Content area
Full Text
Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt JÖRG BABEROWSKI: Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt. München: Beck, 2012. 606 S., 74 Abb. ISBN: 978-3-406-63254-9.
Unlike most revised and expanded editions, "Verbrannte Erde" neither shares its title nor its argu - ment with the original. In "Der Rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus" (Munich: DVA, 2002; paperback: Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2007), Baberowski had argued for an interpretation of Soviet history revolving around the notion of "modernity". Violence emerged from the attempt to abolish ambivalence, to create a clear and rational order, to landscape the human garden. What made the Stalinists more brutal than other modernizers was that they read modernization through the secular salvation doctrine of Marxism, while bringing the culture of violence of the empire's villages to the center of power. This was a bold thesis and it got the attention it deserved. Then, in 2010, Baberowski was invited to update the book for translation into English. When he sat down to re-read what he had written nearly a decade earlier, Baberowski began to feel uncomfortable. Somewhere in the intervening years, his description of Stalinism as an instantiation of modernity had begun to bother him. He describes the internal struggle in the introduction to "Verbrannte Erde": "It was painful to read my own book. The sentences and the diction no longer pleased me. [...] Everything I had since read, said, and written about Stalin and Stalinism stood in odd contrast to those strong opinions which gave the book its structure." (pp. 9-10) Not a man to pull his punches, even if his own book is at stake, Baberowski now describes much of what he had written earlier as "nonsense" (Unfug, p. 10). Few historians would be so publicly self-critical.
The expanded and revised edition of "Der Rote Terror", then, became a new book altogether, albeit one with large overlaps with its predecessor: The preface of the old book became an enlarged and substantially revised chapter one, chapter one became chapter two, chapter two transformed into chapter three, and so on. There is more re-writing in some chapters than in others. An enormous amount of material has been added to the chapter on the terror, and the one on war and postwar likewise grew from a...