Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-53 (review) William Jay Risch

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 38, Number 1, Summer 2007, pp. 129-130 (Review)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/216618

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] REVIEWS | 129 The chapter on advertising in El tiempo takes the large leap of link- ing advertisements for patent medicines and ªre-insurance companies to the growing economic crisis affecting Ottoman Jewry. It is hardly a certainty, however, that ruined Jewish artisans sought to assuage their insecurities with either “pink pills” or policies from the London and Lancashire Fire, Ltd. Given the pioneering nature of Stein’s book, quibbles about omis- sions and overgeneralizations need not be stressed. The work raises a host of important issues regarding two Jewish communities in the throes of modernization, seen from a rare comparative perspective. John D. Klier University College London

Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–53. By Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004) 248 pp. $35.00 Gorlizki and Khlevniuk present a detailed, intriguing study about the last years of and his ruling circle, using Russian archival sources dealing with the ’s governing body—the — and its members that have only recently become available, as well as newly published memoirs and oral interviews. They show that, far from being at the complete disposal of one man or of various Party factions, the Soviet ruling circle had become a mixture of personal dictator- ship and modern state bureaucracy. It was a “neo-patrimonial” system marked by two elements in tension with each other—one based on a need to have predictable, specialized, committee-based methods of gov- erning and the other based on a system of personal loyalty that threat- ened “any notion of a continuous routine bureaucracy” (9). In clear, concise prose, the authors show that Stalin, attempting to control autonomous tendencies among his colleagues during World War II, resorted to bullying and vilifying them to restore the prewar equilibrium rather than initiating mass purges of the Party and state. Sta- lin’s personal whims weighed heavily on the actions of members of the ruling circle, as seen in the campaign against Western inºuences wrongly attributed by others to advisor Andrei Zhdanov. Yet elements of pre- dictable, committee-based forms of governance emerged as the Soviet government—the Council of Ministers and its committees—assumed greater responsibility for the economy. The Leningrad and Gosplan Af- fairs of 1949 to 1951, concocted by Stalin, were purges of a limited, sur- gical nature rather than signs of radical changes in governance. In the Nineteenth Party Congress of 1952, Stalin shook up the Party and state apparatus by ªercely attacking potential successors and instigating a cam- paign of hysteria against a supposed “Doctors’ Plot.” His failing health and declining mental state, however, increasingly removed him from the 130 | ROGER LANE workings of the inner circle, the members of which turned to collective forms of leadership and initiated comparatively radical reforms in the months after Stalin’s death. Though it is a fascinating, well-researched analysis of Kremlin in- side politics, Cold Peace lacks a comparative approach to the study of twentieth-century dictatorships. It makes only passing reference to those of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, failing to engage contemporary scholarship about either of them. In some cases, its arguments could have been more clearly explained. The authors often refer to the grow- ing Cold War tensions that had begun to inºuence Soviet policy by 1947/48, but they do not show them having an impact on the dynamics of the ruling circle. Nor do they pursue their suggestion that Stalin’s sev- entieth birthday in 1949 played a role in his motivation for the Lenin- grad and Gosplan Affairs and his change of leadership tactics. In addition, the oral interviews that they conducted with lower-ranking ofªcials and relatives of Politburo members did not receive critical treatment as sources. William Jay Risch Georgia College and State University

Murder on Trial, 1620–2002. Edited by Robert Asher, Lawrence B. Goodheart, and Alan Rogers (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005) 279 pp. $78.50 cloth $24.95 paper The three editors open this collection with an introductory essay on “Adjudicating Homicide: The Legal Framework and Social Norms,” which ranges over nearly four centuries in British North America and the United States. On the one hand, they trace the development of for- mal criminal-justice systems, from the different codes and procedures of seventeenth century Virginia and Massachusetts through the late eigh- teenth-century establishment of state and federal constitutions to the policies of the near present. This part is a story, mostly, of expanding rights granted to defendants. The process moved slowly but strongly through the colonial period, rapidly in the early states, and slowed down again until the 1860s and the Fourteenth Amendment. The “due pro- cess” clause ªrst inspired procedural changes, and, almost a century later, demanded them, once the United States Supreme Court determined that the federal Bill of Rights should extend to the states. The authors also point out that “changing community ideas about insanity, the development of children, gender roles, and racism have af- fected the law” (3). In broadest outline, legal reform has been driven by changing contemporary mores, notably by the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment and by the expansion of democracy to include not only white male defendants but women and minorities. Yet, even apart from some backing and ªlling—notably about capital punishment—at the case level the black-letter law has often in effect been subverted by pros-