CHILDREN OF THE ARBAT
Anatoli Rybakov
Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
752 pp., $19.95
There is a (probably) apocryphal story that is often told about Stalin's death. Though everyone has assumed that, unlike Lenin, he left behind no last will and testament, the guardians of the Kremlin archives know better. Considering all the trouble that Lenin's document caused, there is really little reason to be surprised that Stalin's will has remained such a closely guarded secret. Discovered on Stalin's bedside table were two sealed envelopes, each of which carried the deceased tyrant's handwritten instructions. On one he had scribbled "To be opened if things get bad"; on the other "To be opened if things get really bad."
As the months passed, the political situation began to deteriorate: There were riots in East Berlin, uprisings in the Soviet concentration camps; writers and artists started to demand more freedom; there were shortages of almost everything in the stores; Eastern Europe grew increasingly restive. The new leaders were at a loss as to what to do and decided to open the envelope marked "To be opened if things get bad." Inside they found a plain piece of paper on which Stalin had written "Blame everything on me--Joseph Vissarianovich Stalin." And, sure enough, they followed his advice; they lumbered him with sole responsibility for every single shortcoming of the Soviet system--past, present, or future.
For a while, Stalin's advice seemed to work. True, the uprisings in Hungary and Poland had to be put down, but the quality of life seemed to be improving. Most of the concentration camp inmates were released; agricultural reforms were undertaken; more consumer goods were promised; relations with the West appeared to be getting better. It was all to prove ephemeral, however. Within a few years the Virgin Lands scheme had failed; there were just as many shortages as before; writers like Solzhenitsyn were going beyond taking tendentious swipes at Stalin and had begun to examine the underlying assumptions of the communist system; crises in Cuba and Berlin confirmed that, no matter who was in charge, Marxist-Leninist ideology could not coexist peacefully with the West.
Once again Stalin's successors were at a loss, and once again they went to the archives to consult the oracle. Opening the envelope marked "To be opened if things get really bad," they found a plain piece of paper just as before. On it Stalin had scribbled "Do exactly as I would have done--Joseph Vissarianovich Stalin." And since that time the Soviet leaders have followed this injunction more or less diligently. Or, rather, they have been uncertain as to whether to follow the first piece of advice or the second, and have at various times acted in accordance with the one or with the other or with both simultaneously.
Even today, in the era of glasnost, there appears to be profound confusion about Stalin. He is denounced at party congresses, yet the correspondence columns of newspapers are filled with moving tributes to the tyrant; Gorbachev has called him both a violator of "socialist legality" and Lenin's true heir; the much-lauded perestroika itself, involving as it does a crackdown on drunkenness, lax labor discipline, the so-called second economy, and Brezhnevite satrapies within the party,
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