Donald Rayfield
Author of Stalin and His Hangmen
About the Author
Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russia and Georgian in the Department of Russia, Queen Mary University of London. He has published the standard history of Georgia's literature and is editor-in-chief of the immense Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. His Stalin and His Hangmen (2004) show more has been translated into nine languages. With 28 illustrations and 6 maps show less
Works by Donald Rayfield
Associated Works
Dead Souls (1842) — Translator, some editions; Introduction, some editions — 10,490 copies, 135 reviews
Anton Chekhov's Short Stories [Norton Critical Edition, 1st ed.] (1979) — Contributor — 688 copies, 8 reviews
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: A Sketch (short story) (1865) — Translator, some editions — 284 copies, 2 reviews
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov (New York Review Books Classics) (2020) — Introduction, some editions — 100 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Rayfield, Donald
- Birthdate
- 1942
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Dulwich College, London
Magdalene College, Cambridge University - Occupations
- Professor of Russian, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
- Organizations
- Queen Mary, University of London
University of Queensland - Awards and honors
- Officer of the Order of the British Empire
- Short biography
- Born in 1942, educated at Dulwich College and the University of Cambridge, for most of his life Donald has been a lecturer and a Professor of Russian. In 1973, he first visited Georgia and has since written a history of Georgian literature, edited a Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary and, recently, published a history of Georgia.
He is also the author of a biography of Anton Chekhov and a study of Stalin and his Hangmen, both of which have been translated into other languages, including Russian. He has translated a number of Russian and Georgian poets, playwrights and prose writers. He is now an emeritus professor, but continues research. He lives in Kent and has a passion for horticulture, especially exotic trees.
http://www.tedxtbilisi.com/?31/bios/ - Nationality
- UK
- Places of residence
- London, England, UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
Stalin and His Hangmen is a very detailed, clear analysis of the lives and times of Stalin's chiefs of secret police from Dzierzynski (founder of the Cheka), through Menzhinsky, Iagoda (NKVD), Ezhov, to Beria. The book ends in 1956 with the shooting of the last of Beria's men (Beria himself having been shot in 1953). It is a harrowing and chilling tale of systemic state-sanctioned (i.e Stalin-sanctioned) ethnic cleansing, murder and sadism.
There are those who argue that if Lenin had lived show more longer, the regime would not have evolved in the bloodthirsty way that it did. However, Lenin was no shrinking violet. Rayfield notes that before he was fired on in 1918, Lenin had argued for hangings, rather than shootings,"so that the public could better contemplate the corpses". Nor was Lenin very sympathetic to the intelligentsia: he sent lists of "active anti-Soviet intellectuals" who were to be tracked down and deported; he wanted several hundred political opponents (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, etc) rounded up and summarily deported. In 1922, two boatloads of intellectuals left for Europe and America, and those who remained, "drew the obvious conclusions and withdrew into themselves". The war against the church and the confiscation of its property and valuables led to violence in some quarters and Lenin supported extreme measures. In 1922, he wrote to the Politburo about, "the only moment when we can smash the enemy's head with a 99 percent chance of success....we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of Church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy, not stopping at the crushing of any resistance...".
Stalin developed politically in this maelstrom of violence, paranoia, and lawlessnes, and brought to the mix his personal qualities described as Rayfield as, "first, a sense, a conviction, of his mission to rule; second an acute sense of timing; and third, a deep insight into others' motivation and a hypnotist's skill in manipulating them". Added to this was a paranoia that deepened over time; a doctor who was rash enough to so diagnose Stalin in the early days died in a mysterious car crash a few days later.
The numbers are staggering and hard to contemplate. The forced collectivization of the peasantry is calculated to have cost between 7.2 and a "plausible" 10.8 million lives, not counting those lost over the years through the great terror and campaigns aimed at specific minority groups. No one was safe, and the system routinely devoured its own. Wives, children, siblings of many of Stalin's close political allies and colleagues were arrested, imprisoned, and many shot, and yet those colleagues, if one can use that word in this context, continued in their positions, continued working with, and supporting, Stalin. Only Stalin remained inviolable, though he continually feared assassination, poisoning, etc.
Comparisons are often made between Hitler and Stalin, and I think Rayfield has an interesting, and accurate view. He argues that, "Hitlerism was like a cancer on the body politic, letting the body apparently function normally until the cancer destroys it; Stalinism was more like the larva of a parasitic wasp–devouring and converting to itself the body politic that it has invaded".
It is difficult for those of us blessed to live in a society based on the rule of law and equality of individuals before the law to comprehend the Soviet Union where, Stalin and his hangmen knew no such strictures. The system gave full rein to the murderous, sadistic impulses of a very wide range of people from prison guards to torturers to rapists to the highest levels of the police and politics. And as in the analogy of the wasp, the system systematically devoured its own, crushing any initiative, any superiority. The secret police themselves (working through the alphabet soups of Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, Smersh) became the victims: torturers and guards often became the tortured and the prisoners. And in the Kafkaesque world that Stalin controlled and developed and maintained, torturers and murderers were often awarded public medals for services while their innocent victims either mouldered in unknown graves or perished in the wilds of the Gulag.
Rayfield does not attempt a full biography of Stalin, but he is insightful and informative on the factors and experiences that shaped Stalin as a person, from his formation as a Georgian in the Russian empire to the influence of his seminary training on his outlook to life. One aspect that I did not appreciate, as did not many according to Rayfield, is how exceptionally well read Stalin was. In his formative years, Stalin was reading up to 500 pages a day, making notes in the margins, and he favoured European history, literature, and linguistics.
Rayfield is also, rightly, critical of the host of Western intellectuals who refused to see with their own eyes the effects of the terror or the great famines that accompanied the march to collectivization, and who continued to sing Stalin's praises.
This is a good, and important book for understanding the nightmare world of the Soviet Union under Stalin. show less
There are those who argue that if Lenin had lived show more longer, the regime would not have evolved in the bloodthirsty way that it did. However, Lenin was no shrinking violet. Rayfield notes that before he was fired on in 1918, Lenin had argued for hangings, rather than shootings,"so that the public could better contemplate the corpses". Nor was Lenin very sympathetic to the intelligentsia: he sent lists of "active anti-Soviet intellectuals" who were to be tracked down and deported; he wanted several hundred political opponents (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, etc) rounded up and summarily deported. In 1922, two boatloads of intellectuals left for Europe and America, and those who remained, "drew the obvious conclusions and withdrew into themselves". The war against the church and the confiscation of its property and valuables led to violence in some quarters and Lenin supported extreme measures. In 1922, he wrote to the Politburo about, "the only moment when we can smash the enemy's head with a 99 percent chance of success....we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of Church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy, not stopping at the crushing of any resistance...".
Stalin developed politically in this maelstrom of violence, paranoia, and lawlessnes, and brought to the mix his personal qualities described as Rayfield as, "first, a sense, a conviction, of his mission to rule; second an acute sense of timing; and third, a deep insight into others' motivation and a hypnotist's skill in manipulating them". Added to this was a paranoia that deepened over time; a doctor who was rash enough to so diagnose Stalin in the early days died in a mysterious car crash a few days later.
The numbers are staggering and hard to contemplate. The forced collectivization of the peasantry is calculated to have cost between 7.2 and a "plausible" 10.8 million lives, not counting those lost over the years through the great terror and campaigns aimed at specific minority groups. No one was safe, and the system routinely devoured its own. Wives, children, siblings of many of Stalin's close political allies and colleagues were arrested, imprisoned, and many shot, and yet those colleagues, if one can use that word in this context, continued in their positions, continued working with, and supporting, Stalin. Only Stalin remained inviolable, though he continually feared assassination, poisoning, etc.
Comparisons are often made between Hitler and Stalin, and I think Rayfield has an interesting, and accurate view. He argues that, "Hitlerism was like a cancer on the body politic, letting the body apparently function normally until the cancer destroys it; Stalinism was more like the larva of a parasitic wasp–devouring and converting to itself the body politic that it has invaded".
It is difficult for those of us blessed to live in a society based on the rule of law and equality of individuals before the law to comprehend the Soviet Union where, Stalin and his hangmen knew no such strictures. The system gave full rein to the murderous, sadistic impulses of a very wide range of people from prison guards to torturers to rapists to the highest levels of the police and politics. And as in the analogy of the wasp, the system systematically devoured its own, crushing any initiative, any superiority. The secret police themselves (working through the alphabet soups of Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, Smersh) became the victims: torturers and guards often became the tortured and the prisoners. And in the Kafkaesque world that Stalin controlled and developed and maintained, torturers and murderers were often awarded public medals for services while their innocent victims either mouldered in unknown graves or perished in the wilds of the Gulag.
Rayfield does not attempt a full biography of Stalin, but he is insightful and informative on the factors and experiences that shaped Stalin as a person, from his formation as a Georgian in the Russian empire to the influence of his seminary training on his outlook to life. One aspect that I did not appreciate, as did not many according to Rayfield, is how exceptionally well read Stalin was. In his formative years, Stalin was reading up to 500 pages a day, making notes in the margins, and he favoured European history, literature, and linguistics.
Rayfield is also, rightly, critical of the host of Western intellectuals who refused to see with their own eyes the effects of the terror or the great famines that accompanied the march to collectivization, and who continued to sing Stalin's praises.
This is a good, and important book for understanding the nightmare world of the Soviet Union under Stalin. show less
I'm sure there are amusing names for hyper-inclusive biographies, I mean, right down to toilet paper usage (not kidding) - let us just call it the "laundry list bio". Much new information was released in the last few decades, letters etc. of Chekhov's that had been considered too racy by the Soviet state. And racy plenty of it is. Chekhov, rather like Shakespeare, arose from a class only two generations away from serfdom into precarious middle-class (shopkeeping). The parents worked show more tirelessly and devotedly (which includes beatings, scoldings and whatever else deemed necessary) to encourage the five boys to study hard and make something of themselves. This did not exclude occasionally abandoning them while they went elsewhere to try and make money. (The one sister, Masha, did receive slightly less harsh treatment although she was expected to do her share in the household.) The father, Pavel, was a religious fanatic and the boys grew up memorizing vast tracts of bible and music, reciting and singing the orthodox litany. Rayfield is so intent on laying out the new information that he does not linger over interpretation -- but many have seen that the Chekhovian story structure is musical, theme, development, return to deepened theme (at the simplest) and likely it is from this early influence. Rayfield mentions this here and there, but no deeper looks. As the boys grow up it becomes apparent that Kolia, the painter, is a genius but unstable and that Anton is the most stable and the most intelligent of the lot. Oldest brother Aleksandr is a math/science whiz but also vulnerable to substance abuse. They are all very randy and crude in ways that separate them entirely from, say, Tolstoy and the aristocratic classes. In fact there is something Elizabethan all around in a reaching after everything life could offer, as if knowing it couldn't last long. Russia at the turn of the century had, perhaps, more in common with earlier times than staid and repressed Western Europe. (About to explode into violence, yes.) In a biography of this magnitude I can hardly summarize but I will say that many things surprised me -- among them how careless Chekhov's family were with him, given that he became the de facto head of the family, a famous and admired man, the breadwinner. They were also amazingly restless always hopping on trains to Moscow, Petersburg, back to the dacha in the country, later to Yalta, now and then into Europe . . . and as Chekhov grew more ill these jaunts didn't cease. The weather in Russia is truly appalling most of the year and he found himself stuck in terrible circumstances waiting for trains -- no doubt these speeded on his death. The contradictions are endless. Chekhov knew how important he was: he never let Masha marry (she was not sure she wanted to and he played on it so she would stay head of domestic affairs for him). Everyone knew he was ill and that he should be kept warm and well fed, and yet Masha would go off, or later his wife Olga, and the house would go cold and the food would revert to potatoes and indigestible fatty stews he couldn't stomach . . . His mother was rather hopeless at caring for him too. Dogs were adored then cruelly abandoned. There were interludes, a few years at the dacha Melikhovo where they played at being estate owners and enjoyed themselves but it all proved to be incredibly hard work. I'm rambling -- Rayfield does provide the information for the knowledgeable Chekhovian to draw the parallels between what went on in his family life, love life, and travels and what he put into his works. An exhausting and exhaustive read but worth it for any Chekhovian admirer, which I am. The writing is never anything but solid, clear and so a degree above pedestrian, but Rayfield was trying to get in every scrap of information and he succeeds. ****1/2 show less
As Chekhov's greatest play, "The Cherry Orchard" has long presented challenges to readers, literary critics, and theatre audiences -- challenges that reflect the multiple interpretations that one can apply. As a contribution to the Twayne's Masterwork series, Donald Rayfield's analysis offers some help to readers seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the play's meanings and the playwright's intentions. This book is organized as follows. The first section is titled Literary and Historical show more Context" and considers in turn (1) "Chekhov's culture and traditions"; (2) the importance of "The Cherry Orchard" and (3) its critical reception. The next part of the book is titled "A Reading", and first summarizes and analyzes each of the 4 acts in turn. It then considers the "metatext", "intertextuality" with regard to Chekhov's own plays and those of other authors, including Turgenev, Ibsen, and Shakespeare. Next, a chapter titled "The Aftermath" considers the legacy of the play, through contemporary times. A chronology of Chekhov's life and works helps round out the book, along with a selected bibliography and an index.
Having read "The Cherry Orchard", and having seen two performances of it by video, I found the Twayne analysis to be rather helpful to my understanding of the play. The first chapter places the play in the context of Chekhov's life, career, and sociopolitical perspective. Chapter 2 proposes that "The Cherry Orchard" is important for 3 reasons: first for "its intrinsic textual richness, its linguistic power, and subtlety as a piece of dramatic prose"; second because of "its position in Russian cultural history as the culmination of all 'realist' nineteenth century fiction and as the first classic of an arguably new 'symbolist' or 'absurdist' literature; and third, because of its role in the history of 20th century drama. Each of these three aspects illustrate the difficulty for those not fluent in Russian, since so much of the play's deeper meanings seem to be lost in translation. Even in its original language, the subtlety and complexity of the play defies understanding; witness the conflict between Chekhov on the one hand and the play's first director and actors, as to whether it is best presented as a comedy or a tragedy (a duality reflected in the subtitle of the present work). Analyses of the four acts of the play highlighted the difficulties. So much reportedly depended on sound effects, use of long pauses, and subtle inflections of speech, yet Chekhov offered but minimal stage directions. Little wonder that the play's directors weren't often successful at carrying out the playwright's actual intentions. Beyond the analyses of the four acts of the plays, I found the intertextual analysis to be useful, in drawing parallels with Chekhov's other plays and with dramatic works by other authors.
At first reading (or viewing), "The Cherry Orchard" is deceptive -- it appears more simple than it is. For readers seeking to understand the subtleties and nuances of this complex play, Rayfield's analysis is likely to be of some value. For my part, it helped choose between the poles of "catastrophe and comedy". It is both, and best characterized as a tragicomedy, one reflective of its author's compassion and affectionate understanding of the hapless people who populate his play. With this perspective, I recommend the 1981 video with Judi Dench as Madame Ranevsky over the 1999 one with Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates. The latter misses the comedic elements and presents the story as more of a tragedy than the author apparently ever intended. show less
Having read "The Cherry Orchard", and having seen two performances of it by video, I found the Twayne analysis to be rather helpful to my understanding of the play. The first chapter places the play in the context of Chekhov's life, career, and sociopolitical perspective. Chapter 2 proposes that "The Cherry Orchard" is important for 3 reasons: first for "its intrinsic textual richness, its linguistic power, and subtlety as a piece of dramatic prose"; second because of "its position in Russian cultural history as the culmination of all 'realist' nineteenth century fiction and as the first classic of an arguably new 'symbolist' or 'absurdist' literature; and third, because of its role in the history of 20th century drama. Each of these three aspects illustrate the difficulty for those not fluent in Russian, since so much of the play's deeper meanings seem to be lost in translation. Even in its original language, the subtlety and complexity of the play defies understanding; witness the conflict between Chekhov on the one hand and the play's first director and actors, as to whether it is best presented as a comedy or a tragedy (a duality reflected in the subtitle of the present work). Analyses of the four acts of the play highlighted the difficulties. So much reportedly depended on sound effects, use of long pauses, and subtle inflections of speech, yet Chekhov offered but minimal stage directions. Little wonder that the play's directors weren't often successful at carrying out the playwright's actual intentions. Beyond the analyses of the four acts of the plays, I found the intertextual analysis to be useful, in drawing parallels with Chekhov's other plays and with dramatic works by other authors.
At first reading (or viewing), "The Cherry Orchard" is deceptive -- it appears more simple than it is. For readers seeking to understand the subtleties and nuances of this complex play, Rayfield's analysis is likely to be of some value. For my part, it helped choose between the poles of "catastrophe and comedy". It is both, and best characterized as a tragicomedy, one reflective of its author's compassion and affectionate understanding of the hapless people who populate his play. With this perspective, I recommend the 1981 video with Judi Dench as Madame Ranevsky over the 1999 one with Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates. The latter misses the comedic elements and presents the story as more of a tragedy than the author apparently ever intended. show less
Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of A Tyrant and Those Who Served Him by Donald Rayfield
Despite my familiarity with reading about the horrors of Stalin's rule, I found this a more than usually deeply depressing read, though interesting in shedding light on the background of some of the less well known horrible personalities in the history of Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the continuing high esteem in which some of these characters are held in Putin's Russia, witnessed by the issuing of Cheka anniversary postage stamps depicting Artuzov and Balitsky, not show more two of the highest leaders but nevertheless deeply horrible and murderous characters; and the continued existence of the Belomorkanal cigarette brand, equivalent to an Auschwitz cigarette brand subsisting in Germany. show less
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