Inside The Kremlin
by Vladimir Solovyov And Elena Klepikova
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Book Summary Information
Author: Vladimir Solovyov And Elena KlepikovaEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Import
Published: 1987
ISBN: 0491034377
Number of pages: 278
Publisher: W H Allen
Book Reviews of Inside The Kremlin
Book Review: The Persistence of Despotism in the Russian Soul
Summary: 5 Stars
This review is based on the paperback edition (1988). The book focuses on Communist politics, especially in the 1970's and 1980's, but is much more than that. It probes the Russian psyche, making it timeless. Solovyov and Klepikova (hereafter SK) comment: "During the many centuries of their servile existence, the common people of Russia have become used to interpreting mercy as weakness, sadism and barbarous treatment as strength, and fear as respect." (p. 36).
"Every time a totalitarian system in Russia is weakened or destroyed, it arises again, in response to a special kind of need, to `popular demand'...Because totalitarianism in Russia is...a unique form of populism...the people's distrust and fear of freedom." (p. 257). SK accurately predicted that, after the fall of Communism, Russians would increasingly favor a return of authoritarianism (p. 266). Leon Trotsky once said: "Every policeman knows that although governments change, the police remain." (p. 86).
Soviet anti-Semitism is examined: "Stalin, though, had become an anti-Semite long before, most likely as a reaction to the disproportionate part take by Jews in political life (by no means merely among the Bolsheviks but across the whole pre-revolutionary spectrum, except for such extreme right-wing organizations as the pogromist `Black Hundred'.)(p. 133).
SK's discussion of Poland may as well have been copied out of a Polish history book! "Poland has always been the most unruly of the Russian empire's subject nations...The Polish uprising of 1831 was put down by Emperor Nicholas I, who had been so stern and cruel in Russia that he was nicknamed `Nick the Stick'. Yet in 1863, his liberal son, Emperor Alexander II, who two years before had abolished serfdom in his own country, used no less cruelty in `pacifying' Poland. We find the same amazing consistency in our own century. In 1920 Lenin...[then] Stalin...in the military pact with Hitler, and...again...at Yalta" (p. 109).
Interestingly, SK see Polish military successes not as Polish imperialism but as defense against perennial Russian imperialism: "A glance at the history of Russo-Polish wars, which covers several centuries, includes several defeats that deeply injured Russian imperial vanity, from the capture of Moscow early in the seventeenth century to that of Kiev and Minsk and the Red Army's humiliating defeat near Warsaw in 1920, sometimes called `the miracle on the Vistula River'." (p. 110). SK attribute the Katyn massacre to "...the Russians' traditional military fear of the Poles." (p. 110). Furthermore, "And does not Stalin's twofold fear of Poland--his own, compounded by the traditional Russian dread--explain the Red Army's failure to help the Poles (actually, its betrayal of them) in August 1944? The Warsaw Uprising itself was the result of a carefully thought-out Soviet provocation." (p. 110).
SK elaborate on the Soviet assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II (p. 103, 106, 117, 126). The mysterious murders of prominent Poles in the early 1980's, notably Father Jerzy Popieluszko, were part of a Soviet plan to destabilize Jaruzelski in favor of a more Soviet-servile successor (pp. 127-129).
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