Stalin [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE PELICAN EDITION The present edition of Stalin contains a newly written section, in which I describe the last crowded and gloomy years of Stalin's rule. When I originally concluded this biography in the summer of 1948 I could not carry the story beyond the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Trying then to assess Stalin's career, I made the reservation that 'we do not know into what new perspective its last act may yet throw the preceding ones'. In the concluding pages of this edition I review the whole perspective with an eye to the final act of the drama and to its epilogue, the so-called de-Stalinization. I am sometimes asked whether I have revised my views on Stalin in the light of the 'revelations' made by Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and others at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 and later. I wish I could answer this question in the affirmative. Unfortunately, those revelations have added nothing to the account given in this book of Stalin's rise to power, of his relationship with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, of his policies in the inter-war period, and of the Great Purges. On all these crucial points my biography of Stalin contains abundant information, still inaccessible, even now, to Soviet readers. On the other hand, I do not accept Khrushchev's assertion that Stalin's role in the Second World War was virtually insignificant. This allegation was obviously meant to boost Khrushchev himself at Stalin's expense; and it does not accord with the testimonies of many reliable eye-witnesses, especially Western statesmen and generals, who had no reason to exaggerate Stalin's role. One aspect only of Stalin's activity has appeared to me in a clearer light as a result of Khrushchev's disclosures - namely, the extent to which Stalin, having suppressed the Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and Bukharinists, victimized his own followers, the Stalinists. In this edition I analyse the consequences of that important fact. Otherwise the original text of the biography is reproduced here as it was written nearly two decades ago. To make room for the FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO A 1961 EDITION i wrote this biography thirteen to fourteen years ago as a book for the general reader rather than for the expert, and I did my best to state in it the essential facts about Stalin and his career as plainly and as non-controversially as possible. When I began planning the work, the public and the Press in this country had not yet quite recovered from their war-time adulation of Stalin; when I was putting the finishing touches to it, the air-lift to Berlin roared on and Stalin was the villain of the cold war. These violent changes in the political climate did not, I think, affect my treatment of Stalin: I had never been a devotee of the Stalin cult; and the cold war was not my war. Yet shortly after publication a British critic could write that 'like its subject, the book has become the focus of an animated and at times ferocious controversy no biography in recent years has aroused similar interest or evoked similar passionate resentment and hostility'. I should perhaps add that most British critics received the book open-mindedly and generously - nevertheless, the 'ferocious controversy ' did in fact go on for years, especially abroad, on both sides of the Atlantic. The book has been praised or blamed for the most contradictory reasons, either as a denunciation of Stalinism, or as an apology for it, and sometimes as both denunciation and apology. Thus, the late Moshe Pijade, Marshal Tito's friend and associate, once explained to me why the government of which he was a member refused to allow a Yugoslav edition of Stalin: 'You see,' he said, 'the trouble with your book is that it is too pro-Soviet for us whenever we quarrel with the Russians; and it is too anti-Soviet whenever we try to be friendly with them.' ('In any case,' he added with a twinkle in the eye,' we cannot permit a Yugoslav edition to appear because if we did everyone would see at once