Sarah Davies and James Harris have set themselves the task of trying to understand Stalin. They do this primarily through an examination of the kinds of information that Stalin had at hand, and through which he viewed the world. These two authors have spent years collectively culling and sifting through now available documents from Stalin’s personal archives—the mass of daily reports prepared for his reading, private correspondence, drafts of speeches, texts, marginal comments on texts, and e..

Shearer, David

English

OpenEdition

 
Cahiers du monde russe
Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États
indépendants 
56/4 | 2015
Médiateurs d'empire en Asie centrale (1820-1928)
Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World,
Dictating the Soviet Order 
David Shearer
Édition électronique
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8259
DOI : 10.4000/monderusse.8259
ISSN : 1777-5388
Éditeur
Éditions de l’EHESS
Édition imprimée
Date de publication : 1 octobre 2015
Pagination : 861-864
ISBN : 978-2-7132-2507-9
ISSN : 1252-6576
 
Référence électronique
David Shearer, « Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order  », Cahiers du
monde russe [En ligne], 56/4 | 2015, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2015, Consulté le 24 septembre 2020.
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8259  ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.
8259 
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2011
Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s
World, Dictating the Soviet Order 
David Shearer
RÉFÉRENCE
Sarah DAVIES, James HARRIS, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order, New Haven :
Yale University Press, 2014, 360 p.
1 Sarah Davies and James Harris have set themselves the task of trying to understand
Stalin. They do this primarily through an examination of the kinds of information that
Stalin had at hand, and through which he viewed the world. These two authors have
spent  years  collectively  culling  and  sifting  through  now  available  documents  from
Stalin’s personal archives—the mass of daily reports prepared for his reading, private
correspondence, drafts of speeches, texts, marginal comments on texts, and editing and
editorial  notes,  among  other  sources.  The  authors  also  include  several  hitherto
unpublished  diaries  of  people  close  to  Stalin,  or  who  worked  with  him  in  various
capacities. In these documents, argue the authors, lies the secret to understanding
Stalin. Stalin, as they argue, was a man of words, literally, as well as action, and the key
to understanding his actions are in his words. Words mattered to Stalin, and it was
through  words—words  that  he  both  read  and  wrote—that  Stalin  understood  and
attempted to fashion the world that he oversaw. By comparing Stalin’s actions with the
information he received, and through his marginalia and writings, Davies and Harris
believe  that  they  can  say  something  definitive  about  how  Stalin  perceived  and
misperceived the world about him, and how his thinking evolved over time. One might
argue this or that point, but, by and large, their book is convincing. The chapters are
clearly  conceptualized  and  well  grounded  in  historiography.  The  writing  is
straightforward and accessible.
2 Davies  and  Harris  divide  their  book  into  two  sections.  The  first  section  of  three
chapters focuses on the kinds of information that Stalin received, and how he filtered
Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order
Cahiers du monde russe, 56/4 | 2015
1
and interpreted that information. In the first chapter, the authors discuss Stalin’s view
of leadership, and especially his increasingly jaundiced view of the Party apparatus.
Chapters  two  and  three  focus  on  Stalin’s  penchant  for  seeing  spies  and  saboteurs
everywhere, and his constant fear of capitalist encirclement and potential war. In the
second  section  of  the  book,  Davies  and  Harris  discuss  how  Stalin  managed his
leadership  cult,  his  changing  views  of  Soviet  society  and  its  stratification,  and  his
various pronouncements on culture, art, and socialist realism. This second section is
based not so much on information that Stalin received as on a close reading of his
various unpublished writings and notes, emendations, correspondence, and editorial
comments. In both sections, the Stalin who emerges is a far more sophisticated and
subtle thinker than Trotsky’s Stalin—a power hungry bureaucratic schemer, a man of
narrow vision  and  low  cunning.  Davies  and  Harris  portray  Stalin’s  worldview  as  a
mixture of preconceived ideas, but also pragmatic flexibility. His thought was far from
static. His thinking about state building, domestic and international politics, economic
management,  class  and  society,  and  culture  evolved:  it  was  “multifaceted,”  often
adaptable, and at times sophisticated. Stalin read enormous amounts of material, and
he paid close attention to words and their meaning and, as others have also pointed
out, he spent an enormous amount of time finding just the right words to try to craft
and mold a Soviet  Union in his  image.  This  is  why we must pay close attention to
Stalin’s words, argue Davies and Harris. It is Stalin’s words, especially his changing use
of words, that give us insight into his vision of the world.
3 Three arguments stand out in this book, the first of which is perhaps the weakest of the
three. In the first chapter, “‘Bolshevik’ Leadership,” Davies and Harris detail Stalin’s
attempts  to  fashion  an  economic  and  political  leadership  cadre  from  at  least  the
mid‑1920s through the 1930s, and they trace his growing frustration with that group.
This  chapter  traces  Stalin’s  growing dissatisfaction  with  regional  subordinates  who
were either too heavy handed—too authoritarian—and therefore ineffective, or more
often than not, engaged in passive avoidance, foot‑dragging, and outright falsification,
all the while pretending that they were fulfilling central directives. Stalin refused to
accept  that  his  own  overly  ambitious  plans  fostered  exactly  these  kinds  of  coping
responses, and he blamed lower party leaders for the inevitable and massive failures in
agrarian  and  industrial  policies  of  the  1930s.  Davies  and  Harris  argue  that  Stalin’s
frustration built to a crescendo in the late 1930s. Once his power became unassailable,
Stalin  engaged  in  a  massive  purge  of  what  he  believed  to  be  incompetent  and
“double‑dealing,”  hypocritical  managers.  Here,  according  to  the  authors,  is  the
explanation for the great purges of the late 1930s. As the authors write, “[b]ecause the
coping  behavior  was  so  pervasive,  the  political  violence  directed  against  economic
officials was doomed to be devastating.” (20). The book’s discussion of how Stalin’s own
policies created a dysfunctional bureaucracy is clear and rings true. It was true also
that  Stalin  was  frustrated  by  what  he  regarded  as  a  lethargic  and  complacent
nomenklatura. At the same time, such a mono‑causal explanation of the great purges of
1936‑1938 gives short shrift to more overt political interpretations. The latter center on
Stalin’s  desire  to  rid  himself  of  a  generation  of  political  elites  who  he  feared  had
become too ensconced in their own power networks, and who posed a potential threat
to Stalin’s rule. [See, for example, Oleg Khlevniuk, “The First Generation of Stalinist
‘Party  Generals’”  in  E.A. Rees,  ed.,  Centre‑Local  Relations  in  the  Stalinist  State,
1928‑1941 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 37‑64)].
Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order
Cahiers du monde russe, 56/4 | 2015
2
4 The second argument put forward in the book is much stronger than the first,  and
revolves around the authors’ assertion that, given the realities of the times, Stalin was
not simply delusional or cynically manipulative about conspiracies. His paranoia had a
basis in reality. Davies and Harris develop this line of argument in chapters two and
three, on spy mania and capitalist encirclement. These are two of the best chapters in
the book, as the authors point out that Stalin had good reason to fear conspiracies.
Zinov´ev  and  Kamenev  did,  indeed,  want  to  replace  him  as  head  of  the  ruling
Communist Party and the country. Trotskii was a real enemy and, in the early 1930s,
boasted that he would work within and without the USSR to bring down Stalin.  As
Davies and Harris also point out, it was no secret that capitalist countries were hostile
to the Soviet Union. They did, in fact, engage in spying, lots of it, and they supported
insurgent groups inside the Soviet Union. Stalin did not need to invent enemies. There
were plenty enough of those. Where he was mistaken, according to the authors, was to
see  all  of  these  enemies  acting  in  concert,  and  in  seeing  every  event—foreign  or
domestic—as part of that single large conspiracy. 
5 Davies  and  Harris  explain  Stalin’s  misperception  of  coordinated  and  ongoing
conspiracy as a genuine misperception, not as a tactical strategy to divert blame for
overzealous  policies,  or  as  a  ploy  to  mobilize  mass  support  for  overly  ambitious
industrialization policies. The leader’s penchant to see ever widening and omnipresent
conspiracies  resulted  from several  influences:  his  own conspiratorial  activities  as  a
revolutionary, the ruthless conflicts of his civil war experience, Bolshevik ideology and
political culture, party power struggles,  and the hostile international climate of the
1920s and 1930s. Most important of all, however, according to Davies and Harris, was a
multi‑centered and overlapping information system designed specifically to seek out
and identify hostile intents and actions. The domestic and international branches of
the  political  police,  the  diplomatic  corps,  and  news  agencies,  especially  Tass,  all
operated to feed Stalin with the kind of information that he was predisposed to expect:
conspiracy and more conspiracy. Davies and Harris are at their best in chapters two
and three as they detail how Stalin viewed and wove together various events—foreign
and domestic—that were often unconnected, but that Stalin put together in a way to
confirm what he wanted to believe. The murder of the Soviet diplomat P.  Voikov, for
example, in Warsaw in June 1926, is the classic example. The Soviet foreign minister at
the time,  Chicherin,  understood the murder for  what  it  was,  a  singular  event  by a
disgruntled  anti‑Bolshevik  émigré.  Stalin,  however,  saw the  secret  machinations  of
Britain, France, Poland, and even Romania behind the murder, all acting together to try
to provoke a  war.  Voikov’s  murder and Stalin’s  interpretation are well  known,  but
Davies and Harris show that Stalin’s fear of war was not just episodic or a cynical tactic
to entrap political opponents. Stalin’s fear and sense of vulnerability was consistent
from the early 1920s until 1941. The German invasion of that year seemed to confirm
nearly two decades of misperceptions about concerted and secret foreign intentions to
destroy the USSR. Stalin’s fears had a basis in fact, argue Davies and Harris, although
Stalin, relying on a biased information system, exaggerated the scale and coordination
of that threat. As the authors note, Stalin built a strong Soviet Union, but he perceived
his position and the defense of the country to be in constant jeopardy. The Stalinist
state was strong, conclude Davies and Harris, but Stalin perceived it to be weak.
6 The third, and one of the most interesting, arguments of this book focuses on Stalin’s
evolution of thinking about class and society in the Soviet Union. Chapter five, “The
Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order
Cahiers du monde russe, 56/4 | 2015
3
Working Class,” shows well the fruitfulness of the authors’ approach in deriving Stalin’s
thought processes from his verbal and written comments. In this chapter, Davies and
Harris follow Stalin’s thinking about working class hegemony, from his belief in class
struggle and proletarian dictatorship in the 1920s and early 1930s to a broader, more
inclusive  idea  of  Soviet  society  by  the  mid  and  late1930s.  The  authors  follow  this
transformation in the leader’s  thinking by examining Stalin’s  close editing of  party
slogans, literature, newspaper and other media coverage, and his own history of the
Communist Party. By the late 1930s, with the victory of socialism supposedly secured in
the  USSR,  Stalin  promoted  a  vision  of  Soviet  society  not  as  one  dominated  by
working‑class hegemony and riven by class conflict, but as a “cohesive” community, a
socialist  whole (276‑277).  That community included workers (though not a  working
class,  as  such),  but  was  increasingly  dominated  by  a  specifically  sovietized  kind  of
intelligentsia made up of educated managers, literate specialists, and cultural workers.
Stalin perceived Soviet society as a work still in progress, but by the end of the 1930s, it
was,  he  believed,  cohering  into  something  more  than  just  a  conglomeration  of
peasants, workers, and an intelligentsia. After the war, as Davies and Harris note, Stalin
no longer referred to the proletariat, or to peasants, but to Soviet citizens. His careful
excising of class language from party and state slogans reveals a significant change in
the dictator’s thinking about the Soviet sotsium.
7 In  their  final  chapter,  “Soviet  Culture,”  Davies  and  Harris  discuss  Stalin’s  various
pronouncements about socialist realism, and what it meant. By looking at what Stalin
actually wrote or said, the authors conclude that, in Stalin’s thinking, socialist realism
was a flexible series of guidelines rather than a set of dogmatic precepts. At times, his
comments or  letters  seemed to confirm a narrow,  didactic  interpretation,  as  in his
famous comments that music should be written with a clear melody, or that story lines
should  be  simple,  moralistic,  and  grandly  heroic.  As  often  as  not,  though,  Stalin
criticized many works that he believed were too simplistic, too black and white, and
that did not reflect the complexities of life as it was lived by ordinary people. Davies
and  Harris  acknowledge  the  apparent  contradictions  in  many  of  Stalin’s
pronouncements, but they see this as evidence that Stalin’s views about Soviet culture
were more sophisticated and flexible than previously thought. This may be the case,
but one might read these contradictory statements in another way: not as a sign of
flexibility, but as evidence of Stalin’s manipulation of culture toward whatever political
ends suited him at a particular moment. In either case, this chapter, and this book, give
pause for a reassessment of Stalin. It is a work full of interesting and fresh assessments,
and it should generate a number of new research leads in the history of the Stalinist
dictatorship. 
AUTEURS
DAVID SHEARER
University of Delaware
Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order
Cahiers du monde russe, 56/4 | 2015
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