The Birth of a Legend
Stalin : The Career of a Fanatic. By Essad Bey. (Lane. 15s.) THERE has always, since man created God in his own image, been a strongly implanted desire in the human heart to personify—and then to deify—human achievement. The Russian, in this as in most other respects, is human, all too human. The first stage of the Russian revolution promptly and appropriately personified itself in Lenin, now well on his way to the posthumous divinity of Alexander the Great or the Roman Caesars. The second stage has grouped itself conveniently round the name of the Georgian, Joseph Djugash- vili, alias Stalin or the Man of Steel. Will Stalin too, in the fullness of time, achieve godhead ? There are signs that he may ; and this curious " biography " of him by Essad Bey, published last year in German and now well translated into English by Mr. Paterson, is one of them.
It scarcely, perhaps, deserves the name of biography ; for though it preserves the main outline of its hero's career, it obviously prefers picturesque fiction to bare fact. It reads in places like a Thackerayan parody of a novel by G. P. R. James, as witness this splendid opening of a dialogue between Stalin and his fellow Georgian Communist, Ordjonikidze
" Sit thee down, Sergo ! ' said Stalin with a kindly smile, for ho was genuinely fond of old Sergo. ' How many men are there in the C.C.C. ' he asked craftily, as soon as Serge had broken off a piece of the Caucasian churek."
(By a singularly inappropriate error, the printer has left two pages blank at this point, thereby depriving us of the climax of this promising episode.) But it is not, in the ordinary sense of the term, a vie ronianeee ; for the essence of this now fashionable literary form is to be, if not true, at any rate plausible. Sometimes, indeed, Essad Bey manages to preserve a deceptive air of verisimilitude. His statement that Stalin took as his second wife " a young Ossete girl of fifteen " is not improbable ; it is merely untrue. But more usually he soars into realms of pure legend. One characteristic example must suffice. He relates how on one occasion Stalin, having emptied a slop-pail over the Governor of a prison in which he was confined, was condemned to the punishment of " running the gauntlet," i.e., of passing before a regiment of soldiers each of whom delivered a blow with a flail on his back as he passed. Stalin received the terrible castigation quite unconcerned, sauntering along the line and studying " a book of essays by Lenin " as he went. It is superfluous to remark that this brutal punishment had been abolished many years before the date of Stalin's imprisonment, and that, in the days when it was applied, the victim neither walked nor ran but was carried along the lines of his torturers
strapped to a hurdle. Even if all the details had been right, the story would still have been clearly stamped as an example of the familiar type of Oriental legend which loves to attribute superhuman powers of courage and endurance to its heroes. " Ex Oriente lux," Essad Bey, himself an Oriental, proudly quotes ; but the light into which he leads us is the twilight of mythology, not the broad day of history.
Accuracy of fact is not, however, a condition of literary excellence. Essad Bey has all the gifts of a born writer ; and his book may be heartily recommended—except to anyone who is dull enough to want the truth about Stalin. His style is rapid, vivid and incisive. He has the advantage over other biographers of having himself been born in his hero's native Caucasus ; and he sketches brilliantly the sort of surroundings and conditions in which young Djugashvili grew up. He is less successful with the mature Stalin and takes refuge in fluent and contradictory generalizations. The dictator of Moscow is "gloomy, chivalrous, brutal and honourable." The selection of qualities is already sufficiently catholic to be almost meaningless. But there are plenty of stories in this book which might equally well justify another quartet of contrasted epithets—" humorous, treacherous, mild and unscrupulous." In short, the writer, once he gets his hero away from the Caucasian mountains, ceases to have, or at any rate to convey to the reader, any coherent conception of his personality. His Stalin hovers between the characters of legendary hero and legendary bogey-man—a strange combination of Samson, Raffles and Dick Turpin. He answers to almost any description save that applied to him in the sub-title of the book : a fanatic. For both Essad Bey and other biographers agree that Stalin, despite " a certain lack of culture," shares Lenin's capacity for reconciling theo- retical orthodoxy with political opportunism and is, at any rate in this respect, a worthy pupil of his master.
But Essad's mordant pen does not confine its attention to Stalin alone, and there are stories and character-sketches of many other prominent Bolsheviks. Kra.sain put forward a plan for enriching the Party funds by marrying good-looking young communists to wealthy widows. Molotov is an exemplary official whose " intolerable pedantry, colossal industry and conspicuous virtues make him odious to the Party." Litvinov conducts the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs with the " keen eye of an experienced ironmonger " and once boxed an Ambassador's ears, but has now learnt better diplomatic manners. Rykov (since deposed) is regarded by Stalin as " a harmless intellectual, more particularly because, in the event of any serious conspiracy, he always loses heart at the last moment and betrays his associates:, All this makes a pleasant pendant to the stories of how Stalin blackmailed a rich cloth-merchant or, when his best friend was run over by a lorry, telegraphed to the local Soviet to shoot the chauffeur, The author rarely condescends to quote an authority, and even on these rare occasions generally veils his informant under the decent anonymity of an initial. But it does not matter. The stories are good ; and " Stalin cares not a rap what Is said about him," Perhaps—you may remark as you lay down this lively but most unveraciotai book—it Is just as well.
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