Behrooz Ghamari, Remembering Akbar

This blog focuses on the Soviet experience with revolution, but the Russian Revolution should frequently be put into historical context by comparing it with other revolutions, both European and non-European.  With little background in Iranian history, I’ve seldom ventured to make any comparisons between 1917 and 1979.  However, this summer I participated in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Global Studies Research Lab.  The lab included access to the university’s wonderful library collections, as well as access to some of the country’s foremost experts in globalization, including Dr. Antoinette Burton, co-author of  Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870-1945 and dozens of other highly influential books and articles about empire, globalization, and related topics.  In my meeting with Burton, she recommended one of her colleague’s books, Remembering Akbar:  Inside the Iranian Revolution.  The book, published under the pen name Behrooz Ghamari, offers a strikingly intimate portrait of life before, during, and after one of the twentieth century’s most important revolutions.

Ghamari’s account of revolution suggests that revolutions should perhaps rarely be described as anything other than plural phenomena.  In other words, it’s clear from Ghamari’s account that the Iranian Revolution, like the Russian Revolution, happened in stages.  Unrest in the country built up gradually, and unpredictably, and its success in overthrowing the Shah happened unexpectedly.   Ghamari also makes it clear that the Iranian Revolution, like the Russian Revolution, was all about discourse.  The Revolution was an explosion of speech acts taking place in dozens or perhaps hundreds of different settings or contexts.  The Revolution was performed.  It was communicated.  It took place whenever the disgruntled formed discussion groups, passed along revolutionary books, put on radical plays, printed critical pamphlets, marched, sang, or joined a crowd. 

Remembering Akbar also helps us to see that the Russian Revolution had an enormous direct influence on the course of events in Iran in 1979.  Although Islamic revolutionaries ultimately prevailed over their communist counterparts in the struggle against tyranny, Iranian students were inspired by example of the Russian Revolution.   As late as 1979, and even afterward, many of the Shah’s diverse opponents felts that Lenin and Marx offered one of the clearest alternatives to oppression.   Akbar, the author’s revolutionary pseudonym, treated Lenin’s works, especially What is to be Done?, as if they contained the same magical formula for liberation that the Bolsheviks already claimed they did.  Akbar also read the Russian authors Shokolov and Gorky for inspiration, but also made room for Mao and various other Yugoslavian and Italian communist critics of the Russian communist canon.

Ghamari’s account of revolution is a tragic one, revolving as it does on the fact that the Iran’s new governing class, the Islamic theocrats, imprisoned and executed thousands, targeting leftists, religious minorities, and many other vulnerable groups.  In fact, Ghamari’s time in one of Iran’s most terrifying prisons inevitably conjures up comparisons with Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Bukharin’s own novel, written as he awaited execution at the hands of Stalin.   In each case, the Revolution is betrayed, and the lack of democracy in the movement leads to unimaginable repression.

 Incredibly, Akbar and other bourgeois intellectual students took to the streets because they felt that they would be able to enter factories and lead a revolutionary proletariat on the victory against a murderous king.  In some ways, the book seems anachronistic.  Could 1917 really be repeated in 1979, the age of Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev?    But it’s hard to say what’s more anachronistic, the idea of a revolutionary proletariat, or the idea of an absolute monarch.  Of course, the Islamic dimension of the Iranian Revolution somehow managed to make both proletariat and monarch obsolete.  Although reviving certain ancient symbolism, the Islamic State was somehow distinctly modern. 

Three Things to Know About Revolutions

Below are three things experience has taught us about revolution.

First, revolutions are violent affairs.  To paraphrase something somebody in the Godfather once said, after the rhetoric of evolutionary reform breaks down, “things get rough.” A revolution is an explosive situation in which men and women decide that violence is a legitimate method of solving a set of political problems.  Strike that:  a revolution is an explosive situation in which men and women decide that violence is the only appropriate method of addressing a set of political problems.  As Chairman Mao said, "Revolution is no dinner party."  People die in revolutions, and after revolutions, more people die.  

Second, revolutions are exciting. Revolutions are extraordinarily creative affairs in which broad swaths of the population feel empowered to participate in civic and cultural life in new and creative ways.  In fact, segments of the populations experience liberation in surprisingly diverse ways.  If the political regime required radical reformation, why not do the same in art, architecture, prose, poetry, international relations, economics, family relationships, and gender relations? 

Third, revolutions are predictably unpredictable.  When a revolution breaks out, people often falsely believe they know what will happen to the revolution over time.  That is to say, they believe that there is an ahistorical sequence to revolutionary events or a natural mechanism of revolt, something akin to the stages of grief.  We get angry, we blame others, we feel guilty, we accept; or, in the case of revolutions, we suffer, we lose control, we dream and hope of a better future, we collapse into stale routine. There’s a paradox here.  On the one hand, many analysts--Marx and Lenin included--believe that revolutions are the most predictable of all human events.  That is to say, revolutionaries study previous revolutions in detail precisely because they believe on some level in an unalterable historical pattern.  A revolution in ancient Rome looks like a revolution in modern Germany, or a revolution in Mongolia.  A revolution is a revolution is a revolution.  

If you read the Russian revolutionaries, to say nothing of Hegel or Marx who help to invent the trope of revolutionary historiography, you can’t help but be struck by their arrogance.  They know what happened in France so they can predict what will happen in Russia.  There will certainly be a Thermidor, and if there isn’t one, it’s only because the revolutionaries will change natural flow of history by enacting ingenious new dams or levies, usually in the form of draconian systems of surveillance and terror.  But of course the revolutionaries weren’t simple people.  They thought about revolution a lot, and lived closer to them than we do today.  Lenin didn’t predict either of the revolutions of 1917.  Instead, he and the other Russian radicals were like modern storm-chasers, driving toward political maelstroms even though they didn’t quite get to any of them in time to bear witness to their awesome power.  But Lenin, and Trotsky more than Lenin, did see enough of the immediate aftermath of revolution to understand their chaotic, elemental power.  Notwithstanding all of their stubborn attempts to diagnose something ahistorical about revolutions, Russian revolutionaries understood that revolutions were truly terrifying, unwieldy, and unpredictable.  Their knowledge of this dark side of revolution was surely what made them so willing to turn to terror in attempt to try to prevent their recurrence once they were installed in power.  

The Bolsheviks said they were suppressing opposition at Krondstadt out of a fear of counter-revolution and reaction, but one has to suspect that their brutal strategies of containment were born of their own involvement in history’s only real contact with almost primordial chaos.  Viewed in this light, one almost comes to terms with the paradox of Bolshevik interest in making a science of revolution.  After all, it’s only a scientist who hopes that we can conduct the same experiment with revolution over and over again but gain the same result. 

Revolutions aren’t purely local affairs.  Reading Antoinette Burton’s book, A Primer for Teaching World History, I am reminded that revolutions shouldn’t ever be seen as occurring in a purely national context. The Russian revolutionaries accepted Marx’s early take on this international thesis:  revolutions were the product of modernity, global economic processes, and transnational class struggle.  Lenin added something important to this line of argument by exploring the relationship between colonialism and international militarism.  But even modern scholars understand that we can’t truly comprehend the nature of any revolution without exploring how the event, or series of events, is connected to global processes.  These processes can be direct, and uncomplicated.  For instance, the Russian Revolution was the outgrowth of processes and movements that affected men and women in almost every corner of the globe, including urbanization, industrialization, colonization, and world war.  But they can also be more intricate.  The Russian Revolution had analogies both inside Europe and outside Europe.  Turks, Egyptians, Hungarians, Germans, and Chinese—to say nothing of Georgians and Uzbeks—all strove to initiate political and economic reform, to overhaul gender relationships, and recast their relationship with the global economic order.  Moreover, if we don’t accept the fact that each revolution only exists in relationship to other revolutions—whether those revolutions are historically distant, such as 1789, 1848, or 1870, or nearly coterminous, such as that of Germany, Turkey, Hungary, Spain, Cuba, or China—we miss one of their most characteristic and important markers, i.e., their truly world-historical character.    

Comedy by Chernychevsky

Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift, is often said to be one of the greatest twentieth century novels. For me, it’s been a long struggle to even complete the book. Nabokov, genius though he is, pains me with his lack of concert for plot or suspenseful pace. Indeed, I freely admit that I only kept reading to see what Nabokov’s protagonist would say about Russia’s famous nineteenth century radical and godfather of Bolshevism, Chernychevsky.

Chernychevsky was Lenin’s nineteenth century hero, a widely-read, hard-working man who wrote the influential if badly written novel, What is to be Done?, which first spelled out the ascetic path to revolutionary sainthood so many zealous, socialists would eventually follow. The first portion of the book takes place in Berlin and seems, at least in a general way, to be autobiography. The second portion purports to be prose from the author’s study of the famous editor of the liberal organ, The Contemporary. This, interestingly, is followed by a short series of post-modern rants against this same history.

Nabokov’s interest in Chernychevsky is not hard to understand. The utopian socialist’s theories, as well as his whole intellectual milieu, have everything to do with what came later, although it’s hard to tell whether Bolshevik communism was an extension of this milieu or a reaction to the fuzziness and innocence of it. Chernychevsky, the materialist philosopher who had been born the son of a priest, believed in peasant communalism. He was an important interlocutor of men such as Herzen (they lived together in London briefly), Belinsky, and others.

According to Nabokov’s book, which is written with such irony and perhaps subtlety that it’s hard to know precisely where he stands on the man’s legacy, Chernychevsky was extremely popular with liberal opponents of autocracy in the age of peasant emancipation, rampant conspiracies, censorship, and millennial aspiration. His famous novel (there was at least one more) was very well-received—more popular than anything Tolstoy or Dostoevsky wrote his protagonist claims--as the incarnation of everything chic at the time. What was this thinker like? Nabokov’s protagonist is condescending, saying that for all his magnetism and courage, he was awkward, badly dressed, and unsophisticated as a thinker. He critiques his poetry, understanding of the natural world, shallow esthetic philosophy (he believed that art should always serve life), and philosophical pretensions.

In the end, Chernychevsky suffered for his unrelenting radicalism. He was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, exposed to a mock execution, and exiled to Siberia. While he was imprisoned, fellow radicals dreamed of freeing him. They didn’t understand that he couldn’t even ride a horse. His wife came to see him in Siberia, as so many Decembrist wives had done for their husbands, but apparently slept with somebody on the way. (Chernychevsky loved his wife deeply, perhaps more intensely as a result of his status as a cuckold).

Nabokov’s treatment of this phase of socialist activity is redolent of E.H. Carr’s treatment of another famous Russian radical, Bakhunin. In both instances, the radical hero appears sympathetically but ridiculously. It’s hard to know whether this understanding of the past is fair or not. Does an intellectual current that took itself so seriously—and had such a serious opponent—deserve to be laughed at? Perhaps the comedy of that gentler century only became emerges in relation to the decidedly “un-funny” legacy of its heir, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In any event, the paraodox of a comic tragedy or a tragic commedy reminds me of Woody Allen's bad film, Melinda and Melinda, which had at least a wonderful premise: that any story can be told, or perhaps it's all in how the story is received, as a happy comedy or a depressing tragedy. That's how history works.

You Shook Me

More Americans have gotten their impressions of the Russian Revolution from Ten Days That Shook the World than from any other source. John Reed's short book is filled with the reporter's first-hand and generally enthusiastic impressions of the revolutionary events of October 1917. The prose is energetic; and one is tempted to think that Reid's omnipresence in the events he describes must have influenced countless American journalists and nonfiction writers, particularly Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson.

Reed's insights influenced countless liberal and leftist Americans to look sympathetically upon the world's first successful proletarian coup d'etat. His sympathies for Lenin, Trotsky, and Bolshevism in general are overt. Even so, Reed's book does not wholly elide or erase the moral complexity of Red October. Reed's book assumes two things: first, that tsarist Russia was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of most if not all right-thinking Russians; second, that by 1917, if not before, the Allied cause in the the First World War had no moral claims on the Russian people.

Beyond this, Reed clearly endorses the Bolshevik position of providing Russia with clear and moral leadership, but gives readers a very clear idea of why many socialists and radicals clung to the Provisional Government rather than jump on to the Bolshevik bandwagon. The Bolsheviks gained support among key constituencies--namely the army, the navy, the proletariat, and the peasantry--by calling for an immediate end to the war, ending capital punishment in the armed forced, putting industry into the hands of workers, granting land without compensation to peasant Land Committees, and making a series of promises to the ethnic minorities.

Even so, Reed shows that most Menshiviks and Social Revolutionaries thought that the Bolshevik coup would ultimately undermine the socialist cause. Their critique, which Reed does nothing to obscure, was predicated in the idea that the Bolshevik party had too little support in the country at large to be successful. While Reid clearly admires Bolshevik audacity, he understands that the Bolsheviks represented a minority opinion even within those Leftist communities which clearly opposed not only the tsar but the bourgeois parties such as the Cadets.

As a small minority, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries could object to Bolshevik authority by relying on Marx's theory of a bourgeois interlude between feudal and socialist politics. But socialist critics of Lenin and Trotsky also made practical arguments to support the Provisional Government. They said that the proletarian insurrection would rally the forces of counter-revolution and lead to a reactionary restoration of some sort. Bourgeois liberals would united with Cossacks, royalists, tsarist officers, anti-semitic Black Hundred supporters, and many others to overthrow all previous socialist gains.

Menshevik and Social Revolutionary criticisms were varied, and included principled Marxist critique as well as seemingly partisan resentment at being ignored despite strong democratic support. The non-Bolshevik Marxist parties (and some key trade unions) also doubted that the Bolsheviks even had enough leadership talent to run a government, and many in all parties predicted that the Bolshevik experiment would collapse of its own accord in a matter of days. The popularity of Ten Days That Shook The World is justified. It's a clear and persuasive explication of Lenin's claim to be the most effective exponent of the socialist traditions of peace, land reform, and worker empowerment. And it's a brilliant work of reportage that provides a rare window onto the written and oral discourse that overtook Russia in these days of historical possibility.



But most importantly, the book is a lasting testament to the moral complexity of the revolutionary moment, when everyone (general, officer, politician, peasant, trainman) is a potential hero and a potential villain. In Reed's book, even old-guard liberal politicians demonstrate personal valor and high-mindedness. They just happen to be on the wrong side of history.

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.

Rand and Nietzsche For Kids

My five year old son has been asking me how it is that I have chosen to write a blog about socialism without commenting on the philosophical legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rightly or wrong, the fascist critique of the Revolution was intertwined with an admiration of Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms. What is the relationship between the Superman and socialism? How about the will to power? The tyranny of the weak over the strong? What did the slogan—God is Dead—mean to the socialist project? WWNS, What Would Nietzsche Say about the October Revolution and its aftermath?



Even Francis Peabody, the Christian social theorist referred to in a recent post, felt it necessary to address Nietzsche’s legacy in the context of a full analysis of what he called the Social Question. I tell my son that I’m no philosopher. I’m not equipped to deal with the subject. He replies (our debate is getting old—it often interrupts our attempts to play Good Transformers versus Bad Elmo and his stuffed animal goons) that it’s simply impossible to neglect the twentieth century’s most important philosopher. I don’t get Nietzsche so I don’t really have an opinion. He doesn’t understand that at all.



I recall a moment in my long and sorry graduate school career when I approached a cultural studies professor and asked him whether I might not audit his class. I was a history graduate student but somewhat fraudulently claimed cultural studies as a minor field. The professor (who hailed from the Caribbean and had a deep, Jazz radio sort of voice) invited me to his class, and also to a more mysterious “Foucault Reading Group.” It felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I hadn’t been trained for cultural studies, still less for philosophy.

The conversation among the professor and his graduate students seemed brilliant to me, or perhaps I was merely stupid, or bored silly by years of old fashioned political and social history. A remember one woman with fashionable glasses (and who what other graduate student in Urbana had fashionable glasses?) who dominated the conversation.

When I objected that something she had said wasn’t historically accurate, she coldly and decisively dismissed my comment with something like this: What I’ve said may not be historically true, but if I am speaking of an archeology of knowledge, then wouldn’t it make all the sense in the world? The large circle of her supporters nodded in agreement and I was ashamed.

Inevitably, the Foucault Reading Group turned its attention to one of Foucault’s inspirations, namely Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. I couldn’t keep up with my peers, but I do remember one relevant discussion of Nietzsche’s concept of "resentiment." I recall from this distant time, the term refers to the way weak people will sometimes resent stronger people. It’s a form of bitterness born out of jealousy and a desire to bring people down to their lowest common denominator. It’s related to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as an ideological justification for ensuring that the meek really could inherit the earth, or at least quash anyone who really was worthy of such an honor.

Socialism in this context resembles Ellsworth Toohey (Thank you, Wikipedia) in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. He’s a brilliant but sinister apostle of everything second-rate, incompetent, and ordinary. He resists Howard Roark, the Nietzsche-inspired superman and architect. He knows Roark’s projects are superb, and for precisely this reason he objects to them. As editor, Toohey uses democracy itself (in the form of his readership, who are easily manipulated) to thwart humankind’s natural aristocracy. One can easily imagine that Ayn Rand had Lenin or Trostsky in mind when she created Toohey. The original communist leaders were also brilliant, almost themselves natural aristocrats, who used their genius to implement a system that ruthlessly ensured the triumph of mediocrity.

The socialist project failed, but it made some significant attempts to implement social equality, at least on a theoretical level. In a way that would have horrified Nietzsche, the Communist Party in Russia, as well as China, celebrated the little guy, and move brutally against anyone who had any association with elitism, including priests, aristocrats, kulaks, intellectuals, NEP-men, and former officers, and indeed their families. The system of Soviet mass education and public education were also geared toward leveling out disparities. This was the ultimate expression of currents of modernity that—I would imagine—horrified Nietzsche. Socialism did away with Christianity, but seemed to embody the essence of Christian principles anyway by celebrating the weak at the expense of the strong.

Volkogonov on Khrushchev

In Stalin’s old age, he told his cronies that they were “Pygmies” who would be eaten alive after he was gone. He’s wasn’t too far wrong, but Khrushchev was at least interesting. He wasn’t an intellectual giant, to be sure, but he was folksy, quick-witted, comical, energetic, flamboyant, and mercurial. Deeply implicated in the horrendous crimes of Stalinism—but what Communist bureaucrat who survived the purges wasn’t?—Khrushchev outplayed and outlasted other Party insiders, especially the notorious Beria, and eventually emerged as the third Communist Leader.



Khrushchev probably owed his survival under Stalin to his working class origins and unassuming, comic persona; he probably owed his rise to power in the wake of Stalinism to his craftiness and reputation as a man who was unlikely to kill off too many rivals. In the event, Khrushchev had Beria killed (as the Thermidoreans had Robespierre killed) but soon emerged as a reformer who, somewhat courageously, overturned much of Stalin’s legacy. Self-serving or not, there is not a little sincerity in Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin and Stalinism.



Volkogonov’s assessment of Khrushchev is of course mixed. As Taubman’s biography also makes clear, there is much to both hate and admire in this complex man. In the “hate” column, Volkogonov stresses Khrushchev’s participation in collectivization, slave labor, and deportation during the 1930s and 1940s. He shows that Khrushchev was an unevenly educated, boorish, anti-Semitic ideologue, who accepted—despite his critique of the “cult of personality”—his own right to make decisions in every arena of Soviet endeavor, including politics, economics, agriculture, technology, defense, and even art.




The First Secretary was an energetic reformer, but his reforms, especially in the area of agriculture, were poorly thought out and frequently disastrous. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign was a truly earth-shattering event in the life of the Soviet State; even so, Volkogonov asserts that Khrushchev never really upset any of the principles of the Leninist regime. The security apparatus, the expensive military machine, the Gulag, the Communist ideology—everything was kept in working order.

The Communist hierarchy eventually brought Khrushchev down. They blamed him for his erratic behavior, which was perhaps most embarrassing in the arena of foreign policy. Volkogonov supports the criticism and blames Khrushchev almost exclusively for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as for the rupture with China. Even the most critical communications from Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis appear a bit disjointed and rambling, if not deluded. For instance, Khrushchev denied that nuclear weapons in Cuba could be considered as offensive weapons at all.



In his way, Khrushchev was interested in peace, and certainly he promoted detente, but he was a bully too, and threatened Poland with invasion, attacked Hungary, banged his shoe in the UN, and constantly provoked the West in unproductive ways. Khrushchev believed what he said, that socialism would “bury” capitalism, that socialism was inherently peaceful, et cetera.



Khrushchev’s final years gave his life a final dignity. Ousted from power and ostracized, Khrushchev braved Party pressure and wrote or rather dictated his memoirs (published in the West by his son) which Volkogonov assures us are one of the best descriptions of this epoch in world affairs. In the end, it’s a strange comment on world history that this strange “Pygmy” steered the ship of state of one of two superpowers in the age of the space race, detente, the U2 incident, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hungary, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Sino-Russian split, the Tito reconciliation, the Berlin Blockade, etc.

Volkogonov on Stalin

Volkogonov believed Stalin was brutal, dictatorial, and poisonous to Russia. Going through Stalin’s personal papers within the archives, Volkogonov found ample evidence of Stalin’s murderous actions throughout his long reign. Stalin’s famous blue pencil gives direct testimony to dozens if not hundreds of individual as well as mass crimes.



But Volkogonov is particularly intent on demonstrating the extent to which Stalin merely carried on the traditions of the Bolshevik Party established by Lenin. As noted in an earlier portrait of Lenin, Volgonov argues that Stalin’s many disastrous decisions had already been taken by V.I. Lenin., who indeed was often Stalin’s patron notwithstanding his famous “testament” against Stalin’s rudeness and inordinate power within the Party machinery. Lenin had, after all, already made countless decisions, including the murder of the tsar and his family, without consulting even his peers within the Central Committee. No doubt Stalin increased the scale of crimes against Russian citizens, but Lenin had already resorted to all of Stalin’s tools, including censorship, police brutality, execution, arbitrary imprisonment, exile, secrecy, class oppression, etc. Of course, Stalin’s decision to purge the Party and military was done on a scale that might have shocked even Lenin. Lenin was certainly less paranoid than Stalin, at least in the early stages of his career. But had Lenin lived, who knows what he might have been capable of?

Again, as a patriot, Volkogonov is particularly appalled by Stalin’s incompetence during World War II. Having maintained the extreme form of political centralization established by Lenin, Stalin ensured (even without the purges) that his military leaders would not be able to act independently. But of course Stalin’s passivity in the face of German preparation for war, as well as his famous decision to disallow any form of tactical Russian defeat, cost Russia a great deal in the early phases of the war.

In the end, Stalin’s poor leadership cost the Soviet Union millions of soldiers and citizens, although Volkogonov does admit that Stalin gradually got the hang of military leadership, if only insofar as he eventually began to trust his military leaders. Toward the end of Stalin’s reign, the criminality of his regime did not dissipate. Having won World War II, an increasingly senile Stalin imprisoned countless Russian prisoners-of-war, built numerous palaces, surrounded himself with sycophants, brought about the Korean War, and eventually died in the midst of the Doctor’s Plot, probably a prelude to one more round of ruthless purges.