Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 film Kanal tells the story very vividly: September 1944—the citizens of Warsaw are eight weeks into their valiant, if somewhat foolhardy, uprising against the Third Reich. If the resistance fighters can only hold out until the Soviet force massed just outside the city come to their rescue...but wait! The Red Army chooses this time to sort its sock drawers, do some laundry, catch up on back episodes of The Sopranskis, freeing the Hun to put paid to the Poles in job lots. What rotten luck! The film follows a dead-ender band of partisans as they dodge the Krauts, retreating finally to the insalubrious environment of the Warsaw sewers, which make Orson Welles’ desperate flight at the end of The Third Man look like a stroll through a semiconductor “clean room.”

cordially,

I once saw a visual rendering that put it this way: imagine a graph depicting human suffering in the west during the industrial revolution, with the horizontal axis representing a century-and-a-half of time, and the vertical the degree of suffering, rendered as a rising and then as a descending curve. A second graph depicts the industrialization of the USSR under Stalin, with the horizontal axis much shorter—twenty-five years—and the vertical axis much higher, since even capital’s direst Gilded Age counteroffensives did not involve shooting fifteen hundred people a day. The point being made (with what validity I am not prepared to speculate) was that the areas enclosed by the two curves were roughly equivalent.

Stalin seems to me, on the basis of Kotkin’s account, to have been the indispensable man when it came to Stalinism: an able, energetic, superhumanly determined character absolutely and sincerely a believer in Marxist-Leninist theory, who willed into being the USSR as a major industrial power. We may question whether absent its transformation in that harrowing crucible (if you will pardon the blending of an agricultural and an industrial metaphor, which seems not inapropos here in this context), a Soviet Union capable of turning back the German onslaught would have emerged from a kinder, gentler alternative Bolshevik leadership. If, as I believe, the answer is “probably not,” it may be argued that, given the character of Hitler’s regime and of what it might have achieved with a defeated, supine Russia as its granary, the cost, while steep, was not “too high.” I admit that if one happened to have starved to death during collectivization, this does not make for a particularly persuasive case.

I hope I do not appear to be defending the dreadful man, but for better or for worse, we have all of us been born into the world he had a major part in creating. Kotkin limns a character impossible to admire, but who compels our appalled respect. And I speak here as a US citizen of Truman Administration vintage, and accordingly marinated in Cold War mythos (North American edition). I can imagine how the despot’s accomplishments resonate today in the minds of Russian nationals of my age, who remember when their country made its enemies tremble.

cordially,

And his Politburo colleagues did not come to arrest him because they had all either been psychologically broken by him, or owed their careers to him, and all recognized that he was the only man who could hold together the state he had created in his cruel image, and deploy it against the existential Nazi threat.

cordially,