On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick (review)

Because Sheila Fitzpatrick is probably best known as a revisionist social historian, her On Stalin’s Team may appear at first glance to be a rather idiosyncratic departure into the world of high politics. Closer examination, however, reveals the book to be less about party leadership than about the personal relationships within that leadership—a fascinating topic that is usually discussed in moralizing or gossipy terms without adequate attention to source study. Here, Fitzpatrick expertly captures the essence of the General Secretary’s inner circle—a group within which long-term male relationships often dating back to the 1918–1921 Russian Civil War collided with the everyday demands of ruling a modern state.

On Stalin’s Team demonstrates Fitzpatrick to possess a thorough command of the historical record, whether declassified archival sources including Iosif Stalin’s personal correspondence with Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich or the memoiristic accounts left behind by both of these leaders and others such as Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan. This allows her to challenge many assumptions about Stalinist rule and clarify that although the political system was both illiberal and personalistic, it consisted of a lot more than just fear, suspicion, and supplication. Despite Stalin’s demanding reputation and personality cult, within his inner circle he often played the role of primus inter pares, the first among equals.

Fitzpatrick does not, of course, dispute the fact that Stalin was a dictator. That said, she casts him as someone who relied heavily on a shifting entourage of close comrades-in-arms. Agreeing with people such as E. A. Rees that the formal institutions of party and state leadership atrophied over time, Fitzpatrick disagrees over whether this axiomatically led to despotic one-man rule. (For Rees’s view, see his The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924–1953, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 19–58, 200–239.) Instead, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that during a quarter century in power, Stalin met almost daily for hours on end with members of his inner circle—often in informal working groups of threes, fours, fives, sixes, and sevens—both in his Kremlin offices and at his dachas. Although their specific discussions and debates are impossible to reconstruct today in the absence of official stenographic transcripts or protocols, the general atmosphere of the meetings is described in the memoir literature in terms quite reminiscent of the earlier, more official meetings of the Central Committee Secretariat, Organizational Bureau, and Politburo. The basic patterns of Stalinist political culture persisted even as its formal institutions changed over time.

Fitzpatrick’s vivid, three-dimensional treatment of the General Secretary’s relationship with Molotov and Kaganovich illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of her account. Subtle and nuanced in regard to these party bosses, she struggles to identify sources capable of characterizing the trials and tribulations of other central figures such as Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Lavrentii Beria. Here, Fitzpatrick makes considerable use of what Elena Zubkova has termed “children’s literature”—the apologetic accounts penned by these leaders’ sons—but readily acknowledges the limitations of this genre. (See E. Yu. Zubkova, “O ‘detskoi’ literature i drugikh problemakh nashei istoricheskoi pamyati,” in G. A. Bordyugov, ed., Istoricheskie issledovanie v Rossii: Tendentsii poslednikh let, Moscow: AIRO–XX, 1996, pp. 155–178.) Fleshing out Stalin’s relationship with other members of his entourage proves even more challenging in regard to those who were either unwilling or unable to leave records for posterity—fixtures of the regime such as Kliment Voroshilov, Andrei Andreev, Lev Mekhlis, and Aleksandr Poskrebyshev; interwar bosses such as Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Sergei Kirov, Pavel Postyshev, and Nikolai Ezhov; and the new contingent of the 1940s and early 1950s—Aleksei Kuznetsov, Nikolai Voznesenskii, Dmitrii Shepilov, Viktor Abakumov, and others.

Although it is unlikely that other scholars will fully rectify this imbalance, some have succeeded in identifying material that might contribute to future studies. Vladimir Nevezhin...