국내에 출간된 가장 두꺼운 레닌 평전 <레닌>(시학사, 2001)의 저자 로버트 서비스(1947- )의 신작 <스탈린, 강철 권력>(교양인, 2007)이 번역돼 나왔다. 이번엔 1,000페이지가 넘으니 거의 '사건' 수준이다. 작년에 같은 출판사의 '문제적 인간' 시리즈에서 <네차예프, 혁명가의 교리문답>(교양인, 2006)을 번역해낸 역자 윤길순씨의 작품인데, 반 년도 지나지 않아 이만한 분량을 번역해낸다는 게 어떻게 가능한지 경이롭고 경탄스럽다(이 정도면 스탈린시대의 노동 영웅 스타하노프 수준 아닌가?!).
어쨌든 그 경이로운 '노동' 덕분에 표트르 대제와 함께 러시아사의 '주인'이자 20세기 최고의 권력자 스탈린의 삶을 우리말로도 따라가볼 수 있게 되었다. 트로츠키의 반스탈린주의와 우리식의 반공주의적 시각으로 덧칠돼 있던 스탈린의 모습을 그 실물에 가깝게 복원해줄 것으로 기대된다. 이전에 국내에 소개된 가장 방대한 전기는 아이작 도이처의 <스탈린>(한림출판사, 1972; 원저는 1960)이며, 이 책은 '정치적 전기'란 부제를 갖고 있다. 알다시피 <무장한 예언자 트로츠키>(필맥, 2005) 등 트로츠키 전기 3부작을 쓴 도이처는 트로츠키의 시각에서 스탈린을 조명한다.
참고로 <스탈린, 강철권력>의 원서 'Stalin'은 2004년에 나왔으며 736쪽의 영어 보급판은 작년 10월말에나 출간됐다. 가격은 아마존에서 14.16달러이니까 배송료를 포함해서 25,000원이 안 들겠다(국역본은 40,000원대. 왜 더 비싼가? 번역 비용이 추가되어야 하니까!).
저자인 서비스는 "러시아 혁명사 연구에서 탁월한 업적을 인정받은 영국의 역사학자이다. 19~20세기 러시아의 정치사뿐만 아니라 사회.문화사 분야까지 폭넓은 영역에 걸쳐 선구적 연구 성과를 낸 러시아사의 권위자이다. 이데올로기적 편향을 배제하고 냉정한 분석을 앞세우는 그의 연구 방법은 학계와 평단의 찬사를 얻었으며, 치밀한 연구 태도와 방대한 자료 조사, 간결하고 힘이 넘치는 문체는 수많은 독자들을 사로잡았다." 한국의 독자들도 사로잡을 수 있을는지.
작년에 내가 <레닌>을 구하면서 도서관에 신청했던 서비스의 책은 <러시아 현대사: 니콜라이 2세부터 푸틴까지>(하버드대학출판부, 2005)였다(조만간 대출해봐야겠다). 이런 책과 함께 그와 공동 저작을 여러 권 같이 낸, 역시나 20세기 러시아사 전문가인 제프리 호스킹의 책들이 더 번역/소개되면 좋겠다(호스킹의 책은 <소련사>(홍성사, 1988)이 소개됐지만 현재는 구할 수 없다. 물론 소련 몰락 이전의 시각을 담은 책이라 재출간에는 한계가 있겠고 대신에 <러시아와 러시아인(Russia and the Russians)>(하버드대출판부, 2001) 같은 책이 소개됨 직하다).
가디언지의 서평에 따르면, "<스탈린, 강철 권력>은 결함도 많지만 그 이상으로 재능이 풍부했던 스탈린이라는 정치가의 복합적인 내면 세계를 되살려냈다. 저자는 트로츠키가 주조한 스탈린의 고전적인 이미지에 도전해 그 이미지를 깨뜨린다. 이 책은 스탈린이 어떻게 마음 속까지 철두철미한 계급 투사가 되었는지, 그리고 어떻게 혁명의 심장부의 권력 투쟁에서 일반 당원들의 믿음에 부응했는지를 설득력 있게 보여준다."
그럼에도 불구하고 아직 '스탈린의 전모' 혹은 수수께끼는 다 풀리지 않은 모양이다. 또다른 전문가의 서평을 읽어본 바로는 그렇다. 바로 지난주 'The Moscow Times'지에 이 책에 대한 서평이 재수록돼 있는데, 자료삼아 옮겨놓는다. 필자인 쉴라 피츠패트릭은 스탈린시대 전문가로서 그녀가 엮은 책 'Stalinism : new directions'(Routledge, 2000)은 지젝의 <혁명이 다가온다>(길, 2006)에서도 참조되고 있다.
Closing In on Stalin
Josef Stalin preferred to be seen from afar -- larger than life, inaccessible. In a major new biography, Robert Service tries to cut him down to human size.
By Sheila Fitzpatrick
Published: April 15, 2005
There have been so many new biographies of Josef Stalin lately that we may almost be reaching the point of Stalin fatigue. Not that the subject has become fully comprehensible -- far from it -- or that any of the biographies has the instant-classic status of Ian Kershaw's two-volume "Hitler." Simon Sebag Montefiore's contribution from last spring, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," added a new dimension with his lively and highly readable, but still well-researched, portrait of Stalin in the company of his political associates and in his social and family milieu. Service, who thanks Montefiore in his preface and was warmly thanked by him in Montefiore's introduction, has taken another tack. Already the author of a history of Soviet Russia, Service sets out to give us Stalin in his historical context.(*몬테피오레의 책은 러시아어로도 번역됐다.)
Although Service is well-equipped for this task and has done his homework in the archives, including the newly opened Stalin papers, the dictator's personality seems to elude him. Again and again he dutifully lays out alternative motivations for Stalin's actions, a procedure which, fair-minded and historiographically useful though it is, doesn't necessarily help the reader understand what kind of man Stalin was. Still, he offers some valuable corrections to a number of the received opinions about Stalin. Service's Stalin is highly intelligent, even intellectual, despite what Leon Trotsky said about him. He was never a "gray blur" or colorless organization man, as Nikolai Sukhanov wrote. And he was absolutely not, as Trotsky liked to claim, a mere cog in the bureaucracy, but rather someone who very definitely ran the show.
All of these points are well taken, and it is particularly useful to have the ghost of Trotsky's interpretation, once hegemonic in leftist as well as Sovietological circles, chased away. No one who has looked at the new archival materials could doubt Stalin's intelligence. Moreover, it's clear that he thought like an intellectual (that is, analytically), read prodigiously and widely, and had the habit when faced with a new political task -- thinking about Soviet diplomatic options in Europe in the 1930s, for example, or directing the Soviet military effort in World War II -- of systematically researching the topic in preparation. It turns out that not only was he an intellectual, he was a compulsive and professional editor who corrected any manuscript that crossed his desk for style and grammar as well as for ideology.
Stalin's sense of national identification has been the subject of much speculation. In Service's version, Stalin was not particularly hung up on this question, being neither a passionate and absolute convert to Russianness, as Robert C. Tucker argued, nor, as others have suggested, an unreconstructed Georgian whose bloodthirstiness as a ruler can be explained in terms of age-old Caucasian patterns of machismo and revenge. Service's sensible comment is that, like many other people who live somewhere other than their birthplace, Stalin had a sense of himself as both Georgian and Russian, the balance between the two changing according to circumstance. In addition, he was a serious Marxist, whose commitment to internationalism effectively ruled out any form of passionate nationalism.
Service's take on Stalin's relations with Vladimir Lenin, especially in the difficult years of Lenin's last illness, when Lenin became increasingly critical of Stalin and finally pronounced him unfit to be general secretary, is particularly interesting. This is a topic Service knows well from his work on "Lenin: A Biography," in which he showed clearly how much Lenin's intellectual coherence and emotional balance were affected by his strokes. Telling the story from the other side, Service presents Stalin as largely a victim of Lenin's unreasonableness and his own obligations as a Central Committee go-between. This applies not only to the famous "rudeness to my wife" incident, in which Lenin, already seriously ill, rebuked Stalin for his behavior to Nadezhda Krupskaya, but to Lenin's criticism of Stalin's interpretation of Soviet nationalities policy, which many historians have taken to be rational and justified, rather than the confused intervention by a sick and angry man.
This interaction between Stalin and a dying Lenin is a comparatively rare example in Service's biography of an episode in which Stalin appears more sinned against than sinning. The only other similar case is Stalin's relations with his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, where Service, like Montefiore, foregrounds her difficult personality and psychological fragility. Stalin may have been a neglectful husband, like many another man in public life, but their correspondence when he was absent shows him as the more affectionate and conciliatory partner in what was clearly a volatile marriage. Understandably, Stalin had a sense of betrayal, as well as grief and loss, when she committed suicide in 1932.
Any biography of Stalin must try to explain key episodes in his career, including the dramatic initiatives of the Great Break at the end of the 1920s, when Stalin embarked on all-out collectivization and industrialization; the Great Purges of the late 1930s; the ups and downs of wartime leadership; and the swing into anti-Semitism of the postwar years. Service sees the purges as an intensification of rather than departure from Stalin's earlier patterns, pointing out what many other scholars have missed -- that Stalin distinguished himself by ruthlessness and indifference to the scale of casualties as early as the Civil War. (This may be another occasion where Trotsky's picture was misleading. As the other great Bolshevik proponent of bloodshed from this period, he presumably had little interest in identifying this as one of Stalin's notable characteristics.)
MT Archive
In his new book, Robert Service attempts to go beyond previous portraits of Stalin as an intellectual fraud or a gray bureaucrat.
On other big issues, however, Service has fewer insights to offer. What propelled Stalin into the wildly ambitious gambles of the Great Break and the First Five-Year Plan remains obscure, as does the mechanism by which he gathered his team of devoted executants. Vyacheslav Molotov appears suddenly in the narrative as a totally reliable No. 2 to Stalin, though all the reader has previously heard of him is that he and Stalin clashed in 1917 before Lenin's return from exile. As for the postwar period, the biography really trails off here. Service doesn't regard Stalin as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, probably correctly, but leaves the reader uncertain as to why he made the lurch into covertly state-supported anti-Semitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Stalin's striking retreat from hands-on leadership in the last years of his life, apart from a few favored issues which almost certainly included the anti-Semitic demarche of the Doctors' Plot, gets only perfunctory discussion.
Service had the laudable intention of writing a biography that would show Stalin as a human being rather than as a stereotypical personification of evil, but he only partially succeeds. His Stalin does seem human, though unattractive, and Service does not take the easy way out of suggesting that his suspicious and even paranoid characteristics amounted to madness. But Service fails to achieve the kind of vivid recreation of a personality that leads the reader to feel he has finally understood what made Stalin tick. Why was he so bloodthirsty as a ruler, and why did his associates follow him even after the debacle of the German attack in June 1941, when Stalin clearly expected to be overthrown? Service's historical landscape is quite precisely drawn, but the protagonist who inhabits it remains shadowy and distant -- which is no doubt the way Stalin, a great editor of his own personal archive as well as other people's manuscripts, intended it.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is the author of "Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia," to be published by Princeton University Press this summer.
서평 말미의 필자 소개에는 근간으로 돼 있지만 이 책 <가면을 벗겨내라! : 20세기 러시아에서 정체성과 사칭>(프린스턴대출판부, 2005)은 이미 출간되었다. 아주 흥미로울 듯한 책이다. 참고로, 피츠패트릭 여사의 책으론 <러시아혁명 1917-1932>(대왕사, 1990)이 번역돼 나온 바 있다(놀랍게도 아직 절판되지 않았다!)...
07. 02. 01.
P.S. 러시아서점 오존을 둘러보니까 스탈린 관련 최신간은 저명한 역사학자 로이와 조르스 메드베제프 형제(로이의 책들은 국내에도 여러 권 소개돼 있다)의 <알려지지 않은 스탈린>(2007)이다. 750쪽이 넘는 두툼한 책이고 물론 스탈린의 비밀 문서고를 뒤져서 얻은 '알려지지 않은' 내용들을 포함하고 있다고. 궁금한 신간이다...
