От мифа к реальности: британская сталиниана от Шоу и Уэллса до Саймона Себага Монтефиоре

Abstract

The subject of this interdisciplinary article is the literary and historiographic tradition of Stalin’s perception in Great Britain since the early 1930s to the present time. The trajectory of this tradition is seen as a progression from myth, impressions, illusions of Bernard Shaw and Herbert Wells, to the revelations of Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, to sagacious and artistically impressive works of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, to contemporary historians and writers Robert Conquest, Martin Amis, Donald Rayfield, and Simon Sebag Montefiore, the majority of whose works are based on archival research and examine the image of Stalin from their cultural and civilisational perspectives. Sometimes they create an ambivalent image of Stalin but in general they regard his role in Russian history negatively and see him as a failure, a politician who ruined his people. Was Stalin a great man? According to British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, it does not matter whether a great man is kind or wicked, what matters is that they changed the course of events, and Stalin changed the history of Russia, thus he is a great man. But the course of history was changed by Hitler, and by Gavrilo Princip, who initiated the First World War, but were they great? The notion of a great man in the Russian cultural context has a positive ethical meaning, and “genius and evil deeds are incompatible” (A. Pushkin).