Books: History of a Disease

LET HISTORY JUDGE by ROY A. MEDVEDEV translated by COLLEEN TAYLOR 566 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

Not quite 20 years after Stalin's death, a Soviet scholar has produced the most comprehensive and revealing investigation of Stalinism ever to appear anywhere. Roy Medvedev, 46, is a schoolteacher turned historian. Like his twin brother, the prominent geneticist Zhores, he is a dedicated Communist and patriot, who believes in Marxism-Leninism and its vision of the future.* When he set about writing Let History Judge, Medvedev was motivated neither by disillusionment with the Bolshevik experiment nor by a desire to discredit the present regime. What he wanted, instead, was to enlighten fellow Soviet Communists about 50 years of their own history and thereby keep the study of "that prolonged disease known as 'the cult of personality' " from being monopolized by bourgeois historians and anti-Communist propagandists. "It is Communists," he writes, "who should be the strictest judges of their own history." He began his work in the thaw that followed Stalin's death. When he was finished twelve years later, the authorities had once again grown defensive. It was only after the Soviet Party Central Committee refused to permit its publication in the U.S.S.R. that Medvedev allowed his manuscript to reach an American publisher.

Besides being the first sustained attempt by a Soviet scholar to deal more or less evenhandedly with the whole Stalin period, Let History Judge surpasses existing literature. Soviet and Western alike, in its panoramic treatment of Stalinism's impact upon individual lives. It singles out the fate of some 600 functionaries and victims of the purges, using intimate details from unpublished memoirs and monographs, deathbed testimonies and confessions, official reports unavailable in the West, and private correspondence, including previously unpublished letters from Lenin and Stalin.

Medvedev quotes from a private family archive an eyewitness account of how Stalin personally led the interrogation and humiliation of his purged Ukrainian party chief, Stanislav Kosior. There is also an authoritative description of the death of Stalin's prewar Aviation Minister, Mikhail Kaganovich, a Jew whom Stalin accused of collaborating with the Nazis. The man was summoned to the office of Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin's most durable aides and later Foreign Minister and President of the U.S.S.R., now retired and writing his memoirs. When Kaganovich was confronted with the false evidence against him, he asked permission to use Mikoyan's toilet, where he put a bullet through his head. The source of this story, as retold in Let History Judge, is Mikoyan himself.