Book 14: The Life and Death of Stalin

The Life and Death of Stalin

Louis Fischer


1952

Harper Brothers

Image Stolen from endiscomingblog.com-- not actual album cover

This book was copyrighted in 1952.
Stalin died in March 1953.

Fisher didn't pretend to have precognitive abilities. I think he was just lucky. I would imagine that Stalin's demise probably helped his book sales.

The title is misleading. The author writes about Stalin in the present tense throughout the book.  The "and Death" portion is there to round out the idea, I suppose. 
Fisher leaves us with "Gee... what might happen when Stalin dies?"

That's not exactly the same thing that is implied by the title. I suppose I can forgive fisher for that, because the rest of the monograph is really well-written and, honestly, more interesting than I thought it would be.

Another thing to keep in mind is the political climate in 1952. The Korean War had been going on for a couple of years. Communism was spreading, and this was how people felt about it:

Tomorrow?! Holy shit!  Guess I don't need to study for that exam, then...

So you can imagine Fisher's tone. He tries to keep an academic distance, but he has a hard time.

One of Fischer's most relied-upon sources is Pravda.
Pravda, during Stalin's tenure, was about as reliable as World Net Daily.... fucking not. 

While these publications might not be factually on-target, they do provide a look into the mind of madness.

Fisher, in the last section, gives us a warning:

"The more democracies resemble dictatorships the less is their coapacity to combat communism by nonviolent means. Two fear-dominated, tightly controlled systems, tense, spiteful, and hateful, repaying each ugly blow with one at least as ugly, and rejecting compromise, would soon catapult theplanet into a war to end all civilization or wouild end civilization without wary by the slower process of banishing moderation, political sanity, accomodation, tolerance, and justice, and reducing human rights and the standard of living,"

Fisher, clearly, knew what he was talking about.

It's hard to imagine living in a world where mutually-assured destruction was a part of everyday life.

"Stalin's fate is in the hands of the non-Stalinists. They can write ahistory's verdict of him. They will determine whether his life was a success or failure."

That really is a point worth considering. First we have to determine what success and failure mean. 

I suppose we can say that total failure is that which brings the least good and the most bad, and success would be just the opposite. We could then say that we determine good and bad based on the number of people positively or negatively affected.

Stalin's life:
Murdered and starved his own people... but we couldn't have stopped Hitler without him.
Which would we choose?

Displaced millions of people under his own rule... but taught the world a lesson about dictatorships (and the west a lesson about making alliances with them).

Which of these would we rather had not happened?

Ruined Lenin's work.... Gave Teapartiers something to put on their stupid signs.
Which really benefits society less?

I would recommend this, but only to someone who was interested in seeing history as it was being made. This is a snapshot of early 1950s perception. When we read older histories, they almost become recursive; not only is the subject of the work a history, the work itself is a piece of history.