{"id":221,"date":"2007-09-02T07:56:20","date_gmt":"2007-09-02T05:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=221"},"modified":"2007-09-02T07:56:20","modified_gmt":"2007-09-02T05:56:20","slug":"the-autobiography-of-joseph-stalin-a-novel-by-richard-lourie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/the-autobiography-of-joseph-stalin-a-novel-by-richard-lourie\/","title":{"rendered":"The autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A novel – by Richard Lourie"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his bestselling book “Archangel”, Robert Harris creates an entire modern political thriller around Stalin’s great secret — which is revealed only in the second half of the book. And that incredible secret turns out to be … Stalin had a son!<\/strong>
\nUm, sorry Robert, but for the those of us who know anything at all about the Soviet dictator, this “revelation” had something of the effect of Dr. Evil’s demand that he be paid one million dollars<\/em> not to destroy the world. In real life, Stalin had two<\/em> sons, and a daughter.
\nPerhaps because of this disappointment, I waited a few years before trying another novel which revolved around Stalin’s great secret.<\/p>\n


\nRichard Lourie’s book, though far less commercially successful than Harris’, is far better written and reveals much greater knowledge of its subject than “Archangel”. It seems, however, that nearly all the research for this book consisted of reading Trotsky’s biography of Stalin, the writing of which plays a central part in the narrative.
\nLourie seems aware of the likelihood that Stalin was at one time a paid agent of the tsarist police<\/a>, but this is not his great secret. Nor is it the fact that he had children.
\nNo, what this author comes up with is — drum roll, please — Stalin poisoned Lenin!<\/strong>
\nDisappointment again. Trotsky actually wrote this. He published an article about it. It’s a very old allegation. (In Lourie’s novel, Trotsky is essentially murdered in 1940 to prevent him telling the world about this. Of course, he published articles alleging the poisoning years before his death, so this is something like shutting the barn door after … well, you get the point.)
\nEven though the “great secret” revealed here is common knowledge (and no, I have no idea whether he poisoned Lenin or not), it’s not original. And more important, of all Stalin’s crimes, the slow poisoning of his predecessor as leader of the Soviet police state is hardly the worst.
\nI recommend the book because it is well written, and it does to a certain degree get into Stalin’s mind. (It gives a plausible impression of why Stalin would be so obsessed with Trotsky as late as 1940, for example.) But like so many of these books, the authors’ imaginations fail them when trying to invent an historical secret.
\nStalin did have a great secret and it was this: for most of his career in the revolutionary underground, a career that paved the way for his rise to power, he secretly served the tsarist enemy as an agent of the Department of Police (the Okhrana). And more important, once in power, he restored in Russia a regime which Marx had described as being “semi-Asiatic” — only in a much more brutal and total form. The tsarist police spy had become a new and infinitely more powerful and brutal tsar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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