Books

Much more than a monster: Stalin and Stalinism

A new book celebrates UCC’s Geoff Roberts by exploring his specialist subject, Joseph Stalin

Villagers attend an unveiling ceremony of a newly reinstated monument of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on his birthday anniversary in the village of Zemo Alvani, northeast of Tbilisi, in December, 2012. Photograph: David Mdzinarishvili / Reuters

James Ryan and Susan Grant
Thu Jan 7 2021 - 05:41

In a 2017 television interview, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was asked about the Stalin era by the American film director Oliver Stone. Putin shrugged and chuckled. “So what?” he responded, “we all carry within us some birth marks.”

It is impossible to understand our world today without grasping the imprint of Stalinism, if not quite its birth marks. But what was it? How should we make sense of it? And why does it still matter?

These are some of the questions addressed in our edited volume, Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020*). A collection of essays that celebrates the career of Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus at University College Cork and Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, the book arose out of a 2018 conference of the Irish Association for Russian, Central, and East European Studies, which marked Roberts’s retirement at UCC.

The result, in the words of one reviewer quoted on the back cover, is a “more balanced reading” of Stalin and the type of political regime that bears his name.

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The book focuses on three key aspects of Stalin and Stalinism: Stalin as leader and statesman; the cult of Stalin’s personality; and the Stalinist system and the Cold War. Contributors provide deftly nuanced understandings of one of the most controversial figures in 20th-century history: no easy task, considering the astonishing brutalities associated with Stalinism.

And, as we explain in our introduction, there is plenty of room for new perspectives on a man who has recently been the subject of several large biographies, and a political regime that has been examined in countless studies.

Chapters in the first section challenge conceptions of the Soviet dictator as little more than a “monster” by delving into his leadership in the 1930s and during the second World War.

If the first section deals with much of the controversy around Stalin as a leader, the second examines the challenges and complexities of his infamous leadership cult. Adopting a comparative perspective, chapters here explore the purpose and origins of the Stalin cult by assessing other leadership cults, for example, those of Paul von Hindenburg in Germany, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and even prime minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary today.

In the final section the locus moves to the Cold War period to examine the controversies, complexities and contradictions of the late Stalin years. Here, contributors revision the origins of the Cold War, examine the fascinating story of Soviet involvement in the Cold War peace movement, and assess the language and psychology of confessions in Stalinist Czechoslovakia.

Finally, in lieu of an epilogue, the volume concludes by asking whether Stalin and Stalinism are really undergoing a rehabilitation of sorts in Putin’s Russia – as is often thought – and what this question tells us about Russia today.

Bringing together cutting-edge research and expertise in the field of Soviet, Central and East European history, the volume has a distinctly Irish flavour: most contributors are or have been based in Ireland. And it is a timely publication that looks closely at dictatorial leadership, as we witness direct challenges to the robustness of democratic institutions in our own age.

Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus at University College Cork. Photograph: Tomas Tyner, UCC

It is also a fitting tribute to Geoffrey Roberts, a historian who has contributed so much to the Irish academy and to Irish Slavonic studies in particular, and someone who has never shied from confronting the controversies of the Stalin era.

Born in south London in 1952, Geoff earned his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Active in left-wing British politics, he transitioned to academia and moved to Ireland in 1992 to take up a teaching post in the history department at UCC. He would remain in Cork for the remainder of his academic career, with periodic fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, and the Nobel Peace Institute in Oslo, among others.

In his voluminous body of published work, Geoff has mastered the art of combining prodigious and meticulous scholarship with an ability to communicate to a wide readership. His principal themes have been Stalin-era Soviet foreign policy and diplomacy, the origins of the Cold War, military history, intellectual history, and biography.

He has also thought deeply and written widely about the nature of history and international relations as academic disciplines. In Stalin’s Wars (2006), his magnum opus, Geoff deftly marshalled an enormous quantity of research in the former Soviet archives to underline one of the great paradoxes of the 20th century: it fell to one brutal dictatorship, and the military leadership qualities of Stalin’s rule, to defeat an even greater threat to humanity in the form of the Nazi Reich. And the Cold War that subsequently followed the breakdown of the wartime Grand Alliance was by no means the fault of Stalin’s USSR alone.

During his time at UCC, Geoff acquired a reputation as a brilliant and inspiring teacher. His style was distinctive: fluent and lucid lectures unaided by notes or PowerPoint slides, structured tightly around a few words chalked on a blackboard, interspersed with humorous anecdotes as he paced the floor. And he inspired many of his students (ourselves included) into the historical profession, equipped with keen awareness of the importance of sharp analysis, a clear message, and refusal to accept simplistic narratives. He will be missed as a teacher and a colleague, but we look forward to more of his contributions to scholarship in the future.
James Ryan and Susan Grant are co-editors of Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies. *For the full list of chapters and contributors, please visit the publisher's website.