Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

120 BOOK REVIEWS
result, one may gain far more knowledge about the institutions and forces at work in
Stalin’s Soviet Russia by reading more specialized works on the Red Army or the Great
Terror but not get the connections between the life and times of Stalin in as systematic an
inquiry as Service provides. Service’s biography will become the basic reference work
for those wanting to understand Stalin.
Throughout the book Service attempts to separate fact from rumor and gossip, but it
is not always clear how he assessed specific information, and decided what to describe
and what to discount. Obviously this is a complicated, difficult task because some
personal information comes from those who knew Stalin or observed the results of his
actions, either as friends or enemies, in very emotional and confrontational situations.
Often the tidbits have been passed on to friends or relatives who somehow survived the
terror and purges and later wrote about the incident(s). For example, Service does not
deal with the accusation that Stalin raped his second wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, on a train
trip during the civil war into southern Russia, and appealed to her angry father not to
shoot him. From his coverage of the period and Stalin’s relationship with the Allilueva
family, it would appear that this incident never occurred. Also, Service rejects reports that
Stalin later shot Nadezhda in a fit of anger, choosing instead to present the scene as the
suicide of an emotionally needy person.
The first part of the book discusses Stalin’s life until 1917 and evaluates the impact
of his early experiences in how he was shaped as a young person growing up in Georgia
in a dysfunctional family. Service follows him into exile in Tsarist Russia, describing a
“me-centered” person whose behavior led one of his Bolshevik comrades to change
living arrangements (106). In addition, his interest in adolescent girls finally led to the
daughter of one of his host families becoming pregnant (107). At the same time he was
increasingly becoming a key figure in the Bolshevik party, although he was willing to
disagree with Lenin on a number of ideological issues.
In evaluating Stalin’s role in the 1917 revolution and the civil war that followed,
Service argues that Stalin’s relationship with Lenin became more complicated. Clearly
Stalin was not a “yes man,” and was willing to disagree with Lenin on issues such as the
immanency of a worldwide communist revolution. But at the same time Stalin was
influenced by Lenin’s decision to introduce state terror as a means to preserve Bolshevik
power. According to Service “terror attracted him like a bee to a perfumed flower” (158),
and during the civil war he “applied violence, including terror, on a greater scale than
most other central communist leaders approved of” (171). Service also rejects the
commonly held idea that Stalin was, during this period of time, just a party bureaucrat
who chose to remain in the background. He held important party positions, but he was
also a “dynamic leader who had a hand in nearly all of the principle discussions on
politics, military strategy, economics, security and international relations” (174). He was
in an excellent position to succeed Lenin in spite of Lenin’s critical comments about him
in his Last Testament.
Stalin’s rule after Lenin’s death was marked by increasing fear of potential rivals
and also a desire to foster his view of Marxist-Leninism in industry and agriculture. He
was not held accountable for his policy mistakes and it is questionable whether he even