Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives, and: Stenogrammy zasedanii Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)–VKP(b) 1923–1938 gg.[Stenograms of the Meetings of the Politburo of the CC RCP(b)–AUCP, 1923–1938] (review)

With the collapse of the USSR, the accessibility of party–state archives, and the advent of the "cultural turn," the hitherto dominant paradigm of Soviet political history—"totalitarian" versus "revisionist" perspectives—became redundant, at least in academic circles. Since the 1990s, a so-called "new political history" has emerged, associated with seminal works of Oleg V. Khlevniuk, E. A. Rees, and J. Arch Getty, among others.¹ Their specialist texts are informed, and complemented, by a wealth of published sources from the Russian archives, a few of which have appeared in English,² and by a veritable outpouring of biographical studies.³ These latest approaches have quite rightly shed outmoded and restrictive frameworks, have expanded avenues of research, and in some cases have opened up new ones such as the relationship between the Soviet peripheries and central authorities, the thorny issue of resistance and conformity, and the massive theme of "modernity" in its Soviet guise.⁴ At the same time, it seems to me that not a few of the questions that exercised scholars during the Cold War remain relevant. For instance, debate continues about the decision-making processes at the pinnacle of power in the Communist Party; the positions adopted by leading actors on the crucial problems facing the regime; the reasons for Stalin's triumph in the vicious factional succession struggles; the personalization of power and the limits of, and constraints on, Stalin's dictatorship; and the very meaning and nature of the Politburo.⁵ Indeed, many of these intractable dilemmas are elucidated by the books under review here, particularly the three volumes of Politburo stenograms.

Paul Gregory's succinct text unearths 14 stories buried in seven ex-Soviet party, state, municipal, and secret police archives. The rationale is not a synthetic overview of Soviet history; it is more a snapshot case-study account of the "dark inner workings" of the USSR, as the cover blurb tells us. All the chapters contain extracts, some fairly lengthy, from hitherto classified documents, which are contextualized by the author in explanatory narratives. Chronologically, the stories range from the Leninist era through to Gorbachev's perestroika, but the majority focus on the Stalinist period and its depredations. Some of the "tales" are well known, some less so, and others totally new. Among the former are sketches of Stalin's character; NKVD Order no. 00447 of July 1937; the Katyn massacre; the fate of Stalin's two sons, Iakov and Vasilii; and the invasion of Afghanistan. The new material includes secret police categorizations and punishment of "marginals" and "former people"; the post-Stalin debates on the labor-camp system; and the odyssey of an "ordinary" victim of Stalinist terror, Vladimir Moroz.

But even when Gregory takes on issues relatively well covered in existing literature, such as the bizarre title story of Lenin's brain or the persecution of Russian philosophers in the early 1920s, he provides telling detail and incisive interpretations. For instance, the compelling chapter on the extraordinary fate of Lenin's brain, reconstructed from a 63-page document from the Central Committee special files, describes how elaborate scientific tests were conducted on the organ for over 11 years, from 1925 to 1936...