What I find fascinating in the section of Judt’s book that I’m reading right now is discovering how badly countries of the Soviet bloc suffered under Stalin’s rule. I wasn’t aware there had been this much persecution and horror inflicted on the poor Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, etc. We always saw their countries as being enormously better of that we were, and it never occurred to us in the USSR to feel compassion towards people whom we got into the whole sorry mess.
The part of the book that I don’t find particularly interesting is the one where Judt analyzes Stalin. For one, I know this stuff already. At the same time, Judt’s analysis is not as nuanced and profound as the one you can find, for instance, in this great book, which I can’t stop recommending.
One problem I have with Judt’s vision of Stalin is his insistence that “Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been.” I see no evidence that Stalin’s persecution of Jews after 1948 was informed by some sort of a personal dislike of them. Stalin was perfectly fine with surrounding himself with Jews when it suited him, and, by the way, he allowed one Jewish comrade of his that had saved his life to run around spouting very nasty criticisms of Stalinism. This was a privilege never granted to anybody else. Stalin’s anti-Semitic activities after 1948 had, as did everything Stalin ever undertook, a practical purpose. Mind you, Jews were highly appreciated by the regime before 1948, while persecutions of Georgians, Ukrainians, etc. were massive.
Another issue I have with this section of the book is a lack of clarity as to Stalin’s plans for a new war. Here is what Judt says:
And Stalin in his last years seems genuinely to have expected a war; as he explained in an ‘interview’ in Pravda in February 1951, a confrontation between capitalism and communism was inevitable, and now increasingly likely.
Of course, Stalin expected a war if he was working towards starting it. I have read a variety of sources that claim very convincingly that Stalin was planning World War III. This is precisely where Jews would have come useful to him. Stalin needed to provoke the Americans into starting the actual hostilities, and massive persecutions of Jews were a way of making that happen. There is also overwhelming evidence that Stalin was planning yet another great purge of his closest subordinates. The previous such purge took place right before he started engineering WWII. So it is logical to assume that WWIII was his plan after this new purge.
Stalin was a passionate Leninist (which, of course, had not prevented him from usurping power from Lenin and driving the guy into an early grave), and as such he had to have as his #1 goal world revolution.
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\\ Stalin needed to provoke the Americans into starting the actual hostilities, and massive persecutions of Jews were a way of making that happen.
I don’t believe Americans would attack because of Jews or that Stalin was stupid enough to think so. Using Jews as an excuse to attack, yes, but not attacking because of them. In WW2, for instance, nobody cared too much about the Holocaust, except Jews themselves. Btw, what does the author write about it?
\\ Stalin was a passionate Leninist […] and as such he had to have as his #1 goal world revolution.
You make him sound as ideologically motivated person, a pure revolutionary, instead of a power-hungry tyrant. 🙂
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“In WW2, for instance, nobody cared too much about the Holocaust, except Jews themselves. Btw, what does the author write about it?”
– Ah, but here’s the thing. This is happening several years after the war. People have already seen Oświęcim, Buchenwald, Treblinka. The enromous guilt has started to settle in, affecting pretty much everything in postwar politics. Stalin saw the US getting massively supportive of Israel. This made him withdraw from Israel and say to himself, “Oh well, if the Americans are now for Israel and Jews, I should be against.”
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“You make him sound as ideologically motivated person, a pure revolutionary, instead of a power-hungry tyrant.”
– Tragically, these are not mutually exclusive things. Stalin was following Lenin’s and Trotsky’s theory with a maniacal dedication. I think that world revolution was definitely his goal but ONLY if it happened 100% under his control.
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Thank you for the post, and I hope you will update from time to time as you advance in the book, sharing your discoveries. In Israel I studied almost exclusively Jewish-Israeli history, so practically everything is new to me.
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