History of a Disease

LET HISTORY JUDGE by ROY A. MEDVEDEV translated by COLLEEN TAYLOR 566 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

Not quite 20 years after Stalin's death, a Soviet scholar has produced the most comprehensive and revealing investigation of Stalinism ever to appear anywhere. Roy Medvedev, 46, is a schoolteacher turned historian. Like his twin brother, the prominent geneticist Zhores, he is a dedicated Communist and patriot, who believes in Marxism-Leninism and its vision of the future.* When he set about writing Let History Judge, Medvedev was motivated neither by disillusionment with the Bolshevik experiment nor by a desire to discredit the present regime. What he wanted, instead, was to enlighten fellow Soviet Communists about 50 years of their own history and thereby keep the study of "that prolonged disease known as 'the cult of personality' " from being monopolized by bourgeois historians and anti-Communist propagandists. "It is Communists," he writes, "who should be the strictest judges of their own history." He began his work in the thaw that followed Stalin's death. When he was finished twelve years later, the authorities had once again grown defensive. It was only after the Soviet Party Central Committee refused to permit its publication in the U.S.S.R. that Medvedev allowed his manuscript to reach an American publisher.

Besides being the first sustained attempt by a Soviet scholar to deal more or less evenhandedly with the whole Stalin period, Let History Judge surpasses existing literature. Soviet and Western alike, in its panoramic treatment of Stalinism's impact upon individual lives. It singles out the fate of some 600 functionaries and victims of the purges, using intimate details from unpublished memoirs and monographs, deathbed testimonies and confessions, official reports unavailable in the West, and private correspondence, including previously unpublished letters from Lenin and Stalin.

Medvedev quotes from a private family archive an eyewitness account of how Stalin personally led the interrogation and humiliation of his purged Ukrainian party chief, Stanislav Kosior. There is also an authoritative description of the death of Stalin's prewar Aviation Minister, Mikhail Kaganovich, a Jew whom Stalin accused of collaborating with the Nazis. The man was summoned to the office of Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin's most durable aides and later Foreign Minister and President of the U.S.S.R., now retired and writing his memoirs. When Kaganovich was confronted with the false evidence against him, he asked permission to use Mikoyan's toilet, where he put a bullet through his head. The source of this story, as retold in Let History Judge, is Mikoyan himself.

Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech to the 20th Soviet Party Congress opened a debate among Marxists over how faithful Communists were to live with the truth that an estimated 20 million murders had been committed in their name by the Stalinist bureaucracy between 1934 and 1953. Khrushchev denounced Stalin as an evil genius who was able to seize control of the party by some terrible historical accident. Medvedev's view is less simplistic. He argues that in every social upheaval there is a fanatical fringe whose idealistic elements can easily be infiltrated by opportunists and criminals. Stalin, according to Medvedev, was both--a man typical of the "unstable and dishonorable people who join a revolutionary movement and later degenerate into tyrants."

Khrushchev took the line that Stalin's perversion of the Soviet system started with the purges of the '30s. Medvedev is probably the first and certainly the most distinguished Soviet historian to agree with Western critics that Stalin had already begun to corrupt the party during Lenin's lifetime. In one of his few but significant criticisms of the U.S.S.R.'s founding father, Medvedev suggests that Lenin's "natural enthusiasm for people" kept him from recognizing Stalin's villainous character until it was too late.

Medvedev's book (whose title would be more literally translated as "Toward the Court of History") implies that Medvedev sees himself as a prosecutor. His work, however, is remarkably free from both the hostility that often mars Western studies of Russian politics and the dogmatism that distorts Soviet scholarship. For example. Medvedev proves a hard-digging detective, while at the same time a fair judge of evidence, in his handling of the persistent story that Stalin worked as a double agent for the Czarist secret police before the revolution. Much as Medvedev detests the dictator and therefore may have wanted to believe this rumor himself, he reviews the case in nine tightly argued pages, finds it inconclusive and acquits Stalin of the charge.

Let History Judge represents a subtle and sophisticated endeavor by a man of exceptional intellect and high principles to tell the whole truth about a Communist disaster without throwing into doubt the Communist program and philosophy. He fails on the second count. Those chapters that reconstruct what happened under Stalin seem measured and secure as a historical record. But in the more theoretical sections, where he attempts to explain how a Communist revolution could give way to wholesale slaughter of a citizenry by its government, Medvedev is in difficulty. While asserting that Stalin's rise to power was not inevitable and that Stalinism was a "disease," he also knows that the disease raged for more than a quarter of a century and that Soviet society is still not healthy. That Stalin could divert the inevitable progress of history for so long and so catastrophically does not fit easily into even Medvedev's very refined Marxist framework.

Medvedev is convinced--and tries to convince his readers--that Marxism-Leninism, once it recovers from the tragic aberration of Stalinism, is still the best hope for Russia and for all mankind. His reiteration of faith in Lenin pales, however, next to his far more powerful and persuasive indictment of the man whom Lenin himself tolerated and whom a whole generation of loyal Leninists continued to serve.

* The two brothers are prolific writers as well. This is the fourth of their books to reach the West. Zhores' first book, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko (1969), criticized Communist exploitation of questionable genetic theories. Thereafter Zhores turned out The Medvedev Papers (TIME, Sept. 27), a survey of censorship and intellectual restrictions in the U.S.S.R. These criticisms led directly to A Question of Madness (TIME, Dec. 13), an account by Roy of how party authorities tried to have his brother declared insane.

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