Sheila Fitzpatrick

Paris can be a dangerous place to visit. The Japanese are said to be particularly vulnerable to the medically recognised condition called ‘Paris syndrome’, which inflicts anxiety, depersonalisation and dizziness on those whose expectations are too high. Soviet Russians, though less prone to physical collapse than the Japanese, were even more heavily invested in Paris as the Mecca of civilised cultural pilgrimage. Despite the Soviet disdain for capitalism, deep respect for the Western cultural heritage was built into the Soviet system. The only problem was that the Soviet Union’s borders were closed.

While he deplored the Soviet regime and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, there was a jokey, blokey aspect to Robert Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which tended towards the deadly serious. For Conquest, the Soviet Union was no doubt an evil place, but above all it was a bizarre one, a society whose baroque self-inventions and elaborate mendacity made it an apt subject of black comedy.

Stephen Kotkin​’s Stalin is all paradox. He is pockmarked and physically unimpressive, yet charismatic; a gambler, but cautious; undeterred by the prospect of mass bloodshed, but with no interest in personal participation. Cynical about everyone else’s motives, he himself ‘lived and breathed ideals’. Suspicious of ‘fancy-pants intellectuals’, he was an...

The extraordinarily detailed information on the households and the complexity of their domestic relations is one of the remarkable and unique aspects of this book. Nobody knew what a good communist home ought to be like, Yuri Slezkine remarks, but on the basis of House of Government data it looks strikingly non-nuclear. Partnerships shifted, not always rancorously, so that an ex-wife plus children might be living down the hall from the new wife plus children, with the husband dividing his time between the flats.

Historians’ judgments, however much we hope the opposite, reflect the present; and much of this apologetic and deprecatory downgrading of the Russian Revolution simply reflects the – short term? – impact of the Soviet collapse on its status. By 2117, who knows what people will think?