Customer Reviews

Let History Judge

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4 star:		(1)
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The original version of this book, published in 1972 by Alfred A Knopf, reflects the thinking of historian Roy A Medvedev in the period of August 1962 to August 1968. The revised and expanded 1989 version must first be examined in light of the original.

The original was translated by Colleen Taylor and edited by David Joravsky of Northwestern University. Medvedev couldn't get published in the USSR, and this work thus first appeared in the West. It was written primarily during the transition from Khrushev's anti-Stalinist reforms to Brezhnev's immanent social-imperialism.

August 1968 is also the month of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia and the defeat of Dubcek's "socialism with a human face." This is also the period of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Stalin was as evil as Hitler, yet he rose to power in the first Socialist state. The Second World War played itself out as one totalitarian dictatorship in a death struggle with another, yet Stalin ended up through the course of events as an ally of the democratic and capitalist Anglo-American West in its life-or-death struggle against fascism.

Totalitarianism turns out to have been the big infatuation of the twentieth century intelligentsia. Medvedev represents Russia's awakening from this plague. He is wrong about so much, yet for his age he was so far ahead of his times.

This book is a classic, and I believe the original should be the preferred version. Stalin's terror is nearly beyond belief. It is tragic in a different way than Nazism; perhaps with consequences more evil.

If Leninism ever revives, this will be a classic, just as it is now in the wake of the Cold War defeat of Communism.

This book is a very thorough and well-written biography of Josef Stalin. It was one of the few books I read in college that I didn't mind reading. The information on Stalin's political and personal life gives the reader an opportunity to make informed judgements about Stalin's actions.

The life's work of a confused man; that is the best way to describe this book. I have never read a book on Soviet history that is more befuddled than this one. The author cannot seem to make heads or tails of the history he tries to describe. He cannot seem to escape his socialist bias and indoctrination and make a wise accounting of what Russia went through. He seems to be completely void of any real understanding of human nature, and never was able to come the grips with the fact that socialism and human nature are not compatible. People don't want to be common. People don't want to work for paltry wages so that socialist bureaucratic parasites can ride them like mules.

All through the book he uses the euphemisms that conceal and attempt to justify the crimes socialists commit against the masses. "The class struggle" -- which is nothing but socialists mass-murdering their ideological opponents and stealing their property.
He uses all the usual euphemisms of socialist propaganda to hide the fact that they are nothing but malcontents, willing to mass-murder tens of millions of people to place themselves at the top of the heap. He derides Stalin and his accomplices for their millions of mass murders, then states that he feels it is perfectly acceptable to mass-murder to achieve socialist goals. The man was definitely a twisted individual, the author as well as Stalin.

He tries his best to describe Stalin as the reason that socialism didn't work in Russia, but he could not seem to set his fuddled mind on any one reason Stalin caused the problems; and in fact, offers many contradictory explanations. The book is one long painful repeating of the same information in chapter after chapter, from which he seems to derive different conclusions. It is not arranged with any semblance of order, and was in desperate need of an editor who could bring a sense of flow and purpose to the writing. My copy is 903 pages; the book could have been 250 pages, and been more readable and concise, and not been a constantly repeating mess.

He makes it clear time and time again that he believes that mass-murder of opponents in service to his ideology is acceptable. This is a quote from the book:
"In the Soviet revolution there have been many situations when extreamly cruel methods had to be used, such as the shooting of the tsar's family in Yekaterinburg, the sinking of the Black Sea Fleet, and the Red Terror of 1918."

This idiot thought murdering the Tsar's family in the basement of the house they were held captive was necessary for his ideology to triumph. What kind of ideology finds it necessary to murder children in a dark basement? He failed to mention that the Jewish man who committed those murders then went on to strip the bodies of their jewelry, which was never seen again. And thus, that crime serves as a true metaphor for socialism: Murder and theft.

I will give this book two stars because it does contain much useful information, but the authors philosophies, and attempts to understand the history are perverse. He wasn't just clueless in his attempts to understand this history, he didn't even suspect there was a problem with his interpretation.

This book was the first in the Soviet Union to treat Stalin in an objective way. Prior to its release Stalin had been the great hero of the patriotic war the father of the country and so forth. Whilst the secret speech by Krushev had distanced the country from his system scholarship had not taken the step of subjecting his rule to objective analysis.

The author was a person who was an opponent of Stalin and prior to the fall of the regime was active in its criticism. The book goes through the issues associated with Stalin such as the decision to collectivize agriculture, the forced industrialization, the terror and the handling of the war. The author forms the view that Stalin was an unmitigated disaster. That is the country would have progressed economically better without him, and his handling of the war was catastrophic.

It is a good book to read with other western accounts such as Bullocks.

The late 1990's saw the publication of numerous scatterbrained, and ill-intentioned, attempts to descredit Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx, by associating their actions, and ideas, with those of Joseph Stalin. One must ask, "were these attempts in any way successful?" Luckily, the answer is an emphatic, no. The individuals who bought into the "Marx and Lenin created Stalinism" theory, alluded to in works such as 'The Black Book of Communism', by Mister Courtois (or Miss), 'The Passing of an Illusion', by Mister Furet, and 'The Soviet Tragedy', by Mister Malia, already harbored such fantastic illusions. Most of the population has no interest in Sovietology, so attempts at descrediting Lenin, Marx, Bukharin, and Trotsky, were, and are, virtually fruitless (I took a Public Speaking course at a local community college, and most of the students hadn't even heard of Lenin, Marx, or Trotsky!.)

To find true objectivity, on the subject of Sovietology, one must reach back into the distant past, and read Roy Medvedev's incredible, 'Let History Judge'. One could refer to Medvedev's writings, as "Solzhenitsyn, without the racism and bitterness"(a spew of biographies show that Solzhenitsyn is without question anti-semitic; however, this fact doesn't mean he's no longer one of the elite writers of the twentieth century). 'Let History Judge', is not so much a history of Stalin, but a history of Russia from 1917-1953. Described, with minute detail, is Lenin's seizure of power, Lenin's benevolent feelings toward Stalin (which ended effectively after the Eleventh All-Congress of the Bolsheviks), Trotsky's role as leader of the Red Army, Trotsky's complete ineptness in regard to the left-opposition, and Stalin's remarkable, almost super-human, political abilites. In addition, one will never discover a finer description of collectivization anywhere (although I must admit Conquest's 'Harvest of Sorrow', is pretty excellent). Russia's grain production in 1930-1933, were almost certainly below pre-WWI levels, apparently, but Stalin wanted Russia to appear forceful, so he sold grain internationally, as if it were "business as usual", which resulted in the death of millions of non-guilty peasants (however, one can not deny George Carlin's classic quote, "there are no innocent people, once you're born, you're guilty as charged").The description of the horrible Gulag system is not quite as great as Solzhenitsyn's, but it's pretty darn close. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev doesn't slander the dead, or embark on anti-semitic diatribes (thankfully, for the population at large, Medvedev critiques much of what Solzhenitsyn wrote in the 'Gulag Archipelago' with absolute clarity).

The price is pretty high, but at 800+ pages, the person isn't really buying just one book, they are buying a multitude of books, which cover a variety of subjects. In addition to, 'Let History Judge', I would also strongly recommend you read Edvard Radzinsky's 'Stalin', Volkogonov's 'Autopsy of an Empire' (being a Yeltsin staffer, Volkogonov is biased, but there is some interesting anecdotes!), and Robert Tucker's magnificent two-volume biograpy of Stalin. Unlike other works on the subject of the Russian Revolution, these works actually take a "scholarly" approach!