Russia After Stalin

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THE book I am now placing in the reader's hand has had a curious history. I began writing it in the middle of March 1953, some days after Stalin's death. I intended to sum up broadly the Stalin era and to deduce from the summary a few tentative prognostications. I concluded the introductory chapter with the forecast that a break with the Stalin era was about to begin in Russia. I had made the same forecast in an article written for the Manchester Guardian a few hours before Stalin's death. My friends, among them eminent students of Soviet affairs, shook their heads sceptically.

By the time I had concluded the first few chapters startling changes were already occurring in Moscow. Malenkov's government decreed an amnesty and cleared the air of the last, poisonous scandal of the Stalin era, the so-called conspiracy of the Kremlin doctors. I willingly admit that I had not expected that my prognostication would begin to come true so soon. I had thought in terms of months and years, not of days and weeks. This fact accounts for a certain lack of stylistic uniformity in the book. At its beginning I discussed expected developments in the future tense; later I had to describe these developments in the present and even the past tense. I have made no attempt to eliminate these discrepancies. A historian who speeds to the place where past, present, and future meet and tries to describe the scene takes many risks, not only stylistic ones; and he can hardly describe the scene unless he indulges in a certain amount of thinking aloud.

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