Scorched Earth

Starred review from October 17, 2016
Baberowski, professor of Eastern European history at Humboldt University in Berlin, analyzes the Stalinist system in what is arguably the most comprehensive and perceptive volume of its kind in the West. He begins with a brief, brilliant study of the nature of Stalinist violence. Stalin detached violence from communist ideology, making violence “subject to the purposes of the dictator alone” and a continuation of “the tsarist project of registering, homogenizing, and subjugating” the empire’s subjects. This practice was developed in a culture of civil war that produced “a synthesis of delusions and excessive violence” and a generation of functionaries to implement them. They could control their regime by force, but not the general population. The result was a “dictatorship of subjugation” that violently disciplined people who “were nothing more than raw material from which New Men were to be sculpted.” Power and propaganda produced a “public world of lies and a private world of truth,” in which “no one was able to protect themselves from persecution.” Any hope that the violence “served a higher purpose” was trampled as domestic terror expanded through endemic deportation and murder. Baberowski’s chilling account of Stalin’s system shows how the country cannibalized itself as one man sought total power.