******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
‘All my own relatives are in prison too!’ Yoram Gorlizki by Sheila Fitzpatrick <http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Fitzpatrick,+Sheila> Princeton, 384 pp, £24.95, September 2015, ISBN 978 0 691 14533 4 We were ‘milk-drinkers’ by comparison, Vyacheslav Molotov, for many years Stalin’s deputy, said of Stalin’s inner circle. ‘Not one man after Lenin … did even a tenth of what Stalin did.’ For Molotov, Stalin’s organisational skills, his boldness and his cunning saved the Bolshevik Revolution after Lenin died. Others would take a different view. Either way, part of the fascination Stalin exercises comes from the sharp contrast, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, between the warm, affectionate, tactile world of his inner circle and the often brutal world beyond – and the ease with which disbelieving former friends and comrades were dispatched from one to the other. Stalin was skilled in the art of eviction. ‘Rykov and his gang must be driven out but for the time being this is just between ourselves,’ he mused to Molotov in 1929. Members of the group were to be dropped one by one, according to different timetables. ‘No doubt this incremental approach was the product of Stalin’s caution,’ Sheila Fitzpatrick observes in *On Stalin’s Team*, ‘but at the same time it had a tinge of sadism: the defeated hung twisting in the wind for a long time, begging for clemency and reinstatement … until they ended up as total outcasts if not gibbering wrecks.’ *The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.* http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n16/yoram-gorlizki/all-my-own-relatives-are-in-prison-too?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3816&utm_content=usca_nonsubs&hq_e=el&hq_m=4371237&hq_l=30&hq_v=252679b491 _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
