A Novelist Re-creates Stalin

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 4

A Novelist Re-creates Stalin

Joseph. By Mervyn Jones. Jonathan Cape. 507 pp. Coinciding with new signs of the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation in Russia comes this Intriguing novel based on the dictator’s life. To many, the author’s lack of concern for historical truth will be irritating. Incidents and details have been invented or altered, the characters have all acquired Anglicised names (their real-life Russian counterparts are listed at the back of the book) and it is a little disconcerting to find the novel’s Joseph with one wife, not two, one child and not three, etc. Examined purely as a work of fiction it is an objective novel with rich studies of men taking a nation of millions into a new epoch and especially of the man who was the • key figure. The author carefully describes Joseph’s early years—his mother is deserted by her drunken, cobbler husband and forced to become a washerwoman but is determined to send her only child to school. Later Joseph enters a seminary where he enjoys the quiet meditative life until a visit to a library introduces him to wider reading and he becomes committed to the revolution. Slowly he works his way up from Party member to local technical branch leader to member of the Central Committee and finally General Secretary of the Party. Lacking brilliance or charm, Joseph seems an unlikely successor to Lenin: his detached self-sufficiency is almost sinister to his colleagues, but he is systematic, thorough and totally absorbed in the Party’s purpose. After successfully re-making the vast nation, he turns his attention to re-making its people, but, obsessed with the greatness of his vision, be is unable to see the fear, hopeless suffering and shattered lives around him. The book leaves him in World War II leading a devoted and determined nation in the defence , of their country. As an interesting com-

parison: Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, saw her father as all-power-ful but impotent in the face of the frightful system that had grown up around him. Joseph’s son describes his father thus: “He is utterly pure, and he is totally corrupt Pure, because he thinks only of what is right and wise and necessary. Corrupt because he excludes all judgment outside himself; what he finds right is always what increases his power." The author is a nercentive and convincing novelist