Book reviews:  Joseph Stalin: Koba and Uncle Joe

 
In 2002, I stood in Lividia Palace, where the infamous Yalta Conference took place between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, and listened with deep anger while our tour group leader told a ‘funny’ story about Stalin.  Why, I wondered, does one still hear ‘funny’ stories about this ruthless killer?  Why is it all right to have belonged to the Communist Party, but not to the Nazis?  (For a more recent example, witness the furor of Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to a party in January of this year.  What if he had dressed as Lenin or Stalin?  Would anyone have commented?  And if not, why not?)
Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread: laughter and the twenty million.  (Random House, 2002, 306 pp.) asks the same questions.  Is there a moral difference between the ‘Little Moustache’ and the ‘Big Mustache’?  (Amis believes there is, but only because he feels it is so.)  Why were so many intelligent people taken in by Stalin and the promises of “Uncle Joe?”  How is possible that most Western reporters who toured Ukraine at the height of the famine stated that people in famine stricken areas were well fed, and those who reported the truth were scorned?

The litany of Stalin’s crimes is horrific:  torture, artificial famine, death marches, the Gulag prison camps.  How many died?  Although estimates vary, many historians believe the number could reach twenty million.  Koba is not an objective history, but could be a good starting point for anyone wanting a readable, short book about Stalin and his times.  It asks questions that need to be asked, but offers no easy answers.

Simon Sebac Montefiore’s Stalin; the Court of the Red Tsar (London: Orion Bks, 2003.  720 pp.)  tells a story of political intrigue and maneuvering that is so engrossing one can almost forget that the lives being juggled belong to real people.  And yet, it brings to light a side of Stalin and of his ‘court’ that is more disturbing than Amis’s Koba.  Here are men who will stop at nothing for the Party,  yet these same men show affection to their families,  read important literature, listen to great works of music.  Stalin loves his daughter, and is overwhelmed with grief at the death of his wife, Nadya.

Montefiore makes it clear that Stalin is responsible for millions of deaths: he also makes it clear that Stalin’s henchmen, including Khrushchev, often exceeded the quotas for imprisonment and executions set by their leader.  After Stalin’s death, the only two of his inner circle who admitted to their part in the Terror were Krushchev and Mikoyan, the others blaming Stalin or Beria for the ‘excesses’ of the Terror.

In spite of the broad scope of the book Montefiore’s specific references brought the crimes of Stalin’s regime home to me in a way that Amis’s broad strokes could not.  For example, “In the summer of 1933, Molotov received a report that a factory in Zaparozhe was producing defective combine harvester parts due to sabotage.” (p.125)  The factory was in the Mennonite suburb of Schoenwiese, and employed numerous Mennonites, including my grandfather, Johann Sawatzky.  Montefiore does not tell us what punishment was meted out to the ‘wreckers’ in this case.   Later, on p. 277, another reference that involves my family:  “In 1938, 106,119 people were arrested in Khrushchev’s Ukrainian Terror.”   79 of that number came from Nieder Chortitza, 41 from Neuendorf.  Both of my grandfathers are included in these numbers; neither was ever heard from again.

As his sources, Montefiore uses newly opened archives, as well as unpublished memoirs of members of Stalin’s entourage and interviews with their relatives and children.   His purpose, he says in his introduction, is to go beyond picturing Stalin as ‘enigma, madman or Satanic genius.’  “I hope Stalin becomes a more understandable and intimate character, if no less repellent.” (xxiii)