Days of Reckoning

Orlando Figes

  • Stalin: Man and Ruler by Robert McNeal
    Macmillan, 389 pp, £16.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 333 37351 0

‘What is Stalin?’ an Old Bolshevik asked Trotsky in 1925. After a moment’s consideration came the reply: ‘the outstanding mediocrity in the Party’. Trotsky’s contempt may in part be explained by the wounds which his own pride had suffered from the growth of Stalin’s influence among the party rank and file after Lenin’s death in January 1924. On the other hand, not even Stalin’s closest allies considered intellect and charisma to be among his greatest virtues – at least, not until the Stalinist ‘cult of the personality’, which, according to Robert McNeal, didn’t really take off until 1933, four years after the consolidation of the Stalinist dictatorship.

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[*] Historians of the Nazi regime have been similarly divided since the Sixties between ‘intentionalists’ stressing Hitler’s role in the shaping and implementation of Nazi policy, and ‘structuralists’ emphasising the ‘polycratic’ or multi-dimensional nature of the Nazi state, its relationship with old élites and institutions, and its ‘cumulative radicalisation’ in response to changing social forces.

[†] Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers 1928-1931 will be published by Cambridge in August.