Let history judge: The origins and consequences of Stalinism [Unknown Binding]

Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1976

-- Time

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This weighty--physically and emotionally--book speaks volumes about the play of individual and group memory in a totalitarian society. It grew from notebooks and files secretly kept by the Russian historian Roy Medvedev on the history of his times, from the emergence of Josef Stalin as a leader in the 1917 Revolution to the dictator's death in 1953. Some of the documents Medvedev gathered, including memoranda on secret agreements with Nazi Germany, shocked Russian readers when these notebooks first began to appear in 1988, and his book became one of the primary documents of glasnost. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Justifiably, Medvedev, the great Marxist historian, has called this book "the main work of my life." His conclusions remain substantially the same as the first edition of this volume ( LJ 1/15/72). Stalin's terror was a "deliberate policy and not the results of some persecution mania"; he was possessed by "limitless ambition and limited ability," and was supported by "a majority of the Soviet people . . . backward enough to be deceived." Some may feel the author fails to connect all this to Soviet socialism today. Nevertheless, the new edition's strength lies in the voluminous new testimony and findings, such as the assertion that in 1934 Stalin's poor physical health caused Politboro "to name a possible successor Kirov." Indispensable for larger Soviet collections.
- Zachary T. Irwin, Behrend Coll., Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• Publisher: Spokesman Books for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (1976)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0007ANS0W
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an historical gem that passed unnoticed, September 1, 2005

By 

simpcity - See all my reviews

This review is from: Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and interesting, May 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Let History Judge (Paperback)

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.

2.0 out of 5 stars Painfully bad, January 28, 2012

By 

Happy Camper (Oregon Coast) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Hardcover)

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.