[.ca] Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish ... (ISBN 006019524X)

Superb Description of a Dictator's Spinmastery:
As someone familiar with Russian history, I enjoyed this book. Among others, it debunks the myth that Stalin was weak and out of touch at the time of his death. The fact is he was clearly in control up until the time he died. Reading this book also raises more questions than it seems to answer. For example, how does this plot fuse with his foreign policy? The military? Was this strictly an internal affair or actually a prelude to Nuclear War with the United States? Although beyond the scope of this book, the reader was left wondering how Khruschev, Beria, Malenkov, et al worked out power arrangements after Stalin's death. We know, of course, that Beria was shot in December 1953; but what formed the BASIS for each person's power in what was clearly a lawless state?

Stalin's Purges: Numbers Alone Do Not Tell the Story:
When the Second World War was over in 1945, First Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin seemed to be at a personal peak of power. Despite monumental losses of dead Russian soldiers and civilians, Stalin had led Russia to a victory over Hitler and National Socialism that left him in control not only in Russia but of all of Eastern Europe as well. Further, because of his earlier purges in the late 30's, there was no one left to challenge him either within the Communist party or outside it. Yet, in STALIN'S LAST CRIME, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov picture a Stalin who, by the time of his death in 1953, was far from the omnipotent ruler that most Russians assumed he was. Brent and Naumov present Stalin as a man who could not change to match changing times. When the war in Europe was over, Russia was not the insular country it had been just ten years earlier. An increasing number of Russians had an equally increasing contact with Western, and hence, democratic ideas and values. The horrors of the war reaffirmed in the collected minds of Russians of the need for a legitimate government that followed its rule of law. The once all consuming fear of Stalin had diluted to the point where some of his less visionary peers would dare to contemplate in the pages of PRAVDA no less of who would follow Stalin once he was dead. Finally, there was Stalin's health, which by the late 1940's had regressed to the point that his Politburo comrades might legitimately wonder about the line of succession. Stalin took note of all this and was determined to turn back the clock to 1937 when he could purge millions of his countrymen merely by snapping his fingers. But by 1949, he could not do so. He needed more, and the so-called plot of the Jewish doctors allowed him to crank up the old machinery that would spin out huge nets to catch anyone whom Stalin suspected needed killing. Much of the first half of STALIN'S LAST CRIME is a minute examination of the death of a party comrade, A. A. Zhdanov, who unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and was ordered to recuperate at Valdai, a health resort for members of the Soviet political elite. Zhdanov died there, and Stalin saw in his death the first filmy web of a plot that he knew would ultimately ensnare at least as many as he purged in the 1930's. Brent and Naumov progress from Zhdanov's death to blaming that death on a cabal of Jewish doctors. From there, they detail how Stalin began laying traps for nearly the entire leadership of the Soviet Secret Police, the MGB. Hundreds of high-ranking MGB officers were purged. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and shot or sent to a gulag. Clearly, Brent and Naumov portray a Russia that was only in the first stage of Stalinist immolation. Yet, when Stalin died, the entire apparatus of destruction came to a thankful halt. Russian society returned to a business as usual routine. The gloomy concluding chapters of STALIN'S LAST CRIME suggest that the monstrous vision of a bloody thug leader does not necessarily end with the death of that leader. In fact, many of the inner circle of Stalin's closest comrades were themselves arrested and shot by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khruschev, who decided that to hold onto power might require a Stalinist approach to housecleaning: a new broom must sweep most thoroughly every generation or so. Stalin's own virulent form of anti-semitism as suggested by Brent's and Naumov's subtitle: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, well indicates that for Stalin at least, recycling Soviet anti-semitism must always give way to creating demons that only he could vanquish.

Stalin's Last Crime:
Fascinating well researched subject matter but somewhat ruminative and tedious. I found that could skip through many pages and find that the same events were being described yet again.

Paper trail to nowhere:
For all its admirably meticulous documentation, this book does not pierce the mystery of the Doctors Plot. For all the correspondence, interrogation transcripts and memos excavated from the Soviet archives, one archive remains forever closed: Stalin's implacably bloody mind. Brent and Naumov chillingly recreate the omni-paranoiac climate among the Soviet leadership in the late Stalin era. These people had survived wildly irrational purges in the Thirties, but they best of all knew on what shaky ground they stood. Any hint of independence, any perceived threat to Stalin's dominance, could land them in the execution cellars. The trouble is, Stalin rarely confided his plans to paper, so there is no smoking gun to be found. This sheaf of documentation fleshes out what the people involved said, certainly, and when they said it. But as the authors admit, they are not really much closer to learning the purpose of the whole grim charade. We don't even get as much detail in some instances, such as the Stalin-ordered murder of the prominent Soviet theater director Solomon Mikhoels, as was available in some Soviet-era books. The elusiveness of the authors' task is illustrated by their use of sources. In addition to the archival material, they draw material from the memoirs of Molotov, Khrushchev, and retired NKVD assassin Pavel Sudoplatov. The authors are perfectly above board about the general unreliability of these memorists, so it says something that, even with the availability of the archives, they are reduced to consulting those books. This admirable but ultimately unsuccessful book demonstrates the enduring mystery of the evil of Stalin.

Interesting and Detailed Examination of Stalinist Terror:
This is a fine-grained look at Stalinist terror. Based on original archival research by the authors and additional new information published primarily by Russian scholars, this book is a careful examination of the so-called Doctor's Plot, the last gasp of Stalin's systematic terrorization of Soviet society. The Doctor's Plot was a conspiracy fabricated by Soviet security organizations purporting to show an organized effort to undermine the Soviet State by destroying its leadership via negligent or murderous medical care. The Plot was viewed previously as an irrational and relatively (compared to the great purges, executions, and deportations of the 20s and 30s) minor aspect of Stalinist state terror. The authors argue that the Doctors' Plot was actually the likely prelude to a planned major convulsion that would reproduce many features of the great purges of the 30s. This is impossible to prove definitively but the authors make a good case that the Doctors' Plot was developed carefully by Stalin to eventually start a series of purges and trials that would result in a large scale terrorization of Soviet society. The authors also place the Plot in the context of other important Stalinist campaigns of the period, notably the anti-Semitic actions that preceded and are to some extent coincident with the events of the Doctors' Plot. In this case, the attack would expand to involve a wholesale assault on Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. The authors conclude that Stalin pursued this end as a means of maintaining his absolute power and that only his death in 1953 prevented terrible atrocities on a scale with the crimes of the 20s and 30s. The result probably would have been something similar to the Cultural Revolution in China. A surprising aspect of the book is the apparent demonstration of how relatively difficult it was for Stalin to piece together the Plot. The book contains fascinating details such as Stalin's dissatisfaction with coerced confessions because they were too inconsistent to be used for credible public show trials. There are also remarkable episodes of some figures in the Soviet securiry organizations criticizing documentation of these purported crimes. As the Soviet State matured, it appears that there were expectations that Soviet justice, claimed by Stalin to be essentially perfect, had to meet some realistic and rational expectations. This type of relative resistance probably only increased Stalin's desire to unleash a major purge. Some prior reviewers comment that this book is not smoothly written. This is a fair comment as the authors use quotations from original documents and much of the text is a very careful analysis of the signficance of the original documents. In my opinion, however, this approach enhances the value of the book. The extensive quotations give readers a very good sense of the Kafkaesque and bizarrely bureaucratic nature of Soviet repression in a way that a more conventional approach cannot accomplish. The book includes also a discussion of Stalin's death. Following the suggestion of the American scholar Amy Wright, the authors argue that Stalin may have been poisoned by Lavrenti Beria, the out of favor former head of the security services, with the anti-coagulant warfarin. This suggestion based on the fact that Stalin died from a cerebral hemorrhage and had a gastrointestinal hemorrhage during his final illness. This is plausible but his final illness is typical of individuals dying from major hemorrhagic strokes and gastric erosions (so-called stress ulcers) are fairly common in acutely and severely ill individuals and may cause significant gastrointestinal bleeding. It is more likely that Stalin died as a consequence of years of untreated hypertension.