorbachev see the world in 1987, four short years before the union he led fell to pieces? It’s impossible to know Gorbachev’s inner thoughts, but his speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in that same year seems surprisingly straightforward. While the General Secretary flatters his audience, he also challenges it. Was Communism really doomed? Very likely, but Gorbachev didn’t think so. The history of Bolshevism was replete with heroic progress; the future could resemble this glorious past. Notwithstanding its challenges, the Soviet Union had done more for human kind in seventy years than any other people had done for it in a comparable period.



Possibly a rhetorical flourish, Gorbachev reminded the Party of the significance of October, 1917. This was “humanity’s finest hour,” the “dawn of the real history of mankind,” and a time that “changed man’s inner world beyond recognition.” It was also a summation of everything good and progressive in Russia’s long history. October was peasant rebellion, Decembrist action, worker strike, and cultural protest all rolled into one. Lenin and the Revolution liberated the people, and brought them education, social welfare, equality, freedom, and the first experiment in real democracy in an age of bourgeois imperialism.



The Communist Party achieved the first successful revolution in the modern, imperialist era. It also modernized Russia and brought it victory in World War II. In Gorbachev’s view, the Party’s successes were predicated on something other than unfettered discipline. For Lenin had taught his disciples the virtues of “revolutionary dialectics,” which is to say he had taught them to use Marxist principles to solve political problems in bold but open-ended, creative ways.

The Bolsheviks had, after all, made a long series of strategic reversals. First, they abandoned their slogan, “all power to the soviets,” when their opponents, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, controlled those quasi-governmental political organs. Second, they turned against the traditional Leftist prejudice against seizing power in a socially backward country such as Russia. Third, they performed a volte-face and withdrew from the First World War in order to salvage the Revolution. Fourth, the Bolsheviks overturned their erstwhile theory of a volunteer militia and created a professional Red Army capable of winning a fierce civil war. Fifth, and most importantly, Lenin ended War Communism and allowed capitalism to coexist with socialism during the period of the New Economic Policy.

Gorbachev thought that the Party was the backbone of progress in Soviet Russia. It was the vanguard of revolutionary change. Therefore, the General Secretary felt justified in asking Party members to help him to correct serious problems in the socialist economy. While admiring the spirit of self-sacrifice that had quite literally “electrified” the Soviet landscape, he thought that Stalinist command economics were not appropriate for an advanced economy. A modern USSR could no longer rely on “enthusiasm alone” to effect change. While previous generations had achieved miracles in terms of hauling the country into the twentieth century, the present generation confronted challenges that required innovation, honesty, humanistic values, self-criticism, and flexibility.

Centralized planning had served Russia well during the Interwar period. Notwithstanding his mistakes, Stalin had led the Party toward essentially sound goals. Stalin’s Party had gotten it right. His Party had ignored Trotsky’s blandishments and built the world’s first socialist state. Stalin’s Party had liberated labor and built dozens if not hundreds of major industrial projects. Following the Great Patriotic War, the Communists overcame the devastation, raised Soviet prestige in the international community, and raised its citizens’ standard of living.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union’s achievements had entailed a dark flip side. The country’s economy became too rigid, too centralized, and too bureaucratic. Stalin’s legacy ran counter to the Leninist path of respecting peasants (Gorbachev saw no irony in this phrase). And it was basically undemocratic. The cult of personality disenfranchised Russians. The centralized economy forestalled initiative. To take the country forward, Russia needed reform and openness. More than that, the Soviet Union needed to “update methods,” create “contemporary forms,” and embrace science, technology, and progress. It needed to encourage independence, initiative, and responsibility among the people. If this prescription seems vague, it was.



What did Gorbachev mean when he talked about improving quality or accelerating social progress? What specific proposals would bring these things about? Was Gorbachev’s unity among Party members compatible with his call for independent modes of thinking? Was his demand that workers take more responsibility over their lives consistent with his desire to keep the Party apparatus together?



Whether his speech reflected personal opinion or political reality, Gorbachev presented his Party with a realistic middle path between jettisoning its historical legacy and submitting to apathy and stagnation. Gorbachev’s understanding of history was profoundly flawed. As late as 1987, he was espousing a Stalinist line about both Trotsky and Bukharin, still insisting that the Party had essentially “been right” in its activities. But who –besides Yeltsin--could have done more than that? Clearly, Gorbachev’s intellect and energy and relative honest was not enough to salvage the Bolshevik project. The country was in very bad shape. Its economy was in shambles, but perhaps more importantly, the Russian people had begun to blame the Party for its troubles.

Nikolai "Piggy Foxy" Bukharin and Co.

The Russian Archives of Social and Political History hold extraordinary secrets. Foxy Piggy and the Sword of Revolution reveals some of them. The book is a collection of informal political caricatures produced by and for elite Russian government and party officials during the 1920s and 1930s. Of varying degrees of artistic fluency, they reveal a great deal about the nature of power in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The cartoons, some incredibly funny, others merely malicious, show how Soviet leaders jockeyed for power with one another and intermingled personal feeling with public policy disputes. As the editors Vatlin and Maleshenko tell us, these cartoons were created in the midst of political activity, at Central Committee plenums, Party Congresses, and Politburo meetings. They suggest that Soviet leaders were creative if also crude students of human nature. While they do track the growing dominance of Stalin within the Party, they show that uniformity of expression was not established until the Great Purges of 1937-8. For while the editors point out that few cartoonists created portraits of Stalin that ridiculed him—as they surely did for most other leaders—Central Committee and Politburo politicians were busily, and often collaboratively, producing works that poked fun at one another, both on a personal basis and with respect to political opinion or error.

One cartoonist that stands out both for artistic talent and a humane subject matter is Bukharin. One can’t help but believe that this sensitive artist was proclaiming a more urbane view of politics than his peers, who frequently used their cartoons to do little more than attack and discredit their subjects. However, one can’t help but remember that Mao Tse Tung was an excellent poet and this didn’t do much for Chinese peasants or intellectuals.

It’s important not to generalize too much about Soviet politics based on this treasure trove of cartoon art. However, the editors rightly point out that the content of the artwork is largely devoid of attacks against colonialism or capitalism (common themes in public Soviet propaganda), suggesting that Soviet officials were more concerned with building Russian socialism than with exporting it during this time period. They also note that the work becomes darker and darker as the years go by, reflecting the end of any pretence to pluralism within the Politburo or Central Committee.

In truth, it’s hard to imagine how diversity of opinion lasted as long as it did in the upper echelons of the Communist Party. As the editors remind us, Hitler never even pretended to have equal debating partners. As a theme, economics looms largest. The editors note that the Soviet Union was attempting to create a brand new form of economics, and largely failing. They were producing economic plans, building factories, electrifying the countryside, balancing supply and demand, creating canals and dams, transforming agriculture, and eliminating any form of private trade or free enterprise. In this situation, officials fought with one another for scarce resources as well as the authority to exert influence over key economic activities. With the politburo making all decisions—and often doing so in an information vacuum—government officials were caught in a dilemma. Lacking all authority to make independent decisions, they took their concerns to powerful Party patrons, who ultimately resolved even conflicts which arose out of tiny practical concerns.

The cartoons reveal the darker side of this competition, and hint at the cost of losing this competition: being branded a saboteur or ideological opponent of socialism. As the editors suggest, the leaders who were producing this art with wrestling with their own incompetence and lack of insight into economic reality. They—and increasingly Stalin alone--made every decision, and yet key elements of the Soviet economy were in disarray. The trains collided, agriculture was collapsing, consumers had too little, and slave labor was needed to complete some of the massive industrialization and mining projects. Somebody deserved blame, and since it couldn’t be the Party elite, it had to be kulaks, Trotskyites, “wreckers,” and capitalist spies. The cartoons, which begin with some levity, end with the darker search for scapegoats.

Aesthetics of Tragedy

Another argument of Fitzpatrick deserves comment. Fitzpatrick’s opinion is that there is an aesthetic dimension to the long Russian revolution. To take the argument one step further, the fact that Stalin killed the original revolutionaries who believed in a socialist utopia is the most aesthetically interesting aspect of the revolutionary experience. It’s one thing for the protagonists to defeat their enemies; it’s another for the protagonists to self-destruct. In the French Revolution, the trials of Danton and Robespierre are the most sacred moments of the entire historical drama. How odd to face the guillotine killed poetically by the very process he had helped to create.

Yet Robespierre’s death—see that beautiful movie, Danton—might be seen as tragic too, since Robespierre was the essence of Revolution, an incorruptible force who may have become intolerable to men who didn’t possess the stomach to remain loyal to the original principles of the Revolution—equality, fraternity, and liberty. Certainly Robespierre’s death—and the death of the cause of the Sans-Coulette—he represented, were seen as the heart of the tragedy of the French Revolution by the Russian revolutionaries.

Although the Communists killed many innocent Russians, the ones who garnered the most international sympathy were the Old Bolsheviks or true believers in the very force that destroyed them. Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was sad enough: Once Lenin’s most capable lieutenant, he was first dragged from his apartment and exiled to the distant In the Purge Show Trials, then expelled from the Soviet Union altogether. (Later, we famously met his end by way of an assassin’s ice pick).

Still worse, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and even Bukharin, all implicated themselves; testifying to their own despicable—but false—betrayal of the Communist cause. This kind of self-immolation was harnessed by Western writers such as Koestler, who wrote a horrific tale of a brave true believer who struggles to find a reason to believe that his own admission of guilt and consequent death is historically necessary. Orwell wrote about a similar theme in Animal Farm. The Revolution succeeds but the revolutionaries quickly separate into a new oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

Soltzheniztyn, despite his own familiarity with non-Bolshevik victims, was also impressed with the tragic dimensions of the Old Bolsheviks, who, even in the gulag, argued relentlessly that their party had made a simple mistake by accusing them but remained a force for good in the country at large. If Stalin could only be told about their unhappy fate in the gulag, he would set things right.

Serge, Koestler, and Bukharin

J. Hoberman’s article in the 22 October 2009 issue of New York Review of Books, Orphan of History, is a reminder of the importance of forgotten Bolshevik party member, author, exile, anarchist, prisoner, historian, critic of Stalinism, sometime Trotskyite, and Fourth International supporter, Victor Serge. Although his fame hasn’t survived in America, Serge—who also wrote under the French nom de plume the Unbroken One-- produced a series of novels, including Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (loosely based on the real-life murder of Kirov), Midnight in the Century, the Long Dusk, and the Unforgiving Years, an autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and history such as Year One of the Russian Revolution and Russia after Twenty Years.

Hoberman’s review doesn’t really help readers to understand the literary or artistic merits of any of the specific works or of the oeuvre in general. However, Hoberman makes it clear that Serge’s personal life was fascinating and inextricably linked with the drama and tragedy of the Bolshevik revolution and its legacy. Serge is very well placed to be one of its best chroniclers, as one of the few early participants (he aided the Bolsheviks as early as 1919-and maintained contact with all shades of socialism even when it was dangerous to do so) who managed to escape Russia and critique the Soviet Union from exile.

And while Serge was overshadowed in life and death by Trotsky as a critic of Stalin, Trotsky made no attempt whatsoever to wrestle artistically with Stalinism. So Serge deserves to be read even today. It’s interesting that Hoberman mentions that Koestler’s Darkness at Noon received a much friendlier reception that Serge’s books in post-war America. Certainly Koestler’s book is darkly insightful, unsentimental, morally compelling, and perfect in its simplicity. Yet while admitting up front that I have not yet read Serge’s books, I suspect that an insider such as Serge (who also lived in the West and died in Mexico shortly after Trotsky died there) has more to teach us about the complexity of the communist experiment than any Westerner. If Serge has a rival, perhaps it is Bukharin, who somehow managed to complete his own novel even as he awaited execution by Stalin.

Lenin in Zurich

Notwithstanding the fact that Solzhenitsyn’s trilogy on World War I is basically unreadable, Lenin in Zurich (material related to Lenin compiled into its own stand-alone novel) is worthwhile. It gets at the heart of the author’s real concern with the World War I era: Bolshevism and its embodiment, Lenin. Self-evidently, Lenin in Zurich focuses on an interesting moment in Lenin’s life, his time in exile waiting patiently for revolution to break out in the motherland.

The Swiss backdrop is fascinating and the author isn’t afraid to dwell on the paradox of a radical revolutionary dwelling in comfortable, scenic, bourgeois Switzerland. The irony that Solzhenitsyn was dropped off in Switzerland after being exiled from the Soviet Union must have played a part in his fascination with this period in Lenin’s life.

What kind of man is Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin? He’s intelligent and argumentative and single-minded. He’s hard-working and scholarly too. He’s also vindictive and petty, incapable of compromising with socialist allies as well as bourgeois enemies. Lenin had a need to be in charge, completely in charge. In Solzhenitsyn’s opinion, Lenin’s intractable nature dictated everything, including his theory of a tightly controlled, professional revolutionary elite. The decision to board the train to Russian receives special emphasis, and serves as the book's denouement. To Solzhenitsyn, the deal reveals Lenin's cynicism and, to a lesser extent, special concern for his personal safety. One could come up with a different interpretation of this episode, and indeed of Lenin in general, but Solzhenitsyn's attempt to portray this seminal figure in Russian history is worthwhile and not entirely biased by the author's prejudices against the system Lenin helped to create.

It’s hard to accept stable Switzerland as site of revolution. Yet Conrad’s Under Western Skies shows that revolutionary activity thrived in free places. E.H. Carr’s Bukharin reminds of his own time in the country. But the counter-revolution also resided there, and we shouldn’t forget that Nabokov lived there too in his final years.

Homer Simpson: “Communism Works..In Theory”

These days, one is liable to miss an era when people still believe in an alternative to “things as they are.” After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, there really is no clear alternative to radical socialism. There are varieties of capitalism, or variety of the welfare state mixed model of capitalism if one prefers to avoid the term, but there are no real alternatives.

In more theoretical terms, people say that we’ve experienced the death of the “meta-narrative” or the “end of history.” Whether wrong or right, Marx provided us with an incredibly rich mode of imagining alternatives to the status quo. The world was filled with exploitation, bourgeois warfare, sexism, racism, and colonialism, but there was also a clear road map to something better. There was optimism; there was bravery in the face of the bourgeois exploiters; there were positive historical trends.

As late as the 1940s, one could perhaps be forgiven for still believing in the dream that there was a real possibility that the future could be better—much better—than the present. As it turned out—and as many historians convincingly argue we all should have admitted to ourselves much sooner—Communism could be almost as vicious as capitalism even in its fascist iterations.

But how hard must it have been for many thoughtful people to admit as much? If Communism was worse than capitalism—which signified drudgery, pollution, child exploitation, and a variety of other abuses—than what exactly should one be working for? Right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, many reasonable people maintained that a middle road was possible, and that Communism remained a viable alternative to alienation and materialism and gross wealth disparities.

In Eastern Europe, they might have looked to still-debatable Origin Myths associated with the positive attributes of Lenin and Trotsky and Bukharin. They might have merely blamed Stalin for what went wrong. They might have gone further and said that while Lenin himself deserved blame for Bolshevik despotism, Homer Simpson was right: “Communism works… in theory.” And the theory, especially espoused by Rosa Luxemburg, which combined democracy with communism, still made a lot of sense to many people around the world.

In the 1990s, we had apparently reached what Francis Fukuyana called the end of the history. The results of socialism were so uniformly bad, in terms of ethics, freedom, equality, or economic happiness, that people no longer even said that “Communism works..in theory.” Perhaps we’ll be in this post-Utopian place for many decades to come. It’s impossible to tell. However, with the recent economic crash and recession, and other more acute problems in various parts of the developing world, one remembers that nothing lasts forever.

Critiques of capitalism could blossom dramatically, as indeed they might have had the recession turned into a more serious economic crisis or depression. This makes it a good moment in history to go back to the Soviet experiment. Could something like this become attractive again? Was there anything about it worth keeping? What other kind of alternative could arise that fulfilled the same European or global needs?

Recently, I was asked why I was reading something about Soviet history. I said that the Soviet experience was fascinating because it failed so utterly. One was tempted to wonder how it was that the system survived so many decades when it seemed almost designed to create economic lethargy or even chaos, to say nothing of political oppression. She agreed. But after a moment, I contradicted myself, saying that I understood even today how somebody could point to our present system and say that it was designed for gross inefficiency. The market remained deeply flawed. We had seen what a lack of regulation could do to undermine economic planning as well as the safety and stability of the general population.

Everyday people were re-making their retirement plans based on the market fluctuations of a few months. The housing bubble made basic planning assumption obsolete overnight. And the economy had overproduced on a massive scale while the environment suffered from a system that rewarded short-term thinking from almost all individual or institutional actors. My colleague was surprised, calling attention to the fact that I had been arguing both sides.

I suspect others will feel some ambivalence in the years to come. I don’t dare to say that the re-evaluation will come very soon. The catalog of crimes committed by Soviet leaders is far too long to allow for any easy reconciliation with the “God That Failed.”

Stalin verus Trostky

Now that I’ve renuminated on my favorite Russian historian, I’ll ask a similarly ridiculous question: who is the most interesting revolutionary? In former days, Stalin never seemed to rank very high. Trostky attacked him relentlessly as a mediocrity with little to recommend him except, perhaps, amorality or street smarts. But the book, Young Stalin, puts an end to that myth.

In his youth, we learn that Stalin was everything, including successful poet (shades of Mao), singer, underworld boss, student, priest-in-training, revolutionary, bank robber, lover, prisoner, exile, and theoretician. Clearly, Stalin was a talented man. Not for nothing did Lenin keep him on the Bolshevik all-star team, even during the Revolution. So despite Trostky’s brilliant efforts to explain Stalin away as an upstart and a fluke, Stalin had earned his place at the top of the revolutionary command structure.

Beyond his charisma, he was an intelligent and effective organizer. Of course, later Stalin had the opportunity to show other levels of talent. As he gradually earned Lenin’s seat at the heart of the Communist Party during the 1920s, Stalin showed that he could be by turns (and when it served him) cunning, unsentimental, cruel, well-spoken, humorous, machiavellian, and patient. A

nd it’s my opinion that he won out over his opponents for another reason: he was realistic. For instance, his Socialism in One Country seems much more realistic than the brands of internationalism advocated by either Trostky or Bukharin. The strange thing about the term, realism, in the context of Communist Russia in the 1920s or 1930s, is that realism and socialism were almost oxymorons. So realism or even moderation of Stalin’s kind could lead to gulags and five-year plans.

Even so, Stalin was “neither left nor right” in comparison with some of his rivals, especially Trostky on the left, and Bukharin on the right. Now Stalin is justly critiqued for his disastrous misreading of Hitler at the onset of World War II. I wonder what this truly says about the man. He clearly erred, and his error cost the Soviets a great deal. However, Stalin had made a number of previous realistic, if utterly brutal, moves that set the Soviets up to fight the Germans with some chance of success.

The purges were crazy and self-defeating, to be sure. But some of level of political terror, industrial preparation, diplomatic intrigue (at the expense of the West as well as Finland and Poland,) and military build-up, probably helped the Soviets. Moreover, the instinct to avoid conflict with Germany (if taken to the level of dellusion in the weeks leading up to the German invasion) was logical, either in classical balance-of-power terms, or in terms of an encircling capitalist menance.

So Stalin makes for an interesting revolutionary, a force of personality, a political genius of the first order. Yet Trostky has a case to be made. His books are wonderful and humane, for the most part. You can’t help but appreciate the man when you read My Life, for example. His role in 1905 as well as 1917 and the Civil War, obviously outpace that of Stalin or any other revolutionary save perhaps Lenin. In the public’s mind, as well as the mind of the Old Guard Bolshevik Party, Trostky was the revolution.

Isaac Deutcher’s three-volume biography leaves one in awe of Trostky’s creativity, courage, intellect, ethical rectitude (however controversial), theoretical acumen, linguistic, and oratory skills, etc. The man was of course beaten by Stalin and his allies in terms of the dynastic struggle that evolved after Lenin’s death. Other historians say his arrogance, Jewish heritage (in an anti-semitic nation), and overconfidence did him in. This is probably right. Yet his time in exile, both internal and external, add to his lustre, although one man’s heroism is another man’s egotism, because Trostky’s family and friends were largely sacrificed in his battle with Stalinism.

Okay, this post is longer already than it should be. I’ve not come to Lenin, Plekhorov, Bakhunin, Axelrod, Herzen, Zinoviev, Bukharin, or anybody else for that matter. All subjects for future posts.