Spy's eye view
Sir: Mr Tibor Szamuely's review of The Young Stalin in your 29 March issue has me engaged in 'a massive rewriting of history to prove that spies had actually been running the show long before anyone caught on.' That curious syntax is deplorable. For I did not attempt to rewrite history: that had been Stalin's forte. I merely set the record straight.
Asserting that 'In Mr Smith's eyes the Bol- shevik party was rather like the present-day Communist party of the us, most of whose members are said to be FBI agents' and . . . In Mr Smith's view most of the Bolsheviks in contact with Stalin were themselves police agents,' Mr Szamuely posits his own opinions, that reveal, perhaps unwittingly, more about him than about The Young Stalin. Nowhere in my book did I compare pre-1917 bolsheviks with the Communist party of the us. Okhrana agents exercising an uncommon influence in revolutionary proceedings indeed infested Lenin's fraction. And, it is true that many (not 'most,' as Mr Szamuely exaggerates) bolsheviks around Stalin were police agents : MalinovskY, a delegate to the rv Duma, the principal bol- shevik in Russia before 1914, and Lenin's friend and confidant; Dr Zhitomirsky, charged by Lenin with propaganda distribution to Russia; and Chernomazov, the first editor of Pravda.
Nor did I write that 'Joseph -Stalin had been an active agent of the . .. Tsarist secret police, whose orders he had conscientiously carried out for nearly twenty years.' Evidence does suggest that Stalin had a relationship with the Okhrana for slightly more than a decade. But, the statement- that I was 'unable to provide a single shred of evidence to substantiate [this]
thesis,' indicates that Mr Szamudy has not learned the difference between evidence and proof. Evidence abounds: for the moment we are lacking proof.
In the penultimate paragraph of his review, Mr Szarnnely flippantly suggests that Stalin was actually Lord Kitchener in disguise. This indul- gence in fantasy about a serious work may amuse someone who lacks the basic under- standing of my attempt to chronicle Stalin's pre-revolutionary life. I for one find it sadly inappropriate in the SDECTATOR.
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