Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (review)

In the annals of human carnage a special place is reserved for Josif Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron hand from the late 1920s until his death in March 1953. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens. Well over a million people were executed by Stalin's secret police, and millions more died of torture, starvation, and exposure to severe cold and inhuman working conditions in prisons and the gulag. Countless others were killed during the brutal deportations of entire ethnic groups. The current Russian-Chechen conflict can be traced, at least in part, to Stalin's decision in 1944 to uproot every man, woman, and child in Chechnya and ship them off to barren sites in Central Asia. Nearly a quarter of the Chechens died in the process, and the survivors were forced to remain in exile until several years after Stalin's death.

The appalling human costs of Stalin's 25-year reign have long made him a subject of fascination (and disgust) for scholars, who have sought to explain how a leader could cause so much bloodshed. But there is another side of Stalin's rule that complicates the picture. When Stalin gained ascendance in Moscow in the late 1920s, the Soviet Union was still a relatively weak country—a country that had been forced to cede parts of its territory after World War I. Under his rule the USSR rapidly built up its economy and army, enabling it to triumph over Nazi Germany in World War II. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fighting in Europe and suffered the heaviest death toll (losing as many as 28 million people), but it emerged from the war as one of the two leading military powers in the world. Stalin regained all the territory the Bolsheviks had forfeited after coming to power, and he expanded Soviet rule into areas that even the Russian tsars had not controlled. He also established a wide buffer zone along the Soviet Union's western border.

The combination of destructiveness and achievement that characterized Stalin's rule raises a fundamental question as we look back today. How could such a cruel and depraved leader motivate his compatriots to build a centrally planned economy, fight and win a devastating war, and establish the Soviet Union as a rival to the mighty United States? Other questions arise about Stalin's longevity in office. How could a man who was so manifestly dangerous to those who could have dislodged him—senior officials in the Communist Party, the military, and the secret police, all of which were decimated by Stalin's purges—avoid any serious challenge to his hold on power? Until the late 1930s, Stalin was potentially vulnerable to his rivals, yet there is no evidence that any of them attempted to remove him after he had gained clear ascendance. Nor did his enemies try to assassinate him. Stalin in that respect (and others) was far more politically adroit than Adolf Hitler, who barely escaped assassination during his much shorter reign in Germany.

Many of the questions about Stalin and his rule have not yet been fully resolved. When the Soviet Union still existed, a number of Western scholars produced lengthy biographies of Stalin, the best of which was Adam Ulam's Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking Press, 1973). But Ulam and his contemporaries (not to mention earlier biographers like Boris Souvarine, whose 1935 book, Staline: Aperçu historique du bolchévisme, remains a classic) were handicapped by their lack of access to Soviet archives and by the dearth of reliable memoirs from former Soviet officials. To be sure, a few useful first-hand accounts did appear during the Soviet era. War memoirs by some of Stalin's generals shed interesting (if limited) light on Stalin's wartime role. Illuminating reminiscences about Stalin by other key figures—his estranged daughter, Svetlana...