Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, by Robert C. Tucker
The 20th century spun out quite a few dark lords, and Josef Stalin was perhaps the worst. He betrayed and murdered his comrades from the Russian Revolution, seizing power for himself, and his Great Purge terrorized and killed millions of people. His plans for Soviet industrialization and collective farming killed millions upon millions of people, unleashing (deliberately or not) the worst man-made famine in history. His bungling of diplomacy during the 30s smoothed Hitler’s path to power, and almost led to the destruction and mass genocide of the Soviet nationalities when the Germans invaded in 1941. After the war, he imposed his tyrannical system on Eastern Europe for forty years, and was gearing up for another purge when he, mercifully, finally died in 1953.
“Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above” covers the years 1928-1941, covering Stalin’s assumption of absolute power and the “revolution from above” he inflicted upon Soviet society. Tucker offers a very convincing psychological portrait of Stalin. He argues that Stalin viewed himself as “Koba”, an idealized revolutionary hero, and responded violently to anything that threatened that self-conception. Thus the Great Purge was not the mere cynical elimination of political opponents – Stalin could not believe that his policies had wreaked such havoc upon the Soviet Union. He was the genius-hero of the revolution, after all, and the failures must have been caused by sinister conspiracies against him. Hence his enormous psychological need to torture people into confessing crimes they could not have possibly committed – it preserved his image of himself as the heroic leader of the Communist revolution.
Tucker argues that what Stalin created was not in fact Communism. I disagree slightly on that point. It is my opinion that Communism (and to a lesser extent, socialism) is utterly impossible to achieve, and that any attempt to create it must inevitably devolve into brutal tyranny, in much the same way that a man jumping off a tower to fly by flapping his wings will inevitably break his legs.
I read this book for two reasons – first, I needed to research the USSR for a side job, and second, I wanted my next novel to be essentially “generic fantasy world taken over by Communists, bad things result” and I needed to do research for versimilitude. “Stalin in Power” admirably met my needs, and I recommend it if you’re curious about the Soviet period.
-JM