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  • Stalin: A New History
  • Peter A. Blitstein
Stalin: A New History. Edited by Sarah Davies and James Harris (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 295 pp. $75.00 cloth $32.99 paper

The "archival revolution" following the collapse of the Soviet Union has made possible a reevaluation of Joseph Stalin's life and politics and resulted in a flood of new work on Stalinism. In the introduction to this volume, the editors declare their intention to "reinvigorate scholarly interest in Stalin, his ideas, and the nature of his power" and to contribute to a "renewed interest in political history" of the Soviet Union made possible by the new archival evidence (5). They place the work of the contributors in a clear historiographical context helpful to non- pecialists. Studies of the nature and exercise of Stalin's power comprise the first part of the book; the second part covers the relationship between ideology and politics.

Alfred Rieber's essay, "Stalin as Georgian," finds the roots of Stalin's revolutionary persona in the multiethnic frontier society of his native Georgia, where he remained caught between his Georgian, Russian, and proletarian identities. Jeremy Smith's chapter examines an under-researched period of Stalin's political activity in the Revolution and Civil War, when he was Commissar for Nationalities Affairs; Smith argues that this period shaped his future policies toward the non-Russian nationalities more than has been previously understood.

In his contribution about Stalin's activities as General Secretary of the Communist Party in the 1920s, Harris seeks to debunk the notion that Stalin achieved power by using the Secretariat's prerogative to appoint regional party leaders. The Secretariat was too much of a "blunt instrument" to achieve this goal; rather, local party leaders supported Stalin because his opponents' call for intra-Party democracy threatened their positions.

J. Arch Getty's provocative chapter likewise challenges the commonplace that Stalin was an autocrat; instead, Stalin "functioned rather like a Prime Minister" (105). Getty's effort to compare Stalin's power to that of prime ministers in liberal democracies may not be entirely convincing, but it represents one of the more methodologically innovative pieces in the volume. Oleg Khlevniuk's chapter, "Stalin as Dictator," [End Page 614] provides an excellent summary of how Stalin's personal direction of terror secured his temporary victory over the tendencies toward oligarchic "departmentalism" in the system. Valuable chapters by Robert W. Davies about agricultural policy and by Rieber about foreign policy complete this first part of the volume.

The second part of the book, primarily about ideology, begins with Erik van Ree's effort to refute the argument that Stalin "Russified" Marxism. Many of Stalin's alleged ideological innovations—revolution from above, socialism in one country, the intensification of class struggle as socialism is achieved—have their roots in German and Austrian Marxism of the late nineteenth century.

David Priestland's chapter, "Stalin as a Bolshevik Romantic," argues that Stalin shared a confidence in scientific reason with his Bolshevik colleagues, but one tempered by a voluntaristic romanticism. Davies' interesting chapter tells the story of Stalin's growing role as patron of the cinema during the mid-1930s as his interest in the medium grew, though its limited scope cannot answer why the kinds of films Stalin championed in the 1930s (entertaining, popular) were no longer being made by the late 1940s. William Chase's chapter emphasizes the ideological importance of show trials as "mobilizational narratives." Next, relying on materials surrounding the production of popular biographies of Stalin, David Brandenberger demonstrates convincingly that Stalin understood his cult to be necessary for the legitimacy of the regime. Finally, Ethan Pollock's important chapter on Stalin's role in postwar scientific debates reveals him to have been "more concerned with ideology and science than was previously known" (286). Stalin took science seriously, but, unsurprisingly, his interventions on behalf of open scientific discussion rarely served that purpose.

The editors rightly conclude that the new archival materials "do not paint a black-and-white picture of either an unbridled tyrant in the unprincipled pursuit of power or an embattled leader reacting to uncontrollable forces" (17). By and large, the contributions offer nuanced...

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