Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations.

Ulam, director of the Harvard University Russian Research Center, is the author of among other books, The Bolsheviks and Stalin: The Man and His Era.

ONCE AGAIN Walter Laqueur has performed a remarkable feat of historiography. Some three hundred thirty pages of text may seem hardly adequate to summarize the vast literature about Stalin, to evaluate the new information about the tyrant that has become available thanks to glasnost, and to fathom the meaning of the astounding historical phenomenon which was Stalinism. Yet, the author has succeeded with balance and succinctness. And the subject is not merely of historical importance. Stalin-or more precisely what Soviet society has been allowed in recent years to learn about him and his era-is a major reason why perestroika has turned into the present collapse of Communism.

In the wake of Khrushchev's revelations, the poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky wrote: "What can you put differently? What can you add? Such things did happen on this our earth." Well, you can add that Khrushchev's indictment of his erstwhile boss was still incomplete, and glossed over many of Stalin's crimes and follies. Even so, Khrushchev's colleagues decided (quite correctly from their point of view) that the Soviet system could not stand the continued flow of such revelations, and this was one of the main reasons they got rid of the garrulous Nikita.

Under Brezhnev, the regime tried strenuously to present the image of Stalin as neither god nor beast, but an outstanding Party leader and Marxist-Leninist" who, granted, made some regrettable errors and had an unfortunate temper. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking on the seventieth anniversary of the Revolution, admitted Stalin's unforgivable crimes," but still found words of praise for his role during World War II, when Stalin allegedly displayed special talents for "organizing and disciplining people" (the latter, certainly!).

But by then Pandora's box had opened. What had already been circulating in samizdat, and known abroad, quickly became public knowledge, only now it was accompanied by horrendous details. The Soviet media regularly carry stories of the discovery of mass graves-victims of the terror; the grim literature on the period, headed by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, has become available to the Soviet reader. Stalin, his henchmen, and the whole system which allowed so much horror now stand indicted before public opinion.

There are still questions about the period to which we lack complete answers. Did Stalin instigate the murder of the Party boss of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, the event which launched the most murderous, almost surrealistic, phase of the terror (1937-39)? How could even an absolute dictator get away with the wholesale slaughter of the very instruments of his power: of the state security forces, and of the Red Army, whose officer corps, especially its upper ranks, suffered more casualties at his orders than during all the fighting in World War II? And about Stalin himself- surely only a paranoiac could have perpetrated such bloodbaths, yet how could an insane man have held absolute power for thirty years, and die of natural causes?

In one's revulsion at Stalin's murderous mania, it is natural to downgrade his political and diplomatic talents. Yet, in the latter capacity, he impressed such consummate judges of the craft as Churchill and Roosevelt. Mr. Laqueur sensibly sees a basic contradiction in the way Stalin sought popularity even as he ruled through fear: "Stalin wanted ... to be loved, and the reign of terror is not a good instrument to instill feelings of love." But politics does not always obey the canons of rationality. If one looks at Soviet society during the worst period of terror, one sees not only currents of fear but also waves of a strange exhilaration. Nadyezhda Mandelstam, the wife of the martyred poet, wrote: "We were set on our fellow man like dogs and the whole pack of us licked the hunter's hand, squealing incomprehensibly." It took more than thirty years for Stalin's spell to be exorcised, and even today the last enclaves of Stalinism have not been eliminated from Soviet life. It still clings, for instance, to the KGB, which itself still inspires, though in a form transmogrified, those Soviet citizens who are resentful of perestroika's disarray, and who long for a Communist version of law and order.

As Mr. Laqueur notes, the regime has been hesitant in eradicating Stalinism. As a result, the momentum of glasnost has not only swept aside the last vestiges of Stalin's reputation, but is undermining the very foundations of the Soviet system. The ideological guides of the Gorbachev regime, himself included, have tried to salvage the reputation of Communism by denying an organic link between Leninism and what happened under Lenin's awesome successor; and to maintain that the Party took a wrong turn after Lenin's death, arguing it should have followed the leadership of Nikolai Bukharin. Instead, the apologists insist, the Party was beguiled by Stalin into a veritable war, through forcible collectivization, upon the peasants. Other catastrophies followed. For a while, a sort of mini-cult of Bukharin emerged, seeing him as the alleged advocate of "Communism with a human face." Yet this attempt at rewriting history could not be sustained. Bukharin, undoubtedly an attractive character in many ways, was in fact Stalin's helper in the fight against Trotsky. Though he subsequently opposed forced collectivization (and was himself an eventual victim of the great purge), Bukharin was never seriously in the running for Party leadership.

And, as was logically almost inevitable, the reaction against Stalinism has led to something unthinkable before 1988. Attacks against Lenin and Leninism, Mr. Laqueur writes, are "no longer an extraordinary event." The flood of glasnost threatens to engulf the last remaining ideological prop of the Soviet system. On the surface, the continuation of that system is bound up with the resolution of concrete problems: the economic crisis, and the aspirations to independence by the various national republics. But there is an even more basic problem than these: can Soviet Communism survive the confrontation with its past?