Customer Reviews

The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Yes, I know it's fiction, but a piece of fiction like this has to navigate all the cliffs of historical truth (or what we think is historical truth) to get us to suspend our disbelief, and it succeeds brilliantly. I've read a LOT of biographies of Stalin (Ulam, Deutscher, De Jonge, Volkogonov, Tucker, Conquest and a few others. I much prefer Tucker) and this book just doesn't put a foot wrong. But more than that, it's..compelling. Of COURSE Stalin thinks Trotsky is trying to kill him! After all, he is trying to kill Trotsky, and he assumes Trotsky is as driven as he is, although he fears Trotsky will obtain much more lethal weaponry than an icepick. A wonderful, appalling book. Of course it only covers a part of Stalin's world - personally, I would have loved to have seen more of his views of his supporters, such as Kaganovich, Kalinin, etc. - but it's a novel, keep saying that to yourself, it's a novel, not an autobiography in the usual sense. Obligatory reading.

In the last chapter of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN, it is a week after the August 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, and the Soviet dictator is wrapping up his narrative history of the events that led up to the successful ax murder of his archrival by a conspiracy that he personally directed. In previous chapters, Stalin tells the story of his life as a young boy in Russian Georgia, as a young communist revolutionary, as an associate of Lenin before and after the Revolution, and as the dictator that assumed total power after Lenin's death in 1924 by destroying all of his old Bolshevik comrades. All events are related in the context of his paranoid fear and hatred of Trotsky who, in his Mexican exile, is apparently assembling a biography of the Soviet leader - a biography that will reveal to the world Stalin's ultimate crime against Russia and the Revolution, and which will hopefully spark his downfall. Thus, according to Stalin, the necessity of having to effect Trotsky's murder. (After all, even paranoids have enemies.)

Of course, Stalin wrote no autobiography for the world to ponder. This book is a novel written by Richard Lourie. It is absorbing and interesting only to the degree that the facts of Stalin's life and Trotsky's death, as related herein, are historically true. Since Lourie has a Ph.D. in Russian, and has written previously on Russian history, I give him the benefit of the doubt. I was both absorbed and fascinated by the author's Stalin, a personality so isolated and megalomaniacal as to be able to "write" at the very end:

"Now I know what my name really means: Stalin is the strength to bear a world in which there is only nothing and yourself. At last I have defeated God at loneliness".

This is a well written account exploring Joseph Stailn's bizarre and evil psychology. It grabs your attention early and is stong throughout. It is not, however, a fictional autobiography. Rather it is a detailed illustration of one example of Stalin's paranoia : his obession with wacking Trotsky. Because of this singlemindeness the book loses some of its power. Very little mention is made of the millions Stalin tortured and killed - his true sad legacy. Such focus would have been fine in a book that was titled "Stalin and Trotsky", but not one advertising itself as an autobiography.... Otherwise,recommended.

Most of my reading is non-fiction. On the rare occasions I do read fiction, it is normally of the historical nature. Very few fictions really catch and hold my attention. This "autobiography" of the ultimate tyrant of the 20th century was one of those very few.

When I first got the book, I glanced through it and was initally disappointed that it did not include WW II and the post-war era. I had expected the book to take the reader right up to Stalin's death in 1953. However, once I got into the book I could understand Mr. Lourie's reasons for not going that far.

The book is about Stalin's obsession with his arch rival whom he had already exiled, Leon Trotsky. He is fearful that a has-been could still jeopardize his iron grip over the USSR by revealing to the world Stalin's deepest and darkest secret -- deeper and darker than his other deep and dark secrets. The book alternates between Stalin relating his biography and his plotting the demise of Trotsky. The reader could gain an understanding of why he was what he was.

Although I can understand why Lourie ended the book with the end of Trotsky's life, I do hope there is a sequel. At the risk that most sequels tend not to match the same level as the original, I would be interested in how Mr. Lourie would interpret Stalin's perception of the "Great Patriotic War", the early Cold War period, post WW2 purges, USSR's entry into the atomic era, etc. Perhaps the sequel could take the reader right up to before Stalin's stroke that eventually ended his life.

Another approach may be to write a companion "autobiography" by Leon Trotsky leading up to that fateful day in August 1940 when Stalin's assassin killed him with an ax handle.

If Mr. Lourie or some other talented writer wanted to try a similar "autobiography" on other major historical personalities (e.g., Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, etc.) I could be tempted to read such books.

Although books are much more fun when the reader saves reading quotes from the various famous personalities that speckle the back until the end, one of these snippits stands out on "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin." Joseph Heller, author of "Catch-22," is blurbed, and he says to ignore the book unless one wants to be "buttonholed" by the worst man in history. Heller couldn't have been more accurate; that sentence sums up Lourie's novel with elegance and accurate grace. Make no mistake, as this is no history book. It's a work of fiction, but one that is removed enough from the events surrounding its protagonist that it manages to resonate in such a timely fashion it lures the reader inside and doesn't let go.

"Autobiography" reads like a memoir, as it is intended, and follows two main trains of thought: the events the lead Stalin to have his main, exiled political rival, Leon Trotsky, assassinated, and the events that lead Stalin to assume the leadership of the newly-formed Soviet Union and set a standard for what Communism-cum-Stalinism was to be for the 20th Century. Stalin's story is as much a response to Trotsky's writings-in-exile as a memoir, and the entire story is told not as Stalin writing a history, but as Stalin shoring his fragments against Trotsky's potentially ruining exposes. Lourie's narrative shifts flawlessly from Stalin's "formative" years as the son of an alcoholic cobbler and a churchmouse mother in Georgia, to his time at the Seminary, to his career as a thief and revolutionary. Stalin isn't so much interested in the goals of Communism - a better life for the workers, and so forth - as his is at using an opportunity to gain wealth, power, and prestige (although, neither do any of the other revolutionaries, save perhaps Trotsky). Lourie outlines Stalin's disdain for intellectual, ineffectual Communist ideals and what eventually leads him to commit some of the most horrific crimes ever visited upon a group of people.

But, Stalin is difficult to classify. From a historical perspective, even though "The Boss" outscored Hitler in the body count department, he managed to turn the near-medieval Russia into a modern, scientific, industrial superpower in a few decades. It's the ultimate utilitarian argument: that the ends of struggle (any struggle, be it war, revolution, etc) eventually justify the means. And that, in the end, is what makes "Autobiography" so powerful. Stalin is never portrayed sympathetically per se - in fact, the book reads more like a profile of a serial killer rather than an autobiography - but, in his mad quest for power, it is slowly made clear that he feels the ends did, in fact, justify the means. It's an interesting question - when do the ends no longer justify the means? When is killing for a "better" cause no longer appropriate? How many degrees of separation are there between Stalin and our current leaders - or even ourselves?

Lourie's lyrical, almost Russian, prose helps spin this deceptive, silken tapestry, and the structure of the novel keeps it flowing like a gentle but insistent river. The only problem here is that the reader is never fully made to believe that the historical Stalin saw himself not as himself, but as someone in relation to someone else. It is doubtful at best that someone as egotistical and monstrous as Stalin would have constantly compared himself to others - although, pop psychology certainly argues otherwise. Still, the book is a powerful and pleasurable read, until the reader reminds himself or herself that the subject matter is, perhaps, the most abhorrent man that ever lived.

The author dons the persona of one of the most dangerous men in the history of humanity, Joseph Stalin, to provide a thorough and authentic account of his obsessions, his fears and his ruthless ambitions. The book, which is highly extensive in scope, shows Stalin's poor childhood and how he is abused by his sadistic father. Then, he enters a seminary, begins to doubt the existence of God and mixes in the circles of revolutionary socialists. His rise in the party hierarchy and his association with Lenin are well documented, including his rivalry with the most gifted intellectual genius of the Bolshevik movement, Lev Trotsky, who easily eclipses the "cobbler's son", Stalin. After his ascent to power, Stalin believes that his life is threatened by Trotsky, now exhiled in Mexico, and he proceeds to meticulously plan the latter's assassination. For him, Trotsky is a dangerous and lingering fascination, and he exerts a profound unease on his throughout the duration of the novel, until Stalin finally succeeds in infiltrating Trotsky's circle with an N.K.V.D. agent who slaughters Trotsky with an axe, thus allowing Stalin to rule without any threat or opposition from potential rivals. Although the repressions and policies pursued by Stalin were truly disastrous, this does not prevent Richard Lourie from presenting him as a sympathetic, misunderstood, undervalued and not always unlikeable individual who rose to absolute tyranny. The book excels in two ways. It is very well researched, drawing on all the major episodes in Stalin's life, thus being on a par with some of the best biographies of Stalin available. In addition, it moves with the pace of suspense thriller, containing a number of twists, reversals and red herrings. The conversational, sometimes wryly humorous tone of Stalin the narrator is perhaps one of the most accurate reconstructions so far of the "unknown Stalin".

Lourie's "Autobiography" is an extremely well-written journey, albeit fictional, into Stalin's heart of darkness. It is compelling. This piece of fiction evokes the nature of the beast in ways that straightforward biographies (Volkogonov, etc.) sometimes do not. True, Volkognov's "Stalin" masterfully details the life of Stalin. However, Lourie's fiction, in my opinion, seems to have found that withered spot that passed for Koba's soul. It is no wonder that Lourie's preface reads "To whatever sprit possessed me to write this book, may it be gone forever now."

For any reader partial to either recent Russian history or historical fiction in general, Lourie's book is an excellent addition to the large body of work about Josef Stalin. It begins in 1937 (during the period of major purges and show trials) and ends in August 1940. The dates are important, because the starting point is that period when, after almost a decade in power, Stalin decided to liquidate (i.e., kill or imprison) what was known as the Old Bolshevik leadership, which included both Lenin's and Stalin's most prominent allies and colleagues during the Russian revolution and its aftermath of civil war and tergiversations about what the correct Party Line should be concerning the organization and government of the new Soviet Union. In short, the purges accomplished the removal of all potential rivals for power, be they "politicians", administrators, intellectuals, military men, or men from the security services. The removal of rivals also allowed the rewriting of history to glorify Stalin as Lenin's staunchest early follower and ally and as Lenin's "best pupil" in the realm of "scientific socialism". In this respect the purges fulfilled what might be called theological as well as practical-political goals (establishing, as it were, the true Apostolic Succession of Marx-Lenin-Stalin). The other function of the purges was to defray criticism of Stalin by identifying scapegoats for the various failures of policy during the 1930s that should have been placed squarely on his shoulders: forced agricultural collectivization accompanied by confiscations, famines, mass death, and mass imprisonments, resulting in the huge GULAG complex and the exile of vast numbers of people to the most remote and inhospitable regions of the USSR; the "sabotage" of industry and the economy (in fact, a state of affairs brought about by ignorance, incompetence,lack of realism in planning, plain old corruption, and falsifying information as it went up the chain of command); and shortages of housing, food, and other everyday items of consumption.

The end point of the "autobiography" comes with Stalin's ruminations over his demi-godly status after the elimination of Leon Trotsky. The narrative line of the story is built around Stalin's obsessions concerning Trotsky during these three years. Given their relative positions and power at the time, Stalin's thoughts about his most hated rival can only be understood as a form of megalomaniac paranoia, for in fact Trotsky was only a former rival who was no longer a serious threat to Stalin's leadership after the late 1920s. And that disjunction between reality and Stalin's perceptions produces the right framing and just the right tone to capture the Boss's inner voice, his "dialectical" arguments with himself, in which all the turmoils and setbacks of 1917-1940 are smoothly explained as the work of factions opposing him, with his draconian responses now justified by treachery. This is the great virtue of Lourie's book - its recreation of the Boss's mind. And it is far from whole-cloth invention. The numerous recorded comments about and biographies of Stalin by his colleagues, disciples, victims, and even his weird "creations' (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria - to a certain extent also Khrushchev, Molotov, Vyshinsky, etc.) supply both the facts of his career, his manner of speech, and his habits of craftily posing the existence of "problems" and their ideal solution, usually meaning the elimination of specific people and groups ("there is a problem, there is a man - get rid of the man, get rid of the problem," was one of Stalin's favorite adages).

In addition to the Trotsky theme Lourie has Stalin reminiscing about his bleak and rough childhood as little Soso Djugashvili in Gori, his sadistic alcoholic father and simple-minded pious mother, his seminarian days in Tiflis (Tbilisi) when he assumed his heroic nickname of "Koba", his years as an agitator and organizer in Batum and Baku, his attendance at Bolshevik conferences in London and Vienna, his numerous exiles in Siberia, his pulling off of a major bank robbery (the "Tiflis expropriation" which resulted in intense factional divisions within the Bolshevik Party), and his two marriages. If you go to the standard biographies of Stalin (Robert Tucker's or Volkogonov's, for instance) or the numerous works in which Stalin plays the key role (works by Bullock, Service, Conquest, Pipes, Overy, R. Medvedev, Djilas and many, many more) or the works which are anti-Stalin tirades posing as biographies (Trotsky's or Antonov-Ovseyenko's), you will find descriptions of Stalin's life as outlined above. But you will also find, over and over, portraits that validate Lourie's presentation of the thinking and speech of Stalin (e.g., his simplistic, concise "formulations" of complicated affairs; his "catechistic" style of questions and answers). Lourie's fictional portrait is about as accurate as a writer could get in this respect, as is the presentation of the broader background conditions that had an impact on Stalin's thought and actions, e.g., Hitler's increasing prominence on the European stage.

The fictional prop that drives a good part of the story -- though, given Stalin's character, it's an entirely plausible prop and perhaps even true -- is the one "secret" about his earlier career that he has revealed to no one else (though he suspects that his former OGPU/NKVD chief Yagoda knows it, thus must die). The escalating fear behind his desire to eliminate Trotsky as soon as possible is that the "Old Man", who is living and writing in exile in Mexico, is clever enough to assemble the evidence that would reveal Stalin's innermost secret to the public. I won't reveal the secret here, but the careful reader might guess it before the author reveals it through his subject's confession toward the end of the book. The "Autobiography of Josef Stalin" is an astute exemplar of how to mesh historical reality and fiction.

Of course he never wrote an autobiography, but if he told it to cronies, it would sound like this, then he'd have them shot. So imagine Stalin telling his life story, a crude thug boasting of his power, telling little anecdotes about exterminating millions, and sharing his innermost "thoughts". It's black humor at its best. Lourie is a sovietologist and literary translator from Russian, he's done the research, spent time in Russia, he knows his stuff. It's hard to imagine a more accurate portrait of the monster, and once you start reading, you can't put it down. Should be required reading, lest we forget. Highly recommended.

The tyrant Stalin is seriously brooding about what his arch-enemy Trotsky may write about him in a biography. Stalin contemplates what section of his past may be available for Trotsky to discover and tell the world. So we hear the Soviet Leader on his early life in seminary school, and the beginnings of revolution, and Stalin's participation or non- participation in these events. Will Trotsky suggest Stalin's early contributions were less than satisfactory? Will Trotsky mention Lenin's serious misgivings about the character of the future dictator? And we are given a grand tour through the 1937 Trials of former comrades. Therefore, Stalin must do away with Trotsky, and arranges a massive spying operation in Trotsky's Mexico City Compound. Told with verve, nastiness,and even some very dark humor, this short and incisive work will be hard to put down for anyone. My only complaint is that many aspects of the 1930's USSR are not mentioned, especially the man-made famines in Ukraine, but still a fine piece of work!