Some of the most evocative pages I've had the pleasure to read come from the final chapter of Stephen Kotkin's breathtaking biography of Joseph Stalin. The second part of the monumental trilogy (two thousand pages and counting), Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, ends with the tense few hours before the fateful morning of June 22.
For a few moments, we are inside the head of one of the 20th century's bloodiest despots, pacing the room, distrusting everyone, fumbling with the pipe full of his favourite Herzegovina Flor cigarette tobacco. This is frankly astonishing stuff. Not least because you've already gone, and suffered, through hair-raising accounts of interrogations, arrests, executions. Because now it is he who is full of zoological dread. Because Hitler is at the door, Hitler whom he had recently toasted, and appeased, and supplied with grains and oil, and there is that sickening smell of madness mixed with German beer.And then there is silence, only slightly diluted by the black ravens crowing at the window. The black ravens he had ordered to shoot by the thousands. So yes, now there is silence, only slightly altered by his shuffling shoes hiding those monstrous webbed toes which, as the legend has it, betrayed Satanism.
This could all seem too 'flowery' considering the fact that Stephen Kotkin, a professor in history of both Stanford and Princeton Universities, wrote a book so objective and so rich in sources (hundreds of pages you'd need a magnifying glass to read). Some time ago, in Kotkin's conversation with Slavoj Žižek at the New York Public Library, the world's favourite Slovenian Marxist spoke about how sick he was of all those historians who focus 'too fucking much' on personality and overlook the historical context. To which Kotkin replied, quite rightly, that sometimes the personality is just too omnipotent, and overpowering.
And he tries, too, but what could you do about those mind-boggling 30s (even Hitler was dumbfounded), about a whole country ruled from one man's "Little Corner"?
Kotkin writes with great imagination, something you would not find in too many books on history, and the details he provides are of the kind that will stay with you long after you close the book. Those German women sewing Soviet flags to welcome Stalin in Berlin (German disinformation weeks before the attack). General Pavlov's subordinate listening to The Gypsy Baron by Johann Strauss II the night of the invasion. And, of course, the bust of Otto von Bismarck - whose neck got broken while being delivered to Hitler's office. With no one having the heart to tell the Führer.
Even before the third book is released (in the works; tentative title is Miscalculations and the Mao Eclipse), Stephen Kotkin's work seems unparalleled. In its two volumes, both fascinating and unfathomable, it could well deliver the strongest judgement on the 20th century this side of the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam.
