Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. 384 pp. $35.00 / £24.95.
2016; The MIT Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/jcws_r_00695
ISSN1531-3298
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoBecause 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, in his Zastolya Iosifa Stalina, Book 1, Bol’shie kremlevskie priemy (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2011), has harnessed unconventional sources associated with the inner circle's penchant for state banquets and private dinners to distinguish Stalin's true intimates from other members of his inner circle. Fitzpatrick refers repeatedly to Stalin's Kremlin office datebook as a means of establishing who regularly spent time with him. This picture could be enhanced by looking at the guest ledgers from Stalin's various dachas, which remain classified within the archives of the Federal Protection Service (the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service). A few datebooks from the secretariats of key insiders (Zhdanov, Kuznetsov) have been uncovered recently at the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI), and others should be tracked down and declassified (e.g., those of Molotov, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Ezhov, and Beria). Some of these documents have recently been published: notably, K. A. Boldovskii, “‘Zhurnal posechshenii’ A. A. Zhdanova v Khel’sinki, kak istoricheskii istochnik dlia izucheniya deyatel’nosti Soyuznoi kontrol’noi komissii v Finlyandii 1944–1945 gg.” in I. P. Takala et al., eds., Finlyandiya i Rossiya: Obrazy obshchego proshlogo—Sbornik nauchnykh statei (Petrozavodsk, Russia: PetrGU, 2014), pp. 126–137; K. A. Boldovskii, ed., Zhurnal poseshchenii A. A. Zhdanova, 1941–1944 gg. (St. Petersburg: Natsional’nyi tsentr sotsial’noi pomoshchi, 2014); and M. V. Zelenov, M. P. Iroshnikov, and A. A. Chernobaev, “Tetrad’ priema posetitelei A. A. Zhdanovym v g. Moskve s 19.VII.44 g. po 29.XI.46 g.: Zapisi za 1946 g.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, No. 1 (2016), pp. 52–77. A lot more could also be done with the marginalia left by members of Stalin's entourage on archival documents and in their personal papers and notebooks. Retrospective accounts could be more thoroughly exploited as well, whether the lengthy rough drafts of Kaganovich's and Mikoyan's published memoirs stored in RGASPI (including important sections that never made it into print), the audiotapes of Khrushchev's reminiscences stored at Brown University, or the newly discovered notes and recollections of insiders such as Ivan Serov, excerpts of which were published in Aleksandr Khinshtein, ed., Zapiski iz chemodana: Tainye dnevniki pervogo predsedatelya KGB, naidennye 25 let cherez ego smerti (Moscow: Olma Media grupp, 2016). Moreover, persistent rumors continue to circulate about a Holy Grail for researchers in this field: Soviet state security files on the members of Stalin's inner circle that would include eavesdropping and wiretap transcripts, denunciation letters, interrogation confessions, and other such items.If On Stalin's Team is more insightful about Molotov and Kaganovich than about other of Stalin's aides, the book is also stronger concerning the prewar period than the wartime or postwar years—a problem again stemming at least in part from the inadequacies of the source base and associated historiography. This drawback is most evident in the book's treatment of Stalin's learning curve during the war and the postwar scandals that threatened his team's integrity—the Aviators’ Affair (1946), the Generals’ Affair (1946–1948), the Leningrad Affair (1949–1952), and the Mingrelian Affair (1951–1953). Somewhat better is Fitzpatrick's treatment of the surviving teammates’ shift to collective leadership after Stalin's death in 1953, but here, too, a precise and exacting accounting of how Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov revised the rules of the game awaits further study.Despite On Stalin's Team's unevenness, it is an important book for the field, insofar as Fitzpatrick is correct that members of Stalin's inner circle deserve to be treated as historical agents. (She is also right to refer to them using the modern term “teammates” rather than more pejorative or anachronistic metaphors such as “mafia captains,” “gangland enforcers,” “henchmen,” “grandees,” “chieftains,” “satraps,” and “boyars.”) One hopes that Fitzpatrick's revisionist contribution to Soviet political history will inspire commentators on the period once more to rethink their basic assumptions about how the Stalinist system functioned.
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