Spy's eye view
TIBOR SZAMUELY
The Alliluyev Memoirs Translated and edited by David Tutaev (Michael Joseph 50s)
One of the distinctive features of our age is the ubiquity of the spy, the informer, the traitor, the secret police agent. And, since the spy is already held responsible for nearly every- thing, from the launching of a sophisticated literary magazine to the downfall of a govern- ment in some remote country with an unpro- nounceable name, the logical next step is a massive re-writing of history to prove that spies had actually been running the show long before anyon_. had caught on.
The Young Stalin is clearly a fruit of this ambitious undertaking. Its author, Mr Edward Ellis Smith, is described as an ex-employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, with many years of service in Moscow and elsewhere. The book's thesis is breathtakingly simple: that throughout his whole revolutionary career, until 1917, Joseph Stalin had been an aetive agent of Okhrana, the Russian tsarist secret police, Whose orders he had conscientiously carried out for nearly twenty years. It is a fascinating thesis, shedding entirely new light on the history of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. I hope I am not being an over-pedantic spoil sport when Inoint out, as its only weakness, that the author is unable to provide a single shred of evidence to substantiate his thesis.
A great deal of research has gone into the
book: it contains twenty-one pages of biblio- graphy and 859 footnotes, or 2.27 footnotes per page of text; the author has delved deep into the rich store of top secret Russian police archives at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, and even prints previously unknown letters by Lenin, Stalin and other Bolshevik luminaries. And the truth, for Mr Smith, is self- evident: Stalin's post-revolutionary falsifica- tion of his early record 'indicates that he was striving to conceal matters the disclosure of which would have been politically disastrous and personally shameful to him and might also have placed his life in jeopardy' (the notion that he might have been doing it in order to build up the legend of a revolutionary leader second only to Lenin is not even considered). But, adds MT Smith triumphantly, `the deception is over.' The truth is revealed at last.
Mr Smith starts fairly cautiously : 'We are entitled to consider the possibility that during June or July 1899 an officer of the Tiflis Gend- arme Administration may have made an offer to Soso [Stalin] to serve the police.' Are we so entitled? Well, why not? One thing leads to another: `The-police may have set up specific clandestine tasks for him to accomplish.' A page later: `undoubtedly the police were also pushing him into the strike movement.' Once the basic fact has become `undoubted,' the rest is easy sailing. Why did Stalin become involved in strikes? Because `the police, no doubt; were intent on improving his credentials as a revolu- tionary.' Did Stalin write revolutionary pro- clamations? `Possibly they were composed in police headquarters.' We thought we had no information about his life between August 1900 and March 1901? Ah, but `in reality, this period was full of work that he did for the police.' (Pity we are not told what it was.) And so it goes. Poor old Stalin! Everything he did provesthat he was a police agent! If he is-arrested—the police want him out of the way; if he remains free—he is doing useful work for the police; if he escapes from exile—the police had engineered it to get him back into circula- tion; if he fails to escape—the police are punish- ing him for obstreperous behaviour.
It's no good looking for evidence: there is none. Every insignificant fact is carefully docu- mented—except the statements concerning Stalin's police activities. Sorry, there is one item of `proof': a report, published in 1936 in a Russian émigré paper, of an interview with the Georgian Menshevik leader Zhordania, in which the latter allegedly said that thirty years before the Bolshevik Shaumyan had suspected Stalin of denouncing him to the police. The author returns to this interview again and again, but, even if the facts are true, it is not much to go by : denouncing political and personal opponents to the police was a much-favoured practice of Russian revolutionaries, and later of European communists. It carried no implica- tion of working for the police.
And another strange thing: while Mr Smith sees his book—justifiably--as providing a com- pletely new picture of Stalin's life, all this had, 'according to him, been widely suspected, prac- tically common knowledge, for many years in the Russian revolutionary movement. But then in Mr Smith's view most of the Bolsheviks in contact with Stalin were themselves police agents, and most of the party's activities were really inspired or organised by the police: the Moscow uprising of 1905, the bank `expropria- "tions' of 1906-1907, the founding of Pravda and so on. In Mr Smith's eyes the Bolshevik party was rather like the present-day Communist party of the us, most of whose members are said to be Inr agents.
Among Mr Smith's sources are the memoirs of Sergei and Anna Alliluyev, Stalin's father- and sister-in-law. By a peculiar coincidence an abbreviated version of these has just appeared in English. Not that either the Alliluyevs or Mr Smith are well-served by this skimpy and ridiculously over-priced example of late Stalinist hagiography. Its sole interest lies in its information about the standard of living of the Russian working-class before the revolution—considerably higher than after fifty years of 'proletarian dictatorship.' Old Alliluyev, a skilled worker, sent all his four children to fee-paying secondary schools, treated himself to champagne when ill and disputched his son to the Crimea to recuperate.
But to return to Mr Smith. Was Stalin really a faithful agent of the tsarist secret police?
Personally, I much prefer the older story' that
Stalin was really Kitchener, who had not gone down with HMS 'Hampshire,' but had been art- fUlly transferred to a Russian submarine and soon assumed control of the revolution. A' lot Of things about Stalin would fit in with -this theory : the strong facial resemblance, the in- variable military greatcoat, the foreign accent, the military incompetence combined with streaks of genius, the lack of interest in women, and, perhaps most significant of all, the strange relationship with Churchill (the one man who would have known the truth): calling him 'my old comrade-in-arms'(!) while at the same time obViously hating his guts.
What's that? None of this is conclusive? Per- haps not—but still a jolly sight more so than Mr Smith's theory.
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