Isaac Don Levine (1892–1981)

I don't think I'll be giving anything away by saying what the secret was: Stalin was an agent of the tsarist police, the Okhrana, from 1906 until 1912.

Isaac Don Levine, who wrote the first biography of Stalin published in English in 1931, returned to the subject a quarter of a century later, admitting that his mind had changed. Like Trotsky and other biographers of the Soviet dictator, Levine had heard rumours of Stalin's treason to the revolutionary cause, but had discounted them. There show more was no documentary proof.

And then after the Second World War, Levine was handed a document which seemed to offer precisely that: proof of Stalin's employment by the police as a "mole". There is a gap of a decade between Levine's receipt of that document -- which he was convinced was genuine -- and the publication of this book. Levine's explanation of that gap is not a credible one, and one imagines that he had some lingering doubts that he might have been handed a forgery. (His later silence on this issue, including in his autobiography, lead me to suspect precisely that.)

Most historians and critics were convinced that this was indeed the case, and the infamous "Eremin Letter" may have just been one more forged Russian document, like the better known "Zinoviev letter" from 1924. But there may be more to it than that. show less

I first came across Isaac Don Levine while researching the question of whether Stalin had been an agent of the tsarist police -- an Okhrana mole inside the Bolshevik Party. Levine published a letter claiming to prove this in Life magazine in 1956, followed by a book, Stalin's Great Secret. A quarter of a century earlier, he had published the first full length biography of Stalin in English. I was very disappointed to find that in this, his autobiography, he makes no mention of that story, show more not the article he published nor the book he wrote, both of which were the subjects of controversy.

Instead, he chooses to talk about his other journalistic adventures, including his meetings with Trotsky during the Russian civil war, or Trotsky's assassin in a Mexican prison years later. Levine found himself at many interesting places and times, including Palestine during the mid-1930s, or in Dallas interviewing Marina Oswald, the widow of John F. Kennedy's assassin in 1963.

He was accused of sympathies for the Russian regime, but was also a militant anti-Communist, an associate of Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon too.

For reasons that are hard to explain -- after all, a journalist like Levine should be an expert at telling a story -- this should have been a much more interesting book. show less

An excellent account of the life and psychology of Trotsky's assassin, Ramon Mercader.

Sent to book sale