Document created: 1 June 04
Air University Review, November-December 1972

Dictator Stalin and Mr. Hyde

According to H. Montgomery Hyde, there are more published works on Stalin than any other’ figure in history, including Christ and Napoleon. What further contribution, then, could, he expect to make to a subject already overworked? One might expect him either to possess unshakable confidence in his ability to restate the familiar so distinctively that the reader would not recognize it or to have access to information hitherto unpublished.

This versatile author combines an element of both these qualifications in his recent book, Stalin.* His previously published works include more than forty books, which demonstrate an impressive span of competency in subjects ranging from Cases That Changed the Law to A History of Pornography. Certainly he is not reluctant to tackle a wide range of unrelated topics or compete with authorities in their own narrow areas of specialization. Although there has never been a shortage of English-language biographies of Stalin, few comprehensive studies of him have been written in recent years. In addition to the revelations about Stalin since his death—by his daughter Svetlana, Khrushchev in his “secret speech,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his popular novels, Milovan Djilas in his Conversations with Stalin, among others—there was a growing body of information about Russia’s wartime premier that had not been integrated with previous knowledge into a recent biography. The timely appearance of Hyde’s book fills this gap, and its easy narrative style should appeal to a wide readership.

*H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History of a Dictator (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972, $12.95), 679 pages.

No stranger to the Soviet Union, Mr. Hyde has visited the country ten times since 1933. During his latest trip he visited Stalin’s birthplace near Tiflis in Georgia, the seminary from which he was expelled for propagating Marxist doctrine, and various places associated with the Soviet dictator’s career. Hyde reported that Soviet authorities were generally cooperative in granting his requests to view specific sites but were unwilling to take him to view the grave of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. He was informed that “she was a person of no public interest whatsoever” and that he’d have to find the grave himself.¹ As an indication of his meticulous research, he eventually found the grave unaided and photographed the tombstone for posterity and his book.

Most of Hyde’s documentary research for the book was done at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the Trotsky archives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. This research digs deeply into archival material that until recently was unknown even to the Soviets, and the bibliography should be useful to any student of Soviet affairs. Unfortunately, the greatest treasure trove of memorabilia is in the Stalin collection in the Archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow and is closed to native and foreign historians alike. The final definitive history of Stalin’s era will not be written until that source is opened.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (who, mercifully, called himself Stalin) was a double apostate. On his mother’s urging he won a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894 and spent several years there gaining a classical education in preparation for the priesthood. His exposure to seditious literature smuggled into the seminary led to a growing reputation as “a person who harboured views dangerous to Tsarism” (p. 33), and he was finally expelled in 1899. After a few tumultuous years, the former theological student was the leader of the world’s largest atheistic movement. 

Stalin made no secret of his early association with the church, but he desperately tried to cover up his activities as a double agent in the Okhrana and czarist secret police. As might be imagined, all available evidence linking Stalin to the archenemy of the early Bolshevik party was eradicated. Old comrades who might have had any slight knowledge of Stalin’s double life were eliminated by the purges. Nevertheless, Hyde cites enough surviving documentation and testimony of emigrés to sustain the belief that Stalin was indeed a double agent.

Hyde succeeds no better than other biographers in unlocking the secret of Stalin’s triumph over abler men who stood in his way or in explaining his prolonged perversion of a highly idealistic revolution to his personal aims. Accounts of Stalin’s early contributions to his party were often disparaging and usually indicated that he was overshadowed by other revolutionaries. He was described as speaking “haltingly, with a strong Georgian accent: his speech was dull and dry, and entirely devoid of color and witticism.” (p. 124) He rarely entered into conversation with intellectuals, and when he did he was usually cut off with brief or contemptuous remarks. Hyde cites John Reed, who recorded the October revolution with newsreel clarity in his Ten Days That Shook the World and described Stalin as a “grey blur, looming up now and then dimly and not leaving a trace.” (p. 141) On one quality all were agreed: Stalin was ruthless. But this was not an uncommon quality among revolutionary zealots, and it cannot in itself explain his later success.

By the time he was later sought out by foreign intellectuals and dignitaries for interviews as the head of state, a remarkable transformation appears to have taken place. He was now witty, charming, and possessed of omniscient political perspective. George Bernard Shaw wrote after an interview with him:

Unlike other dictators, Stalin had an irrepressible sense of humour. There is an odd mixture of the Pope and Field Marshal in him: you might guess him to be the illegitimate soldier-son of a cardinal. I should call his manners perfect if only he had been able to conceal the fact that we amused him enormously. (p 247)

In the same interview Shaw recalls an exchange between Lady Astor and Stalin when the latter asked about politicians in England. To this Lady Astor replied, “Chamberlain is the coming man.”

“What about Churchill?” queried Stalin.

“Oh he’s finished!”

“If your country is ever in trouble,” Stalin retorted, looking hard at Lady Astor, “he will come back.” (p. 248) This perspicacious observation was shared by few statesmen in 1931.

Anthony Eden noted after a conference with Stalin: “I have never known a man handle himself better in conference. Well informed at all points that were of concern to him, Stalin was prudent but not slow. Seldom raising his voice, a good listener, prone to doodling, he was the quietest dictator I have ever known, with the exception of Dr. Salazar. Yet the strength was there, unmistakably.” (p. 319)

To visiting foreign dignitaries Stalin may have appeared benign, but to the Russian people he was a reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible. His slaughter of Soviet subjects exceeded that of all the czars combined. In one of his more intimate wartime conversations with Churchill, he indicated that most of ten million Kulaks resisting collectivization did not survive. ² As he consolidated his power, he instituted a series of purges against party members and army officers that virtually eliminated middle and senior officer ranks. Anyone who at any time had opposed Stalin or whom he suspected of being a potential adversary was purged. Soviet law made children over age 12 subject to the death penalty as accomplices in the treasonable acts of their parents. When thousands of starving children jammed railroad stations during the famine of 1932, Stalin issued secret orders that any children caught stealing food were to be dispatched. Hyde provides a thorough treatment of the purge trials of the losers, the internecine maneuvering within the party, the methods of interrogation and prosecution, and the human devastation that resulted.

In comparison with most Western historians, Hyde is more charitable towards Stalin in treating the short-lived and ill-fated pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In Hyde’s view, Stalin realized that war was eventually to be inevitable, but he sought the treaty because it would allow Russia to acquire two things: buffer territory (eastern Poland and the Baltic states) and—more important—time. Stalin’s strange refusal to respond to numerous warnings of the impending German invasion is explained by Hyde as a ploy to mollify the Nazis until the last possible hour in an effort to delay the invasion. The author offers little new information on this puzzling matter, and his interpretation is not convincing.

As an ex-member of the British Parliament, Hyde would be expected to emphasize Stalin’s relations with British leaders and diplomats, and it is in this area that his book is best. Much has been written of Churchill’s wartime meetings with Generalissimo Stalin, but Hyde proves that the subject is not yet exhausted. Churchill had been the most articulate antagonist of Bolshevism since its inception, and there was a residue of mutual suspicion to be overcome before the two men could work together to defeat Hitler. Hyde’s anecdotal account vividly chronicles this thawing process, which ultimately reached the following degree of liquid mellowness:

After dinner, when the President [Roosevelt] and most of the guests had left, Stalin lingered for a final drink with Churchill. “England is becoming a shade pinker,” observed the Prime Minister.

“That is a sign of good health,” replied Stalin. Then after this remark had been translated, he added: “I want to call Mr. Churchill my friend.”

“Call me Winston,” said the Prime Minister. “I call you Joe behind your back.”

“No,” said Stalin. “I want to call you my friend.

I’d like to be allowed to call you my good friend.”

The two clinked glasses for the umpteenth time.

“I drink to the proletarian masses,” Churchill proposed.

“I drink to the Conservative Party,” replied Stalin. (pp. 498-99)

One might assume that a book of 679 pages would offer a reasonably balanced coverage of the various phases of Stalin’s life. However, the reader who expects to gain some insight into Sino-Soviet relations during his reign will discover that the entire subject occupies no more than three pages. Chiang Kai-shek is not even listed in the large index of proper names, although a few fleeting references to him are in the text. Considering Stalin’s ill-fated meddling in the internal affairs of China during the 1920s and the defection of Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang party following his stewardship in Moscow, the omission is inexplicable. Indeed, Trotsky had virtually predicted that Stalin’s tactics would end in a fiasco for Communism in China, and this turn of events was an important factor in Trotsky’s growing split with Stalin. Stalin could not afford to have him claim, “I told you so.” Hyde gives little more than a passing reference to Stalin’s relationship with Mao Tse-tung and adds nothing to existing literature on the subject.

Without offering a specific political judgment, Hyde makes it quite clear, through the selective use of the memoirs of participants in the wartime conferences, that President Roosevelt was both naive and needlessly generous in his negotiations with Stalin. As early as October 1943 Stalin gratuitously informed Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the Soviet Union would join the Allies in attacking Japan soon after Germany was defeated. Stalin volunteered this pledge to Roosevelt and Churchill again at Teheran the following month, without attaching any political preconditions. However, at Yalta in February 1944 Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s demand for considerable Soviet territorial aggrandizement as a price for attacking Japan, some of it at the expense of their wartime ally, China. Roosevelt had previously expressed the view: “I think if I give [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and he will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” (p. 452) Hyde’s account of the wartime summit meetings and their tragic aftermath should be required reading for all U.S. officials who expect to bargain with the Soviets.

For anyone attempting to understand the Soviet system of government and its chief decision-makers, this book has considerably more value than could be expected from the usual biographical/historical study. There is little similarity between the continuity of the Soviet system, which develops and grooms promising party members for positions of leadership over a lifetime of service, and the American two-party system, which sweeps out its policymakers each time the presidency is captured” by a rival party. However, the advantages of the inherent stability of the Soviet system were more than offset by the vagaries of Stalin, who increasingly personalized and obscured the decision-making process.

Despite the fact that Stalin has been succeeded by Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, the present Soviet leadership was nurtured under the tutelage of Stalin. Both Brezhnev and Kosygin were protégés of Stalin and survived some of the worst aberrations of the aging dictator. Shortly after World War II, Kosygin was admitted to the Politburo as a member of a troika of bright young party members noted for their managerial talents. Stalin had the other two members of this troika, Vosnesensky and Kuznetsov, shot for some vague misdoing in the so-called “Leningrad affair.” For some time Kosygin was terrified that he too might be marked for extinction, as there was little difference between his activities and those of his executed comrades. Khrushchev, in recounting Stalin’s excesses (in his “secret speech”), considered Kosygin’s survival nothing short of miraculous. (p. 576) Although not explicitly stated by Hyde, the conclusion is inescapable that no individual could survive such a traumatic experience without being influenced for life.

Because some of the unspeakable terrors of the Stalin era are no longer practiced, there is a tendency to ascribe greater enlightenment to the present Kremlin leadership. But how does a man survive the Byzantine intrigues of a lifetime of Stalinism without becoming a part of it? Hopefully, the present regime represents a break with the past and is one with which we can work out humanitarian solutions to mankind’s problems; but the fact that today’s Soviet leaders are deeply rooted in the Stalinist past is strongly evident in Hyde’s book. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 under the present leadership was pure Stalinism.

Undoubtedly this book will be superseded by future biographies of Stalin as additional revelations come to light, but this is unlikely for the next decade at least. Anyone with historical interest in Stalin and his times, or seeking a framework for understanding today’s Soviet leadership, would do well to seek this book out of the multitude written on these subjects.

Notes

1. Publishers Weekly, February 28, 1972, p. 36.

2. Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950), pp. 498-99.

Contributor

Colonel Glenn E. Wasson (M.A., Stanford University) is Professor of Aerospace Studies, University of California, Berkeley. At the Air Force Academy he was course chairman of Russian history for four years. Preceding his present assignment he was Chief, Foreign Clearance Office, Hq USAF. In the Korean War he flew as navigator on B-26 night interdiction missions, and in Vietnam he flew over 300 missions as a forward air controller.