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• W4239737112 abstract "REVIEWS 379 Davies, Sarah and Harris, James. Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2014. xv + 340 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £50.00. Any attempt to depict the world of an individual is a risky enterprise. How can one describe his daily universe and ascertain his place in it? How can one know what of his environment he is interiorizing and how he is reacting to its challenges? Sarah Davies and James Harris have taken the risk of venturing into the world of no less an elusive individual than Stalin. They were far more fortunate than their predecessors, having access to a prodigious quantity of documents from his personal archives at their disposal, a great number of other original sources, an abundant secondary literature about Soviet history, and the necessary prudence to hazard no further than the limits the material imposed on their research. From these documents they have distilled everything the records could tell them and have resisted the temptation to speculate on questions the sources could not answer. They therefore divulge little about Stalin’s personality, but nevertheless manage to get a firm grip on his various different personae. Based on the available sources, Davies and Harris carefully reconstruct identifiable events to reveal Stalin’s reactions or deduce the reasons for his conduct within given situations. In this way, the authors offer a critical analysis of the archival evidence and a reading of the secondary information from a perspective that transcends their contexts. Stalin spent a great deal of time reading, annotating and writing documents. This helped him to understand what was going on within the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, even if they were not his only source of information. The resolutions he penned on these papers, the corrections he made, his responses to problems and questions, his reluctance to acknowledge them and his misreading of reports and situations drew the circumference of his world. At certain points the contour is hazy, at others it is sharp, while there are many points where it is discontinuous, and thus it clearly shows the limits of the distinct territories of Stalin’s universe. The most important of these domains was Stalin’s place at the commanding heights of the regime and his actions as Supreme Leader. Davies and Harris sketch a nuanced map of this field. Stalin occupied it cautiously in the 1920s, ingeniously recruiting his troops and making them dependent on his policies. On the one hand, he advocated care when it came to dealing with the cadres of the party and state apparatus. On the other, he was increasingly ready to clamp down on real and imaginary transgressors of the party line. Davies and Harris show that the dictator did not always recommend the former approach in order to mask the second. SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 380 Stalin was conscious that it was impossible to govern without officialdom, but he also knew that officials would not necessarily submit to Bolshevik discipline, particularly if they were obliged to carry out difficult tasks. Similarly, he saw how they were inclined to form networks of mutual protection. Stalin was not keen to admit that some projects were barely possible to realize. By the late 1920s he became more and more ready to suspect the dark machinations of his enemies behind foot-dragging and even simple failures. The authors show that Stalin was not maniacally paranoid. His suspicions followed from the Bolshevik vision of a world that was entirely hostile to the Soviet system and from a constant flow of reports attributing the regime’s problems to the manoeuvres of internal and external enemies. He was aware of the role espionage was playing in international relations, of the policies of containment deployed against his country, of the alliances of foreign powers against the USSR and of attempts by them to turn Nazi Germany and Japanese imperialism against the Soviet Union. Vigilance was indispensable in these circumstances, in which it was easy to see dangers where there were none and overlook others which were in fact imminent. Davies and Harris describe a world where Stalin was right to anticipate risks..." @default.
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• W4239737112 doi "https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.95.2.0379" @default.
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