Book reviews of
What these three books have in common is the attempt to come to grips with one of the essential and tragic elements of the last century. Stalin was a giant whose policies ended in the slaughter of millions amid the crushing of dreams and dreamers alike. He sacrificed communism on the altar of Russian nationalism, practicing a realpolitik more like Winston Churchill than the idealistic anti-colonialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a paranoid with reason to fear that his unsavory past as a gangster-revolutionary and czarist agent would catch up with him, and he had a lifelong hatred of Jews, including those who had long served the revolution he claimed to lead. His legacy was the icy hand of totalitarian fear. According to a perhaps apocryphal tale, after Nikita Khrushchev renounced Stalinism in his famous "secret speech" to the party central committee, a delegate in the back shouted out, "And where were you when all this was happening?"
"Who said that?" Khrushchev thundered. The large hall fell silent.
"That's where I was," Khrushchev said.
Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia
The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life
and Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
David Twersky
Forward Sep.07.01
