Table Of ContentSTALIN
A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY
STALIN
A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY
ISAAC DEUTSCHER
SECOND EDITION
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford London Glasgow
New York Toronto Melbourne Wellington
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Jakarta Hong Kong Tokyo
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
First edition, Copyright 1949 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Second edition,© Oxford University Press 1966
Preface to the second edition© Isaac Deutscher 1967
First published by Oxford University Press, London, 1949
Second edition, 1966
This edition issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1967
printing, last digit: 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21
Printed in the United States of America
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
A LINK IN OUR FRIENDSHIP
TO
TAMARA
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
THis edition of Stalin appears nearly twenty years after the book
was written. When I was completing it, in the summer of 1948,
Stalin was still at the summit of his power, admired and feared
all over the world, and surrounded by a dizzy 'cult' in his own
country. And the world looked very different then. The Soviet
Union was not yet a nuclear power; the victory of the Chinese
revolution was still some way off; and Stalin's break with Tito
had only just begun making headlines in the newspapers. I
introduced my assessment of Stalin's record, in the last pages
of the book, with these words:
Here we suspend the story of Stalin's life and work. We are under
no illusion that we can draw from it final conclusions or form, on
its basis, a confident judgement of the man, of his achievements and
failures. After so many climaxes and anti-climaxes, his drama seems
only now to be rising to its pinnacle; and we do not know into what
new perspective its last act may yet throw the preceding ones.
It is this 'last act' that I now relate in a new section of the
book, the Postscript on Stalin's Last Years. After 1948 the
drama of my chief character did indeed rise to its final cul
mination, which led to the subsequent crumbling of the Stalin
cult. Yet the remark with which I prefaced my assessment of
Stalin's role now appears perhaps to have been somewhat over
cautious: Stalin's activity and behaviour in his last years, far
from throwing his previous record into any new perspective,
only added a sharper outline to the perspective I had drawn,
when, in the concluding passages of the book, I anticipated the
so-called de-Stalinization.
I am often asked whether I see no reason to revise my views
in the light of the 'revelations' made by Khrushchev, Mikoyan,
and others at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 and later. In
truth those revelations have added nothing significant to the
account I had given here of Stalin's rise ·to power, of his rela
tionship with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, of his policies
in the inter-war period, of his conduct of the Great Purges, and
of his role in the Second World War and its aftermath. On all
these crucial phases of Stalin's career my biography contains
viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
far more abundant information than that which is even now
accessible to Soviet readers. And, incidentally, my Stalin still
remains a forbidden book in the U.S.S.R., China, and the
countries of Eastern Europe.1
Nor do I take all of Khrushchev's 'revelations' at their face
value: I do not accept, in particular, his assertion that Stalin's
role in the Second World War was virtually insignificant. This
allegation was obviously meant to boost Khrushchev himself
at Stalin's expense; and it does not accord with the testimonies
of many reliable eye-witnesses, of Western statesmen and
generals who had no reason to exaggerate Stalin's role, and of
Soviet generals who have recently written on this subject in a
sober and critical vein.2
There is only one aspect of Stalin's activity which has
appeared to me in a clearer light as a result of Khrushchev's
disclosures-namely, the extent to which Stalin, having sup
pressed the Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and Bukharinists, vic
timized his own followers, the Stalinists. In the new section of
this book I analyse the consequences of that important fact,
consequences which made themselves felt most strongly in the
last phase of Stalin's rule and account in some degree for the
character and style of the Khrushchevite de-Stalinization.
Otherwise I have seen no reason to alter my narrative or inter
pretation of Stalin's career. The original text of the book is
reproduced here with only a few minor corrections and stylis
tical revisions.
11 October 1966 I. D.
1 It is possible, however, that my account of one of the Great Purges, the
Tukhachevsky affair, may need some revision; but if so, Khrushchev and his suc
cessors have not provided the elements necessary for such a revision, despite the
fact that they have rehabilitated Tukhachevsky and cleared him of the charge
that he plotted against Stalin in Germany's interest, as .Hitler's agent. In my
account of the affair I emphatically refuted that accusation; but I related a version
drawn from unimpeachably anti-Stalinist sources (quoted in a footnote on p. 380),
according to which Tukhachevsky had indeed planned a coup against Stalin, in
order to save the army and the country from the insane terror of the purges. This
version may be mistaken; but Khrushchev and his successors have not revealed a
single document or a single fact that would throw light on the affair and allow us
to dismiss altogether the anti-Stalinist accounts which insisted on the reality of the
plot.
2 I gave a detailed analysis of Khrushchev's disclosures in a essay published in
1956, and reproduced in my Ironies of History, pp. 3-17.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION (1961)
I WROTE this biography thirteen to fourteen years ago as a book
for the general reader rather than for the expert, and I did my
best to state in it the essential facts about Stalin and his career
as plainly and as non-controversially as possible. When I began
planning the work, the public and the press in this country had
not yet quite recovered from their war-time adulation of Stalin;
when I was putting the finishing touches to it, the air-lift to
Berlin roared on and Stalin was the villain of the cold war. These
violent changes in the political climate did not, r think, affect
my treatment of Stalin: I had never been a devotee of the
Stalin cult; and the cold war was not my war. Yet shortly after
publication a British critic could write that 'like its subject, the
book has become the focus of an animated and at times ferocious
controversy ... no biography in recent years has aroused similar
interest or evoked similar passionate resentment and hostility'.
I should perhaps add that most British critics received the book
open-mindedly and generously-nevertheless, the 'ferocious con
troversy' did in fact go on for years, especially abroad, on both
sides of the Atlantic.
The book has been praised or blamed for the most contradic
tory reasons, either as a denunciation of Stalinism, or as an
apologyfor it, and sometimes as both denunciation and apology.
Thus, the late Moshe Pijade, Marshal Tito's friend and associate,
once explained to me why the government of which he was
a member refused to allow a Yugoslav edition of Stalin: 'You
see,' he said, 'the trouble with your book is that it is too pro
Soviet for us whenever we quarrel with the Russians; and it is
too anti-Soviet whenever we try to be friendly with them.' ('In
any case,' he added with a twinkle in the eye, 'we cannot permit
a Yugoslav edition to appear because if we did everyone would
see at once from what source our great theorists have drawn
most of their wisdom.')
According to an old, golden rule of portrait painting, a good
portrait is one which does such justice to the complexity of the
human character that every viewer sees in it a different face.
Something might still be said for that rule; and judged by it
