After 4 months of on and off reading, I finally finished reading Volkogonov's "Stalin."
I read it from cover to cover, close to 600 pages.
It was, of course, given that Dmitri Volkogonov was a Soviet Colonel-General in charge of psychological warfare, translated from the Russian. I have compared translations with originals in French and in German, and I'm aware that to the extent that a translation is beautiful, it is bound to be somewhat (at least) inaccurate.
The final two chapters, as translated (or perhaps even as written) are as beautiful as they are warnings. I was inspired to read this book about Stalinism and what Khrushchev appropriately called "the cult of personality" because our own government is being destroyed by just such a cult.
Stalin may have been defeated, but Stalin was defeated only by history, after he was dead. In a better world, he would have been defeated while still alive.
To be perfectly honest, I seldom read any book from cover to cover; at any given time I've got four or five books in process, usually one or two technical books, one or two histories, and generally a biography. Somewhere hopping from book to book, few of them are completely read.
I made a point though of reading this book from cover to cover, since our Democracy is under attack and perhaps will die, because everything touched by "the former guy" dies. It's refreshingly novel and different than much that might one read of Stalin and his era.
Perhaps there is someone today in the White Supremacy Party that will become as apostate as Volkogonov.
Some Soviet Propaganda leeches through, since Volkogonov's apostasy against his Stalinist and Leninist origins did not completely erase them, particularly grating was his rationalization of the subversion of the Baltic States in 1940, for one example, but he does an excellent job in exploring what Stalin may have been trying to accomplish in signing the pact with Hitler that led to the destruction of Poland in 1941.
There were a lot of names in this insightful book; it was hard to keep up with the heroes who became villains and villains who became heroes, the latter far fewer than the latter. I did however greatly respect what he wrote of Khrushchev's "finest hour" at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, and learned a lot about how and why he did it.
I was alive, albeit as a child, when the Cuban Missile Crisis took place, and the propaganda of the time made Khrushchev out to be some kind of demon and John F. Kennedy as some kind of heroic figure. The real history of both of these men is far more complex.
(By way of full disclosure, I personally regard JFK as my least favorite Democratic President of the 20th century, with the possible exception of the racist Woodrow Wilson, although Wilson can be allowed some ambiguity. Neither of these Democratic Presidents deserve to be held in the same category as an FDR, a Truman, a Johnson, or for that matter Clinton and even Carter.)
It's not going to be for everyone's taste, but I would think that a serious historian of European communism could do far worse than reading Volkogonov. I plan to read his "Lenin," - which I took out of the library but never got around to reading - as well as his "Trotsky" which my sons managed to dig up and buy for me as a Christmas present.
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And yes, the younger generation shows a certain level of awareness and fierce determination which may just be enough to carry us through these dark times, with our support and collaborative efforts.
Their optimism and creativity is a force to be reckoned with as well. I see it especially in my soon to be 13 year old granddaughter. I smile a little to myself when I recall her activism at an early age of 8, canvassing door to door to elect a local school board member. and later for Black Lives Matter rally at Lake Merritt in Oakland, Ca. It's in the family, but she is an eager player in all of it. The environment, Socio-Justice issues, and LGBQ etc..
We didn't get it done, but maybe with we achieve enough to get us through to the next generation, may the forces be with us.
P.S. Didn't mean to be such a downer. My heart just aches for it all, and I don't recall feeling so overwhelmed as I do now these past few years and especially after a Presidential victory... never felt so much fear and angst for the present.
So Courage is my motto for today. !
