Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies ed. by James Ryan and Susan Grant (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies ed. by James Ryan and Susan Grant Claire Knight Ryan, James and Grant, Susan (eds). Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2021. xiii + 250 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Geoffrey Roberts select bibliography. Index. £90.00; £28.99; £26.09 (e-book). This volume accomplishes a rare feat: it combines fascinating new research with insightful stock-taking of the past several decades of Stalin-era political history scholarship, rendering it a worthy addition to the bookshelves of seasoned academics and fledgling students alike. The diverse chapters are united by a shared interest in themes of an international bent, showcasing the influence of transnationalism, postcolonialism and the modernity school on recent Soviet scholarship. The volume is divided into four sections, concentrating on Stalin as a leader, the cult of personality and the Cold War, with a final chapter on the afterlife of Stalinism in today's Russia. Part One is the most fully subscribed, opening with a chapter by Christopher Read on the recent explosion of scholarly biographies of Stalin, including his own, and offering a candid assessment of the value and limitations of the biography as a historical exercise. In chapter two, Peter Whitewood takes on misconceptions concerning the military purges in 1937, arguing convincingly that these developments were reactive rather than proactive, having more to do with the leadership's decades-long perception of the Red Army's vulnerability to enemy infiltration than Stalin's bid for power. In chapter three, Daniel Kowalsky offers a lively and comprehensive historiography of Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War, putting to rest 'the Orwellian [End Page 181] myth of swarms of Soviet illegals carrying out assassinations and sapping the Republic's moral[e]' (p. 62) once and for all. Chapter four by Chris Bellamy dovetails nicely with Whitewood's chapter, focusing on Stalin's capabilities as an intelligent, detail-oriented war leader and dispelling Khrushchev's tall tale of an isolated leader holed up in his dacha on the verge of nervous breakdown at the outbreak of the war: instead, Stalin was in his Kremlin office barely an hour after the first bombs were dropped on Crimea (p. 73). Part Two moves away from Stalin the man and onto the Stalin/Stalinist cult, with chapters by Judith Devlin, placing the cult in transnational context, and Balázs Apor, examining the Stalinist cult as but one in a series of leader cults that arose in twentieth-century Hungary. Both chapters abandon the well-trod path of Stalinist exceptionalism and underline instead the parallels and continuities between the Stalinist cult and other leader cults across space and time, making a valuable contribution to the broader, ongoing work on leader cults as a modern phenomenon. Part Three focuses on the Cold War, beginning with Caroline Kennedy-Pipe's enlightening historiography and thematic analysis of the conflict, in which she does not shy away from critiquing her own earlier work in a bid to provide a more global perspective on a topic that continues to be alarmingly relevant today. In contrast to the rest of the volume, chapter eight by Geoffrey Roberts concentrates on an aspect of Soviet policy in which Stalin had very little interest, namely, the peace movement. Roberts shows how the famed bureaucratism of the Stalinist system could prove advantageous at times, as it provided a mechanism by which those outside the inner circle might influence policy. Chapter nine by Molly Pucci steps outside the USSR and into the interrogation rooms of the Czechoslovak secret police, tracing the chilling way in which seemingly simple adjustments in the protocols for writing confessions served to Sovietize the Czechoslovak criminal justice system and systematize the fabrication of evidence in political cases. Finally, James Ryan's thorough, equable analysis of the seeming revival of Stalinism in state and society under Putin provides a fitting end to a volume dedicated to eschewing simplistic formulations and seductive myths in reconsidering the Stalin era. One of the key strengths of this collection lies in the wealth of historiographical analysis it provides both in the introduction, with its cogent, concise survey of...