Stalin by Stephen Kotkin - Stalin by Oleg Khlevniuk

New ! 04/03/2019

Amazon.com: Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator  by Oleg V. Khlevniuk

Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk’s estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin's policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.

In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin’s favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin’s childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book’s conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era
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PREFACE

For more than two decades, I have been studying this man and the causes and logic underlying his actions, which upended or utterly destroyed millions upon millions of lives. This work has been stressful and emotionally draining, but it is my vocation. Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history, the large-scale poisoning of minds with myths of an “alternative” Stalin—one whose effective stewardship is held up as a model worthy of emulation—have given my research more than scholarly relevance.

The literature on Stalin and his era is impossibly vast. Even scholars of Stalinism freely admit to not having seen the half of it. Within this vastness, serious, meticulously documented research coexists with slapdash pen-pushing carelessly cobbled together out of anecdotes, rumors, and fabrications. The two camps—historical scholarship and lowbrow (usually pro-Stalin) ramblings—rarely cross paths and have long since given up the idea of reconciling.

Scholarly biographies of Stalin have gone through the same stages as the historiography of the Soviet period overall. I have a high regard for some classics written at a time when Soviet archives were completely inaccessible. Two authors who stand out are Adam Ulam and Robert Tucker.¹ Back in the 1970s, historians of the Stalin period resembled specialists in antiquity: they tended to know the few available documents and memoirs inside out and had little ability to expand their number. This dearth of documentation encouraged the painstaking study of these sources and elegant and thoughtful extrapolation. The situation was bound to change after the archival floodgates were opened in the early 1990s, and it took us some time to get our heads above water. The eventual appearance of new works informed by archival materials—including scholarly biographies of Stalin, as well as other investigations of the man and the political system—signal that historians have begun to cope with the inundation.²

The opening of the archives gave rise to a new genre of Stalin biography that one might call “the archival exposé.” It’s trailblazers include Dmitri Volkogonov, a former party loyalist who became a driving force for perestroika, and the Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky. This genre favors personal accounts over “dry” statistics or administrative paper trails and page-turning narratives over painstaking research and historical contextualization. For many readers, the archival exposé has played an important role in shaping Stalin’s image.

One of the most successful Western authors working to feed appetites for newly available details about the Stalin era is Simon Sebag Montefiore. A notable feature of his method is the citation of a broad spectrum of sources, not only from memoirs and interviews, but also from the archives. Montefiore struck a sort of middle ground, striving to instill some scholarly discipline into the “archival exposés” genre while producing readable history capable of attracting a wider audience than more scholarly texts.³

In today’s Russia, on the other hand, Stalin’s image is primarily being shaped by pseudo-scholarly apologias. An extremely diverse array of authors, all with their own motivations, contributes to Stalinist mythology. Most of these authors blend a lack of the most elementary knowledge with a willingness to make bold assertions. Their apologias typically cite fabricated sources or shamelessly misrepresent real ones. The impact of this powerful ideological assault on readers’ minds is intensified by the circumstances of Russian life, which include rampant corruption and outrageous social iniquities. When they reject the present, people are more likely to idealize the past.

Apologists for Stalin no longer try, as they once did, to deny the crimes of his regime. Instead they resort to more subtle rewritings of history. In their version of events, lower-level officials, such as secret police chiefs and the secretaries of regional party committees, supposedly hiding their actions from Stalin, instigated mass repression. The most cynical Stalinists take a different tack, claiming that the Terror was just and that the millions destroyed on Stalin’s orders really were “enemies of the people.”

Many Russian Stalinists find it convenient to draw on theories developed by various Western historians: that the Terror developed spontaneously, that Stalin was not deeply involved in it, and that he was a far more “ordinary” political leader than usually thought. It is certainly not my intention to accuse my Western colleagues of fomenting re-Stalinization. They bear no more responsibility for Russia’s contemporary political battles than Marx did for the Bolshevik revolution. Still, we should be aware that our words can have bizarre reverberations.

One variety of apologia widely cultivated in Russia’s intellectual and political soil is the relatively moderate idea of “modernizing Stalinism.” While this ideology formally acknowledges the Terror’s countless victims and the high price paid for the “great leap” strategy, it sees Stalinism as an organic and unavoidable means of addressing the need to modernize and prepare for war. Within these postulates we can detect prejudices deeply rooted in the Russian social consciousness: that the interests of the state take absolute priority, that the individual is insignificant, that the flow of history is governed by higher-order laws. According to this paradigm, Stalin was the expression of an objective historical need. His methods were regrettable but necessary and effective. Furthermore, it is inevitable that the flywheel of history will become spattered with blood.

It would be wrong to deny that the “long waves” of Russian history helped shape the path toward Bolshevism and Stalinism. A strong state with authoritarian traditions, feeble private property and civil society institutions, and the colossal reach of a colonizing power that enabled, among other things, the creation of the Gulag Archipelago, all paved the way toward the Stalinist system. But elevating these factors to some sort of “Russian destiny” leads to the dead-end theory of “inevitable Stalinism.” Adherents of this theory have little interest in specific facts and prefer to recycle Stalinist interpretations of Soviet history, sometimes with a fresh twist, more often without. They adamantly dismiss questions about the price paid for transformations and military victories, alternative development paths, and the role of the dictator. They close their eyes to the fact that Stalin himself, when he brought matters to a state of crisis and ruin, was occasionally forced to soften his policies, thereby demonstrating that even within the framework of Stalinism there were multiple paths toward industrialization. They do not even try to explain how the executions of seven hundred thousand people in 1937–1938 alone, ordered by Stalin, served the goals of modernization. Overall, the theory of modernizing Stalinism makes no serious attempt to ascertain how effective the Stalinist system was or to evaluate Stalin’s own role in the development of the USSR from the 1920s to the early 1950s.

Reducing history to historical imperative is the least creative way of presenting the past. Historians are compelled to deal not with simple schemes and political conjecture but with concrete facts. Working with documents, they cannot avoid noticing the intricate dance between objective factors and personalities or between pattern and random occurrence. In a dictatorship, the role of the dictator’s personal predilections, prejudices, and obsessions is greatly magnified. What better medium than biography to unravel this complex tangle of problems?

Biography is a unique genre of research that can, at one extreme, be reduced to the minutia of historical context or, at the other, be bloated with novelistic details of human behavior. Context without soul and soul without context—these are the main pitfalls confronting the biographer. Navigating them was a challenge for me. In the end, I understood that it was simply not possible to squeeze into this book even a passing reference to every significant episode or aspect of the Stalin period. I was compelled to choose which phenomena and tendencies most deserved inclusion, selecting the facts and events that seemed to characterize Stalin, his time, and the system that bears his name with the greatest clarity and vividness. This selectivity was all the more necessary given the appearance, over the past twenty years, of so many new sources shedding light on Stalin and his period. These sources should be briefly identified.

First, because of the opening of the state archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians now may consult original firsthand documents, whereas in the past they were forced to whittle layers of distortion from official publications. A good example is the works and speeches of Stalin himself. Most were published during the leader’s lifetime, but we now have the ability to work with the originals and compare what was actually said with edited versions. Furthermore, the body of Stalin’s published speeches can now be supplemented with those that did not appear in print. Among the most important documents are papers generated by governmental bodies that Stalin himself chaired, such as the protocols and stenographic records of Politburo meetings and wartime State Defense Committee decrees. These dry bureaucratic documents are tremendously important in understanding Stalin’s personality and life. They took up a huge portion of the dictator’s time and were the tools by which he exercised power. Many resolutions bear traces of his heavy editorial hand.

By themselves, of course, the orders issued under Stalin paint only a partial picture. Why were they adopted? What were the logic and motives behind his directives? Much more revealing is Stalin’s intermittent correspondence with his Politburo colleagues, conducted primarily when he was away on vacation and requiring letters to steer the actions of his fellow leaders back in Moscow. This correspondence was most prolific in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, before Russia had any reliable telephone service. It is a marvelous example of how sluggish technological progress can be a historian’s friend. After the war, telephone communication became more reliable, and Stalin, now securely at the pinnacle of power, felt less need for detailed correspondence with subordinates. Curt directives sufficed. Despite their fragmentary nature, Stalin’s letters constitute an important documentary whole and make for fascinating reading. They represent the most candid testaments he has left to posterity.⁴

Historians have been able to glean a great deal of important information from the logs of visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office.⁵ These logs recorded visitors’ names and the times they entered and left the office and thus shed light on how Stalin conducted business. Comparing them with other sources (such as memoirs or the protocols of Politburo meetings) offers important clues to the circumstances surrounding the adoption of various resolutions. Still, like his correspondence, these logs reflect only a portion of Stalin’s activity. In addition to his Kremlin office, he occasionally worked in his office at Central Committee headquarters on Staraia Square and received visitors in his Kremlin apartment, as well as at his numerous dachas outside Moscow and in the south. Although we know that the service responsible for protecting Soviet leaders kept records of visits to Stalin’s Kremlin apartment, researchers have yet to be given access to this archive.⁶ There appears to be no sign of analogous records for the Central Committee office or the dachas.

The visitor logs were kept by Stalin’s secretariat and security team. It seems likely that these services also kept, for their own purposes, records of Stalin’s movements, as well as accounts by security personnel of what happened during their shifts. It goes without saying that these materials would be of tremendous value to Stalin’s biographers. At this point, there is no solid evidence that such records exist.

Stalin’s correspondence and the log of visitors to his Kremlin office are both part of his personal archive, which was compiled under his direct supervision and apparently with an eye toward history. Many documents in this collection feature the notations “my archive” or “personal archive.” An important addition to the personal archive is an assortment of materials about Stalin gathered from various repositories. This assortment, which includes books from Stalin’s library with notations by him, was concentrated in the Central Party Archive. Today both sets of materials have been brought together in the Stalin Collection of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI, successor to the Central Party Archive, which comprises the bulk of its holdings),⁷ a key source of knowledge about Stalin now used extensively by historians.

Yet despite its importance, the Stalin Collection has serious deficiencies. It offers only limited insights into Stalin’s modi vivendi and operandi. Its primary shortcoming is the absence of much of the vast array of papers that made their way to Stalin’s desk on a daily basis. These include thousands upon thousands of letters, statistical compilations, diplomatic dispatches, and reports and memoranda from the various branches of state security. The lack of access to these documents hinders historians in their effort to develop a thorough understanding of how well informed Stalin was, what he knew about a given question, and thus the logic of his actions. The documents that would enable such insights have not been lost. They reside in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation (APRF, the former Politburo Archive), organized into “thematic” folders.⁸ While working on this book, I was able to examine a few of them. For the time being, the Presidential Archive does not accommodate systematic scholarly study. However, the very fact that these folders exist encourages hope. The history of Russia suggests that sooner or later the archive will open.

The most tempting sources for biographers are always diaries and memoirs. These contain the sorts of three-dimensional treatments of people and events that are hard to extract from official paperwork. Such firsthand accounts permit biographers to fill their works with attention-grabbing details, but historians are well aware of these sources’ liabilities. Memoirists, even candid ones, are rarely disinterested, and they often muddle events and dates or simply lie. These perils are compounded in memoirs from the Soviet era. As far as we know, no member of Stalin’s inner circle kept a diary, depriving us of the kind of detailed source that Goebbels’s famous diaries provided to Hitler’s biographers. The situation with memoirs is not much better. Only two people close to Stalin left detailed reminiscences: Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan.⁹ While these memoirs represent major contributions, both men were silent on important topics (such as their participation in the mass repression), and there was much that they simply did not know. Within Stalin’s inner circle there was a strict rule: each man was privy only to information that he needed for the effective fulfillment of his duties. In the case of Mikoyan, some elements of his memoirs were distorted by his son, who prepared the manuscript for publication. He arbitrarily and without the customary disclosures simply inserted his own additions and revisions into the dictated text, supposedly based on subsequent accounts shared by his father.¹⁰

We also have memoirs by Soviet and foreign officials and other prominent figures who had some—usually extremely limited—interaction with Stalin. These works make a minor contribution to what we know about his life. In additional, many memoirs (for example by Red Army marshals) were published during the Soviet era and were therefore subjected to censorship (including self-censorship). After the fall of the USSR, many other people whose paths had crossed with Stalin’s spoke up. Freedom sparked a flood of memoirs from the children and relatives of Stalin-era leaders.¹¹ This “children’s literature,” as the Russian historian Elena Zubkova so aptly labeled the genre, was mainly motivated by commerce and a passion for self-justification, and the results are indeed juvenile.¹² Many relatives of Stalin and his comrades concocted fairy tales and cock-and-bull stories, blending personal impressions with fantasy. Naive pronouncements on politics serve to show that these offspring had only the faintest idea of what their fathers were up to. Third-hand information, rumors, and gossip abound. The primary factor detracting from the potential value of this literature is that Stalin’s underlings were obsessed with maintaining strict secrecy. They lived with unrelenting secret police surveillance and the constant fear of being provoked into a politically fatal slip of the tongue. It is difficult to imagine what could have compelled them to be candid within their own families. The price was too high.

In this book I have been restrained in my use of memoirs, even though many contain fascinating descriptions and anecdotes readers would certainly find of interest. Guided by the most basic rules of source verification, I have made every effort to compare memoir accounts with other materials, archival materials first and foremost. On one hand, memoirs that generally held up to scrutiny were given greater credence. On the other hand, numerous errors and flagrant fabrications were treated as clear signs of unreliability, even if some claims could not be proved false through other sources. Certain memoirs were put on my personal blacklist. While I do not condemn others for citing these works, I will never do so.

When all is said and done, however, a historian endeavoring to write a biography of Stalin is in a relatively good position. The abundance of archival documents and evidence offers opportunities for prolonged, intensive, and (one can hope) fruitful work. Significant lacunae and the inaccessibility of many materials are frustrating impediments; nevertheless, it is now possible to write a genuinely new biography of Stalin insofar as newly accessible archival material has forced changes in our understanding of both the man and his era.

I would like to add a few final words about the size and structure of this biography. Restraints in the former have inspired innovations in the latter. Exhaustive details had to be forsaken. References and notes had to be kept to a minimum, so priority has been given to the attribution of quotes, numbers, and facts. By no means all of the worthy works of my colleagues have been mentioned, for which I offer them my apologies. Such economies leave me ambivalent. I regret the omission of many telling facts and quotes, but I am glad for the reader. I know how it feels to gaze wistfully at stacks of fat tomes that will never be conquered.

Another aspect of the book that I hope will facilitate reading, in addition to its modest size, is its structure. A conventional chapter-section chronology did not lend itself to presenting the two interdependent strata of Stalin’s biography: the sequence of his life events and the most salient features of his personality and dictatorship. This difficulty gave rise to the idea of two alternating narratives, a sort of textual matryoshka or Russian nesting doll. One conceptual chain examines Stalin’s personality and system of rule against the backdrop of his final days. The other, more conventionally chronological, follows the main stages of his biography in sequence. As a result, the book can be read in two ways. Readers can trust my arrangement and follow the page order, or they can take one stratum at a time. I have tried to make both methods equally convenient.

Флибуста

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The New York Times:A Portrait of Stalin in All His Murderous Contradictions

Dictators lend themselves to caricature. We label them sociopaths, paranoiacs or just victims of bad childhoods. We flatten them in order to explain our own times. Saddam Hussein is Hitler; Vladimir Putin is Peter the Great; Donald Trump is Mussolini. Sometimes, we are told, they simply defy explanation. In a 1939 radio address, Winston Churchill conceded defeat in his efforts to understand Stalin’s Soviet Union. “It is,” Churchill said, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Stephen Kotkin demolishes such simplicities in his monumental “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second part of a projected three-volume biography of the Soviet leader whose reign of cruelty stretched from the mid-1920s to his death in 1953. Drawing on an astonishing array of sources, Kotkin paints a richly variegated portrait, delving into Stalin’s peculiar personality even while situating him within the trajectories of Soviet history and totalitarianism more generally.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 - Amazon

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941-  Amazon 

Флибуста

STALIN’S REGIME HAD REPRODUCED a deep-set pattern in Russian history—a country that considered itself a providential power with a special mission in the world, but that substantially lagged the other great powers to the west, a circumstance that time and again induced Russian rulers to turn to the state for a forced modernization to overcome or at least manage the power asymmetry. This urgent quest for a strong state had culminated, once more, in personal rule. Under Stalin’s regime, both the apocalyptic bloodshed and the state’s capacity to summon resources and popular involvement intensified, a consequence of the violent mass era that slightly predated but was blown open by the First World War, the heady promises of Marxism-Leninism, and Stalin’s personal qualities. His despotic power derived not just from his control over the formidable levers of Leninist dictatorship, which he built, but from the ideology, which he shaped. His regime proved able to define the terms of public thought and individual identity, and he proved able to personify passions and dreams, to realize and represent a socialist modernity and Soviet might. With single-sentence telegrams or brief phone calls, he could spur the clunky Soviet party-state machinery into action, invoking discipline and intimidation, to be sure, but also emotionally galvanizing young functionaries who felt close personal ties to him, and millions more who would never come close to meeting him in person. Stalin was a student of historical forces, and of people, and his rule enabled those who came from nothing to feel world historically significant.

Stalin’s regime was not merely a statist modernization, but a purported transcendence of private property and markets, of class antagonisms and existential alienation, a renewal of the social whole rent by the bourgeoisie, a quest for social justice on a global scale. In worldview and practice it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, gaslighting itself. In administration it constituted a crusade for planning and control that generated a proliferation of improvised illegalities, a drive for order, and a system in which propaganda and myths about the “system” were the most systematized part. Amid the cultivated opacity and patent falsehoods, even most high officials were reduced to Kremlinology (rumors, parsing of “signals”). The fanatical hypercentralization was often self-defeating as well, but the cult of the party’s and especially Stalin’s infallibility proved to be the most dangerous flaw of his fallible rule. The superhuman resolve that he had demonstrated in launching and carrying through collectivization was, it turned out, accompanied by a surprising brittleness, which was exposed in his reaction to the criticism that the violent upheaval and famine sparked. Stalin became haunted not by the peasants’ horrors under collectivization but by the party criticism of him regarding those horrors, which would become the dark spur of his mass murders in the wanton terror, made possible by Bolshevism but driven by him. The pandemonium of widespread accusations of treason that he fomented reflected not reality or even potential threats, but his own demons. The flip side—his fantasies of a cleansing cadre renewal via promotion of new people—did little to quell his anxieties, partly because of their glaring difficulty assimilating the Short Coursehe produced expressly for them.

By inclination, Stalin was a Russian nationalist in the imperial sense, and anti-Western, the core impulse of long-standing Russian-Eurasian political culture. Initially, the ambitious Soviet version of the quest to match the West in order to preserve Russia’s anti-Western identity had increased the country’s dependency on the superior West. But after wholesale technology transfer, Stalin’s regime went on, at high cost and low efficiency, to develop sophisticated military and related industry to a degree unprecedented for even a military-first country. Geopolitically, however, whereas tsarist Russia had concluded foreign alliances for its security, the Soviet Union sought or could manage only nonaggression pacts. The country’s self-isolation became ever more extreme. One flanking power, Japan, had spurred Stalin’s no-holds-barred militarization, and after years of timid responses, he had finally decided to rebuff the challenge of this island power by flaunting the USSR’s better-armed and better-commanded land forces in a border war. The other flanking power, Germany, presented an incalculably greater challenge, given the geography, Germany’s military strength on land, and the special qualities of its ruler. Stalin insisted on calling fascism “reactionary,” a supposed way for the bourgeoisie to preserve the old world.⁹¹ But Hitler turned out to be someone neither Marx nor Lenin had prepared Stalin for.

A lifelong Germanophile, Stalin appears to have been mesmerized by the might and daring of Germany’s parallel totalitarian regime. For a time, he recovered his personal and political equilibrium in his miraculous Pact with Hitler, which deflected the German war machine, delivered a bounty of German machine tools, enabled the reconquest and Sovietization of tsarist borderlands, and reinserted the USSR into the role of arbitrating world affairs. Hitler had whetted and, reluctantly, abetted Stalin’s own appetites. But far earlier than the despot imagined, his ability to extract profit from the immense danger posed by Hitler to Europe and beyond had run its course. This generated unbearable tension in Stalin’s life and rule, yet he stubbornly refused to come to grips with the new realities, and not solely out of greed for German technology. Despite his insight into the human psyche, and demonic shrewdness, Stalin was blinkered by ideology and idées fixes. Churchill controlled not a single division on the Soviet frontier, yet Stalin remained absolutely obsessed with British imperialism, railing against the Versailles order long after Hitler had shredded it. He also obsessed over supposed secret British negotiations behind his back with Hitler.⁹²

For Hitler, the 1939 Pact with the USSR was nothing more than what the 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany had been for Lenin: a distasteful necessity, which, with luck, would not endure very long. Lenin’s luck had been delivered by imperial Germany’s idiotic precipitation of American entry into the First World War; Hitler’s came from his own audacity and the mistakes of his slow-to-react, divided foreign adversaries. The alliance system had not caused the First World War, but the absence of alliances helped cause the Second. A debate continues over the possibility of a genuine Western-Soviet military alliance to deter and, if necessary, defeat Germany in the 1930s, including the logistical difficulties for any combined military action posed by recalcitrant Poland and Romania. But logistics can always be managed when the will is there. Sir Stafford Cripps, the maladroit, well-intentioned British ambassador, grasped that German-Soviet relations were precarious, but he could bring neither his own government nor the Soviet Union anywhere near a British-Soviet rapprochement. Given the profundity of mutual distrust between London and Moscow, only an unequivocal perception by both of the urgency of state survival could have made a bilateral alliance possible, and even then, only for a time. Of course, survival was precisely what was at stake.

Hitler’s racial, Social Darwinist, zero-sum understanding of geopolitics meant that both the USSR and Great Britain would have to be annihilated in order for Germany to realize its master race destiny. To be sure, in the immediate term, he thought in terms of domination of the European continent (Grossmacht), which required Lebensraum in the east. But in the longer term, he foresaw domination of the world (Weltmacht), which would require a blue-water fleet, bases rimming the Atlantic, and a colonial empire in the tropics for raw materials. That was incompatible with the continued existence of the British empire, at least in its present form. Hitler thus put himself in front of a stark choice of either agreeing to deepen the Pact with Stalin, to take on Britain now, which meant conceding at least a partial Soviet sphere in the Balkans and on the Black Sea—on top of the Soviet sphere in the Baltics—or, alternately, freeing himself from the infuriating dependency on Moscow to take on Britain later. In the end, military circumstances helped determine the sequencing: Hitler did not possess the air or naval capabilities or the depth of resources to prevail militarily over island Britain; he did command the land-based wherewithal to attempt to smash the USSR.

A commitment to a prolonged contest for supremacy with Britain, which Hitler expected to be aided more and more by the vast resources of the United States, made quick annihilation of the Soviet Union an absolutely necessary prelude.⁹³ Moreover, even though Hitler and the German high command knew the Soviet Union was not poised to attack, the invasion amounted to a preventive war all the same in his logic, for the Soviet Union was only getting stronger, and might itself attack at a time it deemed more advantageous. And so, while pushing Japan to attack British positions in East Asia, he had offered the British government a version of the pact he had concluded with Stalin, in order to violate the latter, and he seemed dumbfounded that the British government did not accept.⁹⁴ The Nazi leader had grasped his foe’s imperial mind-set, and he was sincere when promising that, in exchange for a free hand on the continent, he would keep Britain’s empire intact for now (its destruction, in any case, would redound to others besides Germany in the short term). He continued to hold out hope that Britain, patently weak militarily on land and therefore unable to defeat him, would see “reason.” But Hitler had failed to grasp Britain’s long-standing preference for a balance of power on the continent.⁹⁵ He did, however, perceive far more common interest between London and Moscow than either of them saw themselves.

During the all-out preparations for blitzkrieg against the USSR, Hitler continued to order that resources be devoted to preparing for a long naval and air war against the UK and the United States. May–June 1941 was the blackest period yet for Britain: its ships were being sunk and its cities bombed, while its position in the Balkans had been lost to Nazi domination. After German paratroopers had captured Crete, in late May 1941, the British position seemed grievously imperiled. Eleven days before the scheduled launch of the Soviet invasion, Hitler had dictated a draft of Directive No. 32, “Preparations for the Time After Barbarossa.” It envisioned subdivision and exploitation of Soviet territories, as well as a pincer movement against the Suez Canal and British Near East positions via Bulgaria-Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran-Iraq-Syria; the conquest of Gibraltar, northwest Africa, and the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands, to eliminate the British in the Mediterranean; the building of coastal bases in West and possibly East Africa; and the creation of a German base in Afghanistan for seizing British India.⁹⁶ Had Hitler thrown all his might into this “peripheral strategy” rather than invading the USSR, Britain might not have survived.⁹⁷ The war with the Soviet Union would have gone ahead at some point, but with Britain knocked out of the picture. There would have been no British beachhead to assist an eventual U.S.-led Allied landing in Western Europe.⁹⁸

HITLER, ONE SCHOLAR HAS REMINDED US, cannot be explained in terms of his social origins or his early life and influences, a point that is no less applicable to Stalin.⁹⁹ The greatest shaper of Stalin’s being was the building and running of a dictatorship, whereby he assumed responsibility for Russia’s power in the world. In the name of socialism, Stalin, pacing in his Kremlin office, had grown accustomed to moving millions of peasants, workers—whole nations—across a sixth of the earth, on his own initiative, often consulting no one. But his world had become intensely constricted. Hitler had cornered the Soviet despot in his own Little Corner.

Stalin’s dealings with Hitler differed from British appeasement in that he tried significant deterrence as well as accommodation, and he took as much as he gave. But Stalin’s policy resembled British appeasement in that he was driven by a blinding desire to avoid war at all costs. He displayed strength of capabilities but not of will. Neither his fearsome resolve nor his supreme cunning—which had enabled him to vanquish his rivals and spiritually crush his inner circle—were in evidence in 1941. He shrank from trying to preempt Hitler militarily and failed to preempt him diplomatically.¹⁰⁰ In the end, however, the question of who most miscalculated is not a simple one. “Of all the men who can lay claim to having paved the way to the new Reich,” meaning his Reich, Hitler liked to say, “one figure stands in awe-inspiring solitude: Bismarck.”¹⁰¹ Bismarck, of course, had built his chancellorship on avoiding conflict with Russia. When the bust of Bismarck was transferred from the old German Chancellery to Hitler’s new Nazi Chancellery, it had broken off at the neck. A replica was hastily made, aged by soaking in cold tea. The omen of Bismarck’s broken neck was kept from the Führer.¹⁰²

The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire film

The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire film directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci. Based on the French graphic novel La mort de Staline, it depicts the Soviet power struggles following the death of dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953. It was released by eOne Films in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2017 and is set to be released in the United Statesby IFC Films on 9 March 2018.

The Death of Stalin was screened in the Platform section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and received critical acclaim. It caused controversy in Russia and many other former members of the Soviet Union, and was banned in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

торрент    облако

City of Thieves 2008 historical fiction novel by David Benioff

City of Thieves is a 2008 historical fiction novel by David Benioff. Both a coming of age story and a black comedy, City of Thieves recounts World War II adventures of two young men in the Leningrad area as they desperately search for a dozen eggs for a Soviet NKVD officer during the German siege of the city.

Amazon 

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Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism by Charles Clover

Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism 

by Charles Clover- Amazon

flibusta 

The Financial Times- APRIL 22, 2016 by: Review by Geoffrey Hosking

 Speaking in 2013 to the Valdai Discussion Club, an international forum of Russia experts, Vladimir Putin called Russia a “civilisational state . . . a project for the preservation of the identity of peoples [and] of historical Eurasia in the new century.” Reviving and integrating Eurasia, he added, was “a chance for the former Soviet Union to become an independent centre of global development”. Putin had used the term “Eurasia” before but this mention of it seemed to indicate a new approach. In 2014 he showed he meant business by annexing Crimea and sending Russian army troops who were “on vacation” into eastern Ukraine.

What did Putin mean by “Eurasia” and where does his “project” come from? That is the question Charles Clover, the FT’s Moscow bureau chief from 2008 to 2013, sets out to answer in this thought-provoking book. Part intellectual history, part portrait gallery of Russians operating on the borders between politics, academia and the media from the 1920s to the present, Black Wind, White Snow traces the background to Putin’s ideas with verve and clarity
In the early 1920s a group of Russian émigrés began to reinterpret Russia’s history and identity in the light of the disastrous 1917 revolution and civil war. They asserted that efforts to Europeanise Russia since the time of Peter the Great had weakened the country; that Russians had more in common with the Tatars and nomadic peoples of Central Asia than with Frenchmen or Germans. This group called themselves “Eurasianists”. But they proved vulnerable to Russian secret-service infiltration and soon lost influence, even among émigrés. The theory was renovated in the 1960s by the historian Lev Gumilev (1912-1992). Gumilev — the son of two famous Russian poets, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev — spent many years in the Gulag, where he met Petr Savitsky, the last survivor of the 1920s Eurasianists. Partly thanks to his inspiration, Gumilev devised a decidedly anti-Marxist theory of the rise and fall of peoples. Certain tribal groups, he argued, have at certain periods in history been gripped by a form of social solidarity he called passionarnost: creative energy, lust for expansion and ruthlessness combined with a capacity for suffering and endurance in pursuing the common cause. Passionarnost, he argued, not technological or moral progress, was the key to world history. The Soviet victory over Germany in the second world war showed that the Russians possessed this quality, and that in common with the peoples of Central Asia they formed a civilisation quite distinct from that of Europe. As the Soviet Union approached collapse in the late 1980s, Gumilev’s theories were published and attracted many intellectuals. His books on the history of steppe nomads became bestsellers, partly because they read like pacy novels (indeed, some academics accused him of writing what was essentially fiction). One of those he inspired was Alexander Dugin, a dissident whose objections to Marxism were similar. According to Clover, Dugin had links with thinkers of the European New Right, who were denouncing the heritage of liberalism, the nation-state and US domination, and arguing that Europe needed to reinvent itself as an imperial power. Their thinking in turn derived from Halford Mackinder and the geopolitical theorists of Nazi Germany, who maintained that the decisive clashes in world affairs were between the oceanic powers headed by the US and the continental powers of Eurasia. All these currents were combined in Dugin’s book, The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997). It became a textbook in the Russian General Staff Academy, where Dugin himself lectured — no longer a dissident but now a pillar of the establishment. The chaos of the 1990s in Russia suggested to many Russians that western-style democracy, far from being beneficial, was actually undermining their way of life. The expansion of Nato and its 1999 bombing campaign in Serbia seemed to confirm that the west was an enemy, and made many thinking Russians, including Putin, converts to a modified Eurasianism. A word of warning: Russian politicians usually adopt ideologies not because they believe in them but because they are useful at certain stages of their careers. Dugin-modified Eurasianism is useful to Putin while he faces conflict in Ukraine combined with western sanctions, and while he challenges the “unipolar” model of international affairs imposed by the US. It does not follow automatically that he wants to restore the Soviet Union as “Eurasia”. If later he decides Russia needs to work more closely with the west, to defeat Islamist terrorism or to prevent conflict getting out of hand, then the tropes of Eurasianism will fall out of his discourse. Clover’s approach, sober and gently sceptical, reflects the provisional nature of Putin’s ideology. He charts the paths by which Eurasian ideas are refracted through various movements, but usually refrains from firm conclusions. This is true to the spirit of Dugin, whom he interviewed at length. Dugin is a conscious postmodernist: he will often proclaim a principle while simultaneously standing back to “deconstruct” it. He provides a repertoire for “political technologists” who manipulate ideologies in response to tactical needs. Political technology has limits, though: at some point Putin might find himself in a situation where he cannot, with dignity, back away from his own rhetoric. Then Clover’s book will be an indispensable guide. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, by Charles Clover, Yale University Press, RRP£25/$35, 304 pages Geoffrey Hosking is emeritus professor of Russian history, University College London

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English - you can look up articles online - Soviet outlook on the world and on Russia

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English -

 you can look up articles online - Soviet outlook on the world and on Russia 

at http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/
The following articles are from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). 
They might be outdated or ideologically biased

PS- Download offline database Mdict TFD Encyclopedia-inluding 

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (GSE) (Russian:Большая советская энциклопедия, or БСЭBolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya) is one of the largest Russian-language encyclopedias.[1]published by the Soviet state from 1926 to 1990, and again since 2002 by Russia (under the name Bolshaya Rossiyskaya entsiklopediyaor Great Russian Encyclopedia). The GSE claimed to be the first Marxist-Leninist general-purpose encyclopedia

The third edition was translated and published into English in 31 volumes between 1974 and 1983 byMacmillan Publishers. Each volume was translated separately, requiring use of the index found at the front of each volume to locate specific items; knowledge of Russian can be helpful to find the right volume the first time. Not all entries were translated into English; these are indicated in the index. Articles from the English edition are made available online byTheFreeDictionary.com

For example, ANTON CHEKHOV

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased

Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich

Born Jan. 17 (29), 1860, in Taganrog; died July 2 (15), 1904, in Badenweiler,Germany; buried in Moscow. Russian writer.

Chekhov’s father, a merchant of the third guild, owned a grocery store. As a boy,Chekhov helped his father in the store; he entered the Taganrog Gymnasium in1868. In 1876 the father went bankrupt and left for Moscow, followed by hisfamily. Left to himself, Chekhov continued his studies, earning his living bytutoring. In 1879 he finished school and moved to Moscow. He studied medicineat the University of Moscow, graduated in 1884 with the title of district physician,and for some time practiced medicine.

Chekhov began writing in the late 1870’s. He contributed to various humormagazines, such as Oskolki, using different pen names—for example, Antosha,A Man Without a Spleen, Brother of My Brother, and, most frequently, AntoshaChekhonte. A collection entitled At Leisure (later called The Prank) was preparedfor publication in 1882 but never appeared in print, apparently because ofcensorship. Chekhov’s first book of short stories, Tales of Melpomene, waspublished in 1884; it was followed in 1886 by Motley Tales.

In March 1886, D. V. Grigorovich wrote Chekhov a letter praising his “real talent”and urging him to “give up working under a deadline” and save “[your]impressions for a well-considered work” (see Slovo, collection no. 2, Moscow,1914, pp. 199–200). This letter was one of the factors that hastened Chekhov’sshift from “trifling” to “well-considered work.” The transition from the purelyhumorous to the “realm of the serious” occurred between 1885 and 1887. “TheSteppe” and “The Name-Day Party” appeared in 1888, followed in 1889 by “AnAttack of Nerves” and “A Dreary Story.” This period also saw the publication ofseveral collections of Chekhov’s short stories—namely, In the Twilight (1887;awarded half of the Pushkin Prize in 1888), Innocent Speeches (1887), Tales(1888), and Gloomy People (1890).

Chekhov’s journey to the island of Sakhalin in 1890 made a deep impression onhim, which left its mark in his journalistic essay of 1893–94, The Island ofSakhalin (published as a book in 1895), in the short stories “In Exile” (1892) and“The Murder” (1895), and in the novella “Ward No. 6” (1892), which summed upthe entire experience. Imbued with a spirit of protest against the horrors of prisonlife, “Ward No. 6” represented the high point of Chekhov’s critical realism of thelate 1880’s and early 1890’s. This is how V. I. Lenin described his impression ofthe work: “When I finished this story last night I was genuinely terrified, I couldn’tstay in my room, I got up and went out. I felt as though I were locked up in wardno. 6 myself” (cited in Reminiscences of V. I. Lenin by His Family, 1955, p. 36).

In the second half of the 1880’s Chekhov wrote extensively for the theater. Hisplays included Ivanov (1887–89), the one-act comedy The Wedding (1889;published 1890), The Wood Demon (1889; published 1890, later revised andreissued as Uncle Vanya), and the one-act farces The Bear, The Proposal, andThe Anniversary.

In the 1890’s and early 1900’s Chekhov made a number of trips abroad. In 1892he bought the estate of Melikhovo in the Serpukhov District, 13 versts from theLopasnia Station (now Chekhov). He administered medical aid to the localpeasants, built schools for the peasants’ children, visited some of the famine-stricken provinces in 1892, worked as district physician during the choleraepidemic of 1892–93, and helped in the national census of 1897.

In approximately 1893, Chekhov’s work moved in a new direction. In 1894 hewrote the story “The Student,” in which he asserts that “truth and beauty . . . havecontinued uninterruptedly to the present day and, it appears, have always beenthe most important thing in human life and on the earth in general” (Poln. sobr,soch. i pisem, vol. 8, 1947, p. 348). The crowning work of this period is the playThe Seagull (1896). As staged at the Alek-sandrinskii Theater, however, the playfailed, and the lyricism that colored Chekhov’s works gave way to a different kindof writing. In his novella of 1897, “Peasants,” and in the short stories written in thesame year, Chekhov sought to reveal the un-embellished truth and even theharshness of life and to show its terrible underside.

In the 1898 trilogy “The Man in a Shell,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love,” in thestories and novellas of the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, and in his last story, “TheBetrothed” (1903), Chekhov depicted spiritual stagnation and a hero strivingtoward a better life.

Chekhov’s skill as a dramatist came into full flower in the 1890’s and early 1900’s.In 1896, after The Seagull, he wrote the play Uncle Vanya (published 1897),followed in 1900–01 by Three Sisters (awarded the Griboedov Prize) and in1903–04 by The Cherry Orchard. The four plays were all produced at theMoscow Art Theater, which opened in 1898; the triumphant premiere of TheSeagull took place on December 17 of that year.

In 1898, after the death of his father and because of his own deterioratingcondition (due to tuberculosis), Chekhov moved from Melikhovo to Yalta, wherehe built a house. There he met with L. N. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, I. A. Bunin, A. I.Kuprin, and I. I. Levitan. Chekhov’s position during the Dreyfus trial, his breakwith A. S. Suvorin’s reactionary newspaper Novoe Vremia, and his sympatheticattitude toward student disturbances were indicative of his rapid ideologicaldevelopment and heightened interest in public life. Chekhov was elected anhonorary academician in 1900, but together with V. G. Korolenko he renouncedthe title in 1902 in protest against Nicholas IPs refusal to grant the same title toGorky.

Chekhov’s work mirrors a broad cross section of postreform and prerevolutionaryRussian life. Even his early comic pieces cannot be reduced to pure humor. In allthe kaleidoscopic variety of his early stories, the author increasingly reveals hisbasic themes—man and his rank, poetry and prose, life’s facade and its reverseside. Many of Chekhov’s early stories show the triumph of the mercantile spirit.Antosha Chekhonte’s characters belong entirely to the banal and philistine worldthat has given them birth; these are “the fat and the thin,” the “chameleons,”“windbags,” “philistines,” “bridegrooms and papas,” and “barroom philosophers”who never dream of opposing their environment.

The creative turning point that Chekhov experienced in the mid-1880’s resulted inthe appearance of new protagonists who do oppose their environment and whosuffer precisely because of their humanity, such as the characters in “AnUpheaval,” “Aniu-ta,” and “Misery.” The basic direction of Chekhov’s mature workof the late 1880’s and early 1900’s is clearly apparent; the author strives toanalyze what N. G. Chernyshevskii called the influence “of social relations andeveryday conflicts on character” (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 3, 1947, pp. 422–23).Chekhov’s unique field of inquiry is the soul of modern man. Hence his maintheme—man’s indifference, or his “somnolent stupor,” as represented by thepeculiar ordeal of a hero who either rouses himself from spiritual slumber or elsegives up and submits to it.

The two basic groups on which Chekhov’s mature work was focused were theintelligentsia and the common people. Likewise, the theme of indifference isdeveloped in two different ways: the hero is either an educated man who isspiritually content and has locked himself up inside a “shell,” or a man of thepeople—downtrodden, worn out by life, and made dull and indifferent. ForChekhov, the “shell” is the symbol of a life built on lies and violence, on thegluttonous satiety of some, and on the hunger and suffering of others. “TheStudent,” in which the hero Ivan Velikopol’skii finds the way to the heart of twopeasant girls, Va-silisa and Luker’ia, was the prototype of the two types of worksthat Chekhov wrote between 1890 and 1900. The hero of “The Student” isfollowed by the characters in the novellas “Three Years” (1895), “The House Withthe Attic,” or “An Artist’s Story” (1896), and “My Life” (1896), the short trilogyconsisting of “The Man In a Shell,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love,” and thestories “Ionych” (1898), “The Lady With the Dog” (1899), and “The Betrothed.”Vasilisa and Luker’ia, on the other hand, are followed by the peasants in thenovella “Peasants” and in the story “The New Country House” (1899), the ruralpolice assistant in the story “On Official Business” (1899), and the heroes of thenovella “In the Ravine” (1900).

The gulf between the intelligentsia and the common people is a theme thatpervades Chekhov’s work and is closely linked to the theme of the “shell.” Duringthese years Chekhov wrote distinctive cycles of works on this theme—”artisticinvestigations” of life. In addition to the “intelligentsia” and “peasant” cycles, hewrote stories depicting the world of the merchant and the shopkeeper’sstorehouse, as well as the inhumanly harsh life of the factories. “Three Years”(1894), “A Woman’s Kingdom” (1894), and “A Doctor’s Visit” (1898) belong to thisgroup of stories.

In his late works, including the short story “A Visit to Friends” (1898) and the playThe Cherry Orchard, Chekhov develops the theme of the impoverishment andruin of the “nests of the gentlefolk.” Thus the theme of human indifference isresolved not only in moral and psychological terms but also on the scale ofdifferent social situations.

The Chekhovian image of “the man in a shell” grows into a symbol of callousnessand conventionalism, simultaneously intimidating and fearful. V. I. Lenin oftenreferred to this satirical symbolic image.

The essence of Chekhov’s thoughts on faith in man and on the truthfulness ofartistic portrayal is conveyed by an entry in the writer’s notebooks: “Man willbecome better when you have shown him what he is” (Poln. sobr. soch. i pisem,vol. 12, 1949, p. 270). Chekhov believed in the possibility of human renewal andthe victory of man over the “shell.” In Chekhov, man is constantly being tested bythe harsh truth of life. Another important aspect of Chekhov’s observation is thatliterature should show man his own image, without trying to persuade and withoutresorting to ennobling deceptions, generalized arguments, or attempts by theauthor to sway the reader’s emotions.

Chekhov’s artistic style is profoundly and organically linked to the ideologicaldirection of his work—that is, the desire to awaken “the living soul” in modernman. His writing firmly establishes the principle of restrained and outwardlyunemphatic narration: the greater the author’s objectivity, the stronger the impact.Chekhov’s terseness of expression, conciseness, and condensed narration(“Brevity is the sister of talent,” ibid., vol. 14, 1949, p. 342) stemmed from his faithin the reader’s ability to catch the author’s hidden and complex meaning. Linkedto this is the heightened role of details that at first glance seem minor and of littleimportance; such details, which are not in the least incidental, are psychologicallyand emotionally significant. Chekhov’s details not only hint at what is importantand characteristic but also serve as vehicles for the internal movement of thestory, novella, or play. Examples of such details are Iuliia’s umbrella in “ThreeYears,” the carriage in which Dr. Startsev rides in “Ionych,” and the dead bird inThe Seagull.

The mature Chekhov avoided tense action, intrigue, and external diversion,shifting the center of gravity to the internal plot, the story of the hero’s soul, andthe hidden dynamics of the hero’s struggle against circumstance, theenvironment, and the mire of a parochial existence. The tragic meaning of manyof Chekhov’s works lies precisely in the fact that nothing happens—everythingremains as it was. Complex plotting, which played an important role in theanecdotal novellas of Antosha Chekhonte, is put aside in the works of the matureChekhov. Events “dissolve” into the flow of daily life or into psychology. In thisrespect the plot structure of Chekhov’s prose works resembles that of his plays.

An integral trait of Chekhov the artist is the profound realization that tragedy doesnot consist of what is terrible, exceptional, or out of the ordinary but of what isprosaic, everyday, and commonplace. The “tragedy of the prosaic” is all the moredangerous because it destroys the hero imperceptibly, by lulling him to sleep andconvincing him that a different kind of life—one that is not prosaic—is impossible.For Chekhov, terror lies in that which is not terrible; the benign and the bloodlessare what is fatal. This is also related to the evolution of Chekhov’s humor. Thewriter’s development as an artist did not consist of the transition from the comic tothe serious but rather of his deeper understanding of the comic as tragicomic,uniting laughter, irony, and sadness. Few of the Russian satirical writers havecreated such a complex yet outwardly simple mixture of laughter andseriousness, satire and lyricism. Chekhov’s laughter is not a separate facet of hisart; it is the very atmosphere of his works, representing a complex gamut offeelings. What is encompassed in his laughter ranges from accusation, derision,and disdain aimed at an entire way of life to the revelation of the grievousrootlessness and humanity of the “little souls” who are Chekhov’s protagonists.

Chekhov laid out new paths for the development of Russian and world drama. Herefused to divide his characters into angels and villains, or one-sidedrepresentatives of good and evil. Just as in his prose works, he avoided plotintrigue and shifted the center of gravity to the hidden, internal plot involving themental world of the hero. Plot emerges not as a chain of events but as the storyof man’s desire to act and his attempts to break out of his daily routine—out ofthe bonds of “prosaic tragedy.”

Chekhov’s plays are built around many themes and leitmotifs that unfold on manydifferent levels and are associated with various men’s fortunes. The themedeveloped in Chekhov’s prose works emerges in his plays as well—namely, theloss of inner connections between people. The characters in Chekhov’s plays areseparated from each other by invisible barriers; each is immersed in his owncondition. The dialogue in Chekhov’s plays tends toward monologue; eachcharacter speaks his own particular “mi-cromonologue.” Nevertheless, the overalllyrical atmosphere unites the seemingly isolated heroes.

Even in his early plays Chekhov did more than re-create everyday reality. ButThe Seagull marks a new advance. Running through the entire play is an imagethat is raised to a symbol and is pregnant with meaning—the image of theseagull, symbolizing Treplev’s and Nina Zarechnaia’s dream of a new kind of art,pure and bold; also related to this image is the theme of wounded and tragic love.There is yet another side to the multifaceted image of the dead bird, representinga soulless, lifeless, mediocre art.

Discouraged by the failure of The Seagull, Chekhov retreated somewhat from theuse of such devices. In The Cherry Orchard, however, he turned to them onceagain. Chekhov’s notion of the dramatic genre acquired new content as well. TheSeagull and The Cherry Orchard were called comedies by their author, but thecomic components of these plays are inseparable from the tragic ones. The pastexperience of Russian and world theatre attests to the failure of those directorswho view Chekhov as a “mere satirist” whose writing is based on farce or ofthose who go to the opposite extreme and adopt a lyrical approach to the playswhile ignoring their comic elements. We are now entering the stage of integratedand multifaceted analysis of Chekhov the dramatist in all his dialecticalcomplexity and inimitable mixture of lyricism and satire.

Chekhov inherited and carried forward the best realistic traditions of Russianliterature. L. N. Tolstoy’s definition—”Chekhov is Pushkin in prose”(Ezhemesiachnyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, 1905, no. 7, p. 427)—illuminates the role ofA. S. Pushkin’s poetry as an influence on Chekhov the prose writer anddramatist. Pushkin’s perfect sense of rhythm and his attempt to achieveharmonious integrity, clarity, and musicality were interpreted by Chekhov in hisown way. Chekhov was profoundly influenced by M. Iu. Lermontov, the author of“Thought” and of the novel A Hero of Our Time, who wrote of the “cooling” of thesoul of modern man. Lermontov’s “Taman”’ was for Chekhov an unsurpassedmodel of prose. It has also been noted that I. S. Turgenev’s plays foreshadowedthe hidden lyricism characterizing Chekhov’s dramatic work.

Among Chekhov’s predecessors and contemporaries, the one who took firstplace in the writer’s creative consciousness was Leo Tolstoy, whose brilliantartistic creations invariably earned Chekhov’s enthusiastic praise. AlthoughChekhov was definitely influenced by Tolstoy’s philosophy, the ideologicaldifferences between the two writers became more pronounced in the late 1890’s.Tolstoy’s concept of nonviolent resistance to evil aroused Chekhov’s opposition.Tolstoy reproached Chekhov for his lack of a consistent moral position—in otherwords, for his skeptical attitude toward faith; he had, however, a high opinion ofChekhov’s writing talent and called him “an incomparable artist.” “Thanks to hissincerity,” said Tolstoy, “Chekhov has created forms of writing that are new—entirely new, in my opinion—for the entire world [and] the likes of which I have notencountered anywhere” (cited in P. Sergeenko, Tolstoi i ego sovremenniki:Ocherki, Moscow, 1911, p. 226).

Chekhov exerted a strong influence on Russian and world literature—both proseand drama. His pupils included the young Gorky (particularly in drama), Bunin,Kuprin, and to some extent L. N. Andreev. K. A. Trenev and A. N. Arbuzov havewritten about Chekhov’s role in the education of Soviet dramatists, and manyEuropean and American writers have noted the part he played in the art of the20th century. G. B. Shaw’s play Heartbreak House, published in 1919, wasclearly written under Chekhov’s influence; Shaw called it “a fantasy in theRussian style on English themes” (Izbr. proizv., vol. 2, Moscow, 1956, p. 286). J.Galsworthy wrote of Chekhov’s salutary effect on English literature. A. Wurmser,F. Mauriac, E. Triolet, and the French directors J.-L. Barrault and J. Vilar havepointed to the impact of Chekhov’s work. In “A Word on Chekhov,” T. Mannrevealed in depth the Russian writer’s unique position in terms of his creativeideology and his unpretentious and selfless goal—namely, the use ofunvarnished artistic truth in the people’s service.

Chekhov is one of the most popular playwrights of contemporary Soviet andforeign theater. Many of his works have been filmed for the cinema andtelevision, including The Wedding, The Lady With the Dog, The Seagull, UncleVanya, The Cherry Orchard, and the early drama Without Fathers.

Russian prerevolutionary and Soviet studies of Chekhov have produced a wealthof textual information and commentary. In articles appearing even before theRevolution, Chekhov’s prose works and plays were searchingly analyzed by suchwriters as M. Gorky, V. G. Korolenko, N. K. Mikhailovskii, F. D. Batiushkov, D. N.Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, and the Marxist critics V. V. Vorovskii and A. A.Divil’kovskii. In the Soviet period, enormous efforts have been devoted to thecollection and publication of Chekhov’s literary legacy and the study of his lifeand work. Among those who have contributed to this undertaking are A. V.Lunacharskii, S. D. Balukhatyi, Iu. V. Sobolev, A. B. Derman, A. I. Roskin, K. I.Chukovskii, I. S. Ezhov, G. A. Bialyi, E. N. Konshina, N. I. Gitovich, M. L.Semanova, V. V. Er-milov, and G. P. Berdnikov. New works and publications(such as Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 68) were issued in commemoration of the100th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth.

The A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of theUSSR is publishing the complete works and letters of Chekhov in 30 volumes. Aseries of collected research studies is being published to accompany theacademy edition: the first such collection. In Chekhov’s Creative Laboratory, wasissued in 1974; the second, Chekhov and His Times, in 1977; the third, Chekhovand Leo Tolstoy, is being prepared for publication.

There are Chekhov museums in Taganrog and in Moscow (in the house wherethe Chekhov family lived from 1886 to 1890), as well as in Melikhovo, in thevillage of Luka in Sumy Oblast, and in Yalta.

WORKS

Poln. sobr. soch., vols. 1–23. St. Petersburg, 1903–16.
Poln. sobr. soch., vols. 1–12. Edited by A. V. Lunacharskii and S. D. Balukhatyi.Moscow-Leningrad, 1930–33.
Poln. sobr. soch. i pisem, vols. 1–20. Moscow, 1944–51.
Poln. sobr. soch. i pisem v 30 tomakh, 1974–.

REFERENCES

Biographies, memoirs, and correspondence
Izmailov, A. Chekhov: Biografich. nabrosok. Moscow, 1916.
Sobolev, Iu. Chekhov. Moscow, 1934.
Derman, A. B. A. P. Chekhov. Moscow, 1939.
Ermilov, V. Chekhov, 3rd ed. Moscow, 1951.
Roskin, A. I. Chekhov: Biografich. povest’. Moscow, 1959.
Berdnikov, G. P. Chekhov. Moscow, 1974.
A. P. Chekhov i V. G. Korolenko: Perepiska. Moscow, 1923.
Perepiska, A. P. Chekhova i O. L. Knipper, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1934–36.
Pis’ma A. P. Chekhovu ego brata Aleksandra Chekhova. Moscow, 1939.
M. Gorkii i A. P. Chekhov: Perepiska, stat’i, vyskazyvaniia. Collection. Moscow,1951.
Chekhova, M. P. Pis’ma kbratu A. P. Chekhovu. Moscow, 1954.
Chekhova, M. P. Iz dalekogoproshlogo: Zapis’ N. A. Sysoeva. Moscow, 1960.
Bunin, I. A. “O Chekhove.” Sobr. soch., vol. 9. Moscow, 1967.
A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. [Moscow] 1960.
Chekhov, M. P. Vokrug Chekhova, 4th ed. [Moscow] 1964.
Knipper-Chekhova, O. L. [Vospominaniia i perepiska], part 1. Moscow, 1972.
Major critical studies
Vorovskii, V. V. “Lishnie liudi.” Soch., vol. 2. Moscow, 1931.
Lunacharskii, A. V. “Chekhov i ego proizvedeniia kak obshchestvennoe iavlenie.”In his Klassiki russkoi literatury (Izbr. stat’i). Moscow, 1937.
Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, D. N. “Etiudy o tvorchestve A. P. Chekhova.” Sobr. soch.,vol. 5,3rded. Moscow, 1923.
Derman, A. B. Tvorch. portret Chekhova. Moscow, 1929.
Sobolev, Iu. V. Chekhov. Moscow, 1930.
Balukhatyi, S. D. Chekhov-dramaturg. Leningrad, 1936.
Stanislavskii, K. S. A. P. Chekhov v Moskovskom khudozh. teatre. Moscow, 1947.
Ermilov, V. Dramaturgiia Chekhova. Moscow, 1954.
Semanova, M. L. Chekhov v shkole, 2nd ed. Leningrad, 1954.
Semanova, M. L. Chekhov i sov. litra, 1917–1935. Moscow-Leningrad, 1966.
Leonov, L. “Rech’ o Chekhove.” Sobr. soch., vol. 5. Moscow, 1954.
Stroeva, M. N. Chekhov i Khudozh. teatr. Moscow, 1955.
Berdnikov, G. Chekhov-dramaturg. Leningrad-Moscow, 1957.
Berdnikov, G. A. P. Chekhov: Ideinye i tvorch. iskaniia, 2nd ed. Leningrad, 1970.
Golubkov, V. V. Masterstvo A. P. Chekhova. Moscow, 1958.
Papernyi, Z. A. P. Chekhov, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1960.
Papernyi, Z. Zapisnye knizhki Chekhova. Moscow, 1976.
Aleksandrov, B. I. A. P. Chekhov: Seminarii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1964.
Erenburg, I. “Perechityvaia Chekhova.” Sobr. soch., vol. 6. Moscow, 1965.
Shakh-Azizova, T. K. Chekhov i zapadnoevrop. drama ego vremeni. Moscow,1966.
Kataev, V. B. “Geroi i ideia v proizv. Chekhova 90-kh godov.” Vestnik MGU:Filologiia, 1968, no. 6.
Berkovskii, N. Ia. “Chekhov: ot rasskazov i povestei k dramaturgii.” In his Lit-ra iteatr. Moscow, 1969.
Chukovskii, K. O Chekhove. Moscow, 1971.
Chudakov, A. P. Poetika Chekhova. Moscow, 1971.
Skaftymov, A. “Nravstvennye iskaniia rus. pisatelei.” Stat’i i issledo-vaniia o rus.klassikakh. Moscow, 1972.
Anikst, A. Teoriia dramy v Rossii ot Pushkina do Chekhova. Moscow, 1972.
Belkin, A. “Chitaia Dostoevskogo i Chekhova.” Stat’i i razbory. Moscow, 1973.
Bialyi, G. A. Rus. realizm kontsa XIXv. Leningrad, 1973.
Chekhovskie chteniia v Ialte. Collection. Moscow, 1973.
Chekhovskie chteniia v Ialte: Chekhov i teatr. Collection. Moscow, 1976.
Lakshin, V. Ia. Tolstoi i Chekhov, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1975.
Foreign literature
Duelos, H. B Antone Tchékhov, le médecin etl’écrivain. Paris, 1927.
Gasparini, E. ll teatro di Cechov. Milan, 1940.
Triolet, E. L’Histoire d’A. Tchékhov: sa vie, son oeuvre. Paris, 1954.
Laffitte, S. Tchékhov par lui-même: Images ettextes. Paris, 1955.
Magarshack, D. Chekhov the Dramatist. New York, 1960.
Magarshack, D. The Real Chekhov: An Introduction to Chekhov’s Last Plays.London, 1972.
A. Čechov: Some Essays. Edited by T. Eekman. Leiden, 1960.
Düwel, W A. Tschechow: Dichter der Morgendämmerung. Halle/Saale, 1961.
Picchio, R. I raccontidi Čechov. Turin, 1961.
Winner, T. chekhov and His Prose. New York, 1966.
Maegd-Soëp, C. de. De vrouw in het werk en het leven van A. P. Tsjechov.[Brugge-Utrecht, 1968.]
Sliwowski, R. Czechow woczach krytykis’wiatowej. Warsaw, 1971.
Reference and bibliographical works
Masanov, I. F. Chekhoviana, fasc. 1. Moscow, 1929.
Fridkes, L. M. Opisanie memuarov o Chekhove. Moscow-Leningrad, 1930.
Arkhiv A. P. Chekhova: Annotirovannoe opisanie pisem k A. P. Chekhovu, fascs.1–2. Moscow, 1939–41.
Gitovich, N. I. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova. Moscow, 1955.
A. P. Chekhov: Rukopisi, pis’ma . . . . Opisanie materialov TsGALI SSSR.Moscow, 1960.
Polotskaia, E. A. “Bibliografiia vospominanii o Chekhove.” In Lit. nasledstvo, vol.68. Moscow, 1960.

Z. S. PAPERNYI

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