LUIS TORRAS
Sunday, February 16, 2020 - 00:50
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Simon Sebag Montefiore, an Englishman educated in Cambridge, a disciple of experts in Russian history such as Robert Conquest and Robert Service, is the author of a great biography of Stalin, but fame came with Jerusalem, a bestseller in which he explains with great skill narrative how the holy city was built, and with the recent Written in history, a compilation of letters in which specific moments are captured and which wants to be an invitation to the layman to read history.
Where does the idea of doing this anthology of letters come from? It was something spontaneous. The main sources of my books are archival material and correspondence and I was very seduced by the idea of sharing these first-person history stories. What does a letter contribute to a historian? It is a resource of enormous value, something authentic, intimate, spontaneous and, at the same time, a reflexive piece, which gathers concerns, thoughts and perspectives of the character in question. It offers us the point of view in context. Within 100 or 200 years, can we say the same about Twitter and Facebook posts? A tweet is still an open letter. Social networks and emails are part of the reality of a moment and in the future they will be useful sources for writing history. The difference is that they are too fast, too easy, which reduces that reflective component that I referred to earlier. The letter is created in an area of intimacy with the recipient, while electronic communications are much more impersonal and lonely, they are not addressed to anyone in particular. Its effect in the political sphere is also more immediate and favors a culture of immediacy and the short term. Is current politics losing sense of history? The digital revolution barely leaves room for isolation and meditation. There is a constant battle to keep the voter's attention. This was not the situation of the great political leaders of yesteryear. Even the most preeminent figures enjoyed space for business, relaxation, sports. Our culture has exalted democracy, and it is essential that every voter can punish incompetent or corrupt leaders, but generates dysfunctionalities that are difficult to correct. Another problem is the degradation of the humanities in our educational system. History itself is not valued as before, and that results in less capable rulers. The politicians of before read and wrote more, like Winston Churchill ... Surely it is so, although everything about Churchill is exceptional. That said, so dangerous is the politician who does not read like the one who only reads a book that can apply to any situation. George W. Bush, for example, was greatly affected by the 1984 reading, whose dystopia compared to Saddam Husein's Iraq, which resulted in serious errors of judgment. Among your extensive work are his two volumes on Stalin, a figure still full of unknowns. Who was he? He was a Marxist-Leninist and a Russian nationalist, despite being born Georgian. It can be said that he invented the Soviet identity. He had a great sense of history, was a great reader and developed an enormous skill in handling the mechanisms of power, which he took advantage of for his own benefit. But if I had to choose an adjective that would sum it up I would say it was an extremist. He believed that the nature of society could and should be transformed and he thought that he was the person chosen for such a Herculean task and that it could only be carried out through enormous violence. It surprises its brutal transparency with respect to the objectives and the means. To Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian leader, he bluntly explained that he could implement the principles of the revolution as he wanted, but that his method was violent. De Stalin has the idea that he ruled omnivocally and with little resistance, but it was not always that way. It is a model of how to conquer and exercise power. Something that historians discovered after diving in the Kremlin archives is that Stalin did not arise by spontaneous generation. It was forged little by little. From Lenin's death to the Great Terror 10 years pass. During that decade, especially at the beginning of the 30s, Stalin had to prevail within the group of just over 100 people who formed the Bolshevik dome. It combines a Machiavellian dimension, of a statesman who falls apart without the slightest scruple of his political adversaries, with a social dimension. I really enjoyed the company of people. In the tumultuous period that goes from 1931 to 1937 it proved to be very bright. He directed a purge that assured him, on the one hand, the leadership and, on the other, the absolute loyalty of the survivors. From that moment on, his authority becomes incontestable. What was Lenin and Stalin's relationship with violence? For one and the other, violence was an instrument to impose his political vision. In the most psychological field, Lenin was indifferent to human suffering and Stalin enjoyed it. Despite this evidence, a very benign idea of Stalinism has been relatively recently in the West. What does this blindness attribute to? Soviet institutions were always very hermetic and centralized and were concentrated in few hands: those little more than 100 people who said before that they formed the hard core of Stalinist power. It was a small and secret organization, more similar to a terrorist group than to a government, as Lenin intended from the beginning. We never knew exactly what its internal functioning was. Even Churchill wonders in his memoirs if Stalin is not the prisoner of a politburo dominated by extremists. Stalin's most difficult moment is Hitler's betrayal. Was the Munich Pact your big mistake? One of the most delicate, no doubt, but not the worst. He told Churchill that the consolidation of his internal power led him to a more compromised situation than Hitler's betrayal. I could, of course, be lying to downplay how he had been fooled by the Führer, but my impression is that the situation in 1932 was limit. The failure of agricultural collectivization and famines put the regime on the verge of collapse. In 1941, on the contrary, the structures of the Party were solid and loyal. The Barbarroja operation was a serious crisis (Stalin even retired three days from the capital) and reveals a great error of judgment, but the new paintings closed rows without cracks. It was also a great epic moment. Stalin had always longed to be a general in times of war. He had devoured the biographies of Napoleon and Julius Caesar and became involved in the direction of the fighting very intensely, paying attention to every detail. And how did he do it? His trajectory was the inverse of Hitler. He read the situation very well at the beginning of the war. Connoisseur of the political and military weakness of France, in a short time he accumulated a series of rapid victories that endowed him with an aura of genius and a confidence that would later be revealed lethal. Stalin went from less to more: he began suffering a strong setback by not anticipating the Nazi invasion. The first year of war was of enormous hardness for the Red Army. Another leader would not have endured, but he recovered and ended up winning. A substantial revelation of his work is that Stalinism was not the work of a single man, but rather a system. If power is the ability to decide on the lives of others, the Stalinist system was tremendously powerful, and That cannot be achieved by the will of one man. The complicity of many others is needed. The Soviet Union was possible because terror and violence were institutionalized at all levels. What is the current relationship of Russians with their past? How do they see it? It is an interesting question. In the 90s, when I was investigating in the different archives, very critical books were published with the Soviet revolution, which were poorly received in broad sectors that consider liberal democracies corrupt, inoperative and, above all, hypocritical regimes. This supposed hypocrisy of the West is one of the arguments that nourishes the popularity of Putin, whose mandate has been a strong setback with respect to the sincere opening that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that time you had no problem accessing the documents I needed to write my books on Stalin. Today would be unimaginable.According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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