Most readers of this journal, despite life's vicissitudes, would take it for granted that they live in a society governed by reason and the rule of law. The example of their own careers would be enough to convince them that theirs was a society that rewarded talent, hard work, and moral commitment; and it would be hard to conceive of a society that was structured otherwise. Which makes it all the more shattering to read this account of post-second world war Soviet Russia. The authors describe a world in which what was rational and what was desirable were defined by the whims of one man, Stalin, and they make plain the nearly unimaginable degree of suffering for which he was personally responsible. It is sobering to realise not only that such a deranged regime existed, but also that it ruled over one of the two nuclear-armed superpowers of the 20th century.
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Jonathan Brent, Vladimir P Naumov
John Murray, £8.99, pp 399 ISBN 0 7195 6508 1 Published in the US by Harper Collins, $14.99 ISBN 0 06093310 0
Rating: ★★★★
Russia in the early postwar period was ambivalent about its Jewish population. The country's role in liberating the concentration camps had earned it the goodwill of Jews worldwide, and Jews occupied prominent positions in its bureaucracy, security services, and cultural and scientific institutions. But Jews were also widely suspected of harbouring sympathies toward the United States, the Soviets' emerging cold war rival, especially following the creation of Israel. Russian society's long history of antisemitism, in which Stalin shared, made the position of the Jews even more precarious.
It was in this social and political context that the death of Andrei Zhdanov occurred. Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo and the most powerful man in Russia next to Stalin, died in August 1948 from what appeared to be severe, decompensated heart failure. There soon arose a dispute among his doctors, however, about whether Zhdanov had had a massive heart attack in the weeks leading up to his death, and whether enough had been done to rule this out. Charges of criminal negligence surfaced, only to be quickly suppressed. An autopsy, hastily conducted, seemed to confirm the original diagnosis. And here the matter seemed to rest—until January 1953, when Stalin declared to the world that Zhdanov had been murdered by his doctors as part of an audacious Jewish conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet Union.
The real conspiracy, of course, was Stalin's attempt to use Zhdanov's death to launch a generalised pogrom against the Soviet Jewish elite. Using all the methods at his disposal—including imprisonment and torture—he extended his web of accusations from the doctors directly responsible for Zhdanov's care, only two of whom were actually Jewish, to include prominent Jewish intellectuals and civil servants, as well as alleged co-conspirators from the security services. This was only possible because Stalin made it so. His word was law, and if the truth did not fit into his preconceived plans, he invented a new truth that did. Only his sudden, unexpected death in 1953 prevented a catastrophic antisemitic purge that could have rivaled the Great Terror of the 1930s, and that could potentially have triggered a new world war.
Brent and Naumov piece together their account from an exhaustive review of the Soviet archives, often relying on documents that have never been made public before. They have produced a work of breathtaking scholarship, which illuminates one of the most tragic periods in modern history, and which illustrates the need never to take our own free and rational society for granted.