Robert Service - Stalin: A Biography

R OBERT S ERVICE is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography (which won the US ForeWord magazines History Book of the Year Award in 2000 ), A History of Twentieth-Century Russia and Russia: Experiment with a People as well as many other books on Russias past and present. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and works at St Antonys College, Oxford. He is married with four children.

Also by Robert Service

The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change

Lenin: A Political Life
Volume One: The Strengths of Contradiction
Volume Two: Worlds in Collision
Volume Three: The Iron Ring

The Russian Revolution, 19001927

A History of Twentieth-Century Russia

Lenin: A Biography

Russia: Experiment with a People

Comrades: Communism: A World History (publishing 2007)

First published 2004 by Macmillan

This edition published 2005 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-0-330-47638-6 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-47637-9 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-47640-9 in Microsoft Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-47639-3 in Mobipocket format

Copyright Robert Service 2004

The right of Robert Service to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Picture credits

Adele Biagi: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47. Corbis: 18, 19, 38, 39, 44. David King Collection: 9, 10, 11, 15. Hoover Institution Archives, RU/SU2237, Poster Collection: 42. Hulton Getty: 2, 7, 17, 31. Popperfoto: 20.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Francesco Benvenuti, Adele Biagi, Geoffrey Hosking and Arfon Rees read the draft and, as so many times in the past, offered invaluable suggestions. Katya Andreyev (on the Second World War), Jrg Baberowski (on the national question), Yoram Gorlizki (on the years after 1945), Mark Harrison (on Soviet economics), George Hewitt (on Georgian language and culture), Stephen Jones (on Georgian Marxism and culture), John Klier (on Jews) and David Priestland (on the 1930s) read several chapters. I also appreciate advice on particular matters from Bob Allen, Rosamund Bartlett, Vladimir Buldakov, Bob Davies, Norman Davies, Simon Dixon, Richard Evans, Israel Getzler, Ali Granmayeh, Riitta Heino, Ronald Hingley, Vladimir Kakalia, Oleg Khlevnyuk, Vladimir Kozlov, Slava Lakoba, Melvyn Leffler, Hugh Lunghi, Rosalind Marsh, Claire Mouradiane, Zakro Megreshvili, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Silvio Pons, Al Rieber, David Saunders, Harry Shukman, Peter Stickland, Martin Stugart, Ron Suny, Steve Wheatcroft, Jerry White, Faith Wigzell and Jackie Willcox. I am grateful to Matthew Hingley for creating a CD of my 78 rpm discs of Stalins speeches and to Vladimir Kakalia for making a present of some of these discs. Georgina Morley, Kate Harvey and Peter James, on the editorial side, have been invariably helpful with their suggestions for improvements. I am grateful to Hugh Freeman, George Hewitt, Ron Hill and Brian Pearce for drawing my attention to errors which have been corrected for this paperback edition.

The book benefited from discussions in the Institute of Russian History in the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of World History and the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History, and more recently it was helpful to discuss the Stalin question at the International Summer University near Gagra in Abkhazia and at the National Library in Tbilisi. (Stalin as a student at the nearby Spiritual Seminary in the late 1890s was banned from using that library.)

St Antonys Colleges Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre has been an incomparable environment for the research. My colleagues Archie Brown, Alex Pravda and Jackie Willcox have supplied constant counsel and encouragement. I have also benefited from the Monday seminars run by our Centre, where several of my papers touching the Stalin question have been discussed. Oxford librarians Jackie Willcox and Angelina Gibson have looked out for material being published in Russia. Simon Sebag Montefiore generously shared with me his notes on the unpublished memoirs of Kandide Charkviani. Heinz-Dietrich Lwe and Shaun Morcom obtained other material for me. Liana Khvarchelia and Manana Gurgulia, organisers of the Abkhazian Summer University with Rachel Clogg and Jonathan Cohen of Conciliation Resources, secured access for me to Stalins dacha at Kholodnaya Rechka, Rachel Polonsky to Molotovs apartment in central Moscow: my thanks to all of them them. Zakro Megreshvili assisted me in obtaining and translating Georgian political memoirs; Elin Hellum rendered a Swedish newspaper article into English.

The line of influential interpretations of Stalin and his career has remarkable homogeneity in several basic features overdue for challenge. This book is aimed at showing that Stalin was a more dynamic and diverse figure than has conventionally been supposed. Stalin was a bureaucrat and a killer; he was also a leader, a writer and editor, a theorist (of sorts), a bit of a poet (when young), a follower of the arts, a family man and even a charmer. The other pressing reason for writing this biography is that the doors of Russian archives have been prised ajar since the late 1980s. Difficulties of access remain, but many dusty corners of Stalins life and career can now be examined. Documentary collections have also appeared which have not yet entered a comprehensive biography. Historians and archivists of the Russian Federation in particular have been doing significant work which has yet to be widely discussed.

Stalins life calls up questions of historical approach. Most accounts have fallen into one of two categories. Some have been focused on his personality and motives and the effect of these on politics and society; others illuminate the general history of the USSR and elsewhere and take for granted that we already know most of what we need about him as an individual. Neither category is adequate by itself and I offer a synthesis in the following chapters. Thus while it is vital to examine Stalins peculiar personality, it is equally necessary to analyse the environment in which he grew up and the political and other pressures under which he operated. Accounts are also divided between those which highlight the specificity of a given period and those which pick out the more durable factors in his career and his partys history. This book is intended to bridge that artificial dichotomy. Thus, while detailed investigations of the Great Terror are essential, so too is a consideration of the whole set of circumstances produced by the October Revolution (and indeed by earlier situations). The aim is to bring together what are usually called intentionalism and structuralism as well as to combine what may be termed synchronic and diachronic approaches.