Building an evil empire

One consequence - and certainly not the least important - of the fall of the Soviet Union was the opening of hitherto inaccessible archives. Historians who previously had had to rely on falsified evidence, rumour and guesswork, suddenly found themselves in a Tom Tiddler's ground of original material, full of startling revelations.

At the same time, survivors of the Stalinist period were at last able to speak openly about their experiences. The result has been a series of works on Soviet history which, for the first time, document in detail the whole appalling nature of the Stalinist regime.

If Anne Applebaum's Gulag told the story of the forced labour camps, and Simon Sebag- Montefiore's Stalin introduced us to the jolly home life of the dictator and his cronies, Professor Rayfield deals with the mechanics of Stalin's rise to power and of his hold upon it. This means that the book is, though it contains much else, essentially a history of the police chiefs who controlled the state-security organs.

Six weeks after the October revolution the ascetic Pole Feliks Dzierzynski - a Soviet Robespierre - set up the Cheka, which, among its other tasks, supplied Lenin with the suit, boots, belt and braces of one of its victims. As it metastasised throughout the state, it continually changed its name but not its function, becoming the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB and, most recently, the FSB.

Dzierzynski was succeeded by another Pole, Menzhinsky, a chess player and water colourist who, at Stalin's behest, forced through collectivisation. After him came Iagoda, corrupt and acquisitive: a inventory of his possessions, compiled after his arrest, listed, inter alia, 1,229 bottles of wine, 3,904 pornographic photographs, and 70 pairs of foreign-made ladies' silk knickers.

Next was the bisexual Ezhov, nicknamed " the Bloody Dwarf", and finally Lavrenti Beria, ruthless, intelligent and efficient, who would cruise the streets of Moscow in his car with two bodyguards, picking up adolescent girls. The scale of the arrests, of the executions, and of the ethnic cleansing numbs the imagination: in 1937-38 nearly 1.5 million were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, half of whom were shot. But efficiency was not always present. Before finally assassinating Trotsky in Mexico, the NKVD had killed his children, his parents, his sister, his sister-in-law and eight of his secretaries.

A question for which the author has no answer is why highly intelligent, otherwise clear-sighted Western visitors such as Shaw and Wells should have been taken in by the propaganda, and have come back praising the system. How on earth could the French author Romain Rolland have believed Stalin's assertion that the Kremlin's female librarians had been supplied by a foreign power with poison to murder the party chiefs?

It's a wonder that Stalin kept a straight face when telling the story. But, to judge by the notes he sent to his subordinates, it seemed that he too attributed all faults and failures to sabotage: they were constantly directed to root out the Trotskyites, Mensheviks or enemy agents responsible.

AT ONE point, Rayfield remarks that Stalin was " no more a Communist than a Borgia pope was a Catholic". But surely only ideology can have been responsible for the lunacy of the collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s, which cost - so Stalin told Churchill - 10 million lives, destroyed the peasantry and turned Russia from a country that was self-sufficient in food into one that is still unable to feed itself.

In The Devils, one of Stalin's favourite works, Dostoevsky explains why Marxism must inevitably lead to absolute dictatorship; it was, perhaps, just bad luck that in this case the dictator was a paranoid psychopath.