As I continue to read through my paperback Penguins, I find there are some books which I know I shouldn’t ignore, but which I assume will be a slog to read. I push them aside until they are the only ones left on a particular pile. My current pile consists only of these temporary rejects, and the book I just finished reading is “A History of the U.S.S.R.” by Andrew Rothstein, written for Penguin and published in 1950. 1950 was, as you recall, only five years after the end of World War II, and three years before the death of Stalin.

Over the past 65 years or so, I have read a lot about the Soviet Union. I have read histories, and biographies, and sociological studies, and novels, and essays, and everything else. Why should I read another book – one written so long ago. And one that I had never heard of, one that I don’t even remember being referenced anywhere. But I picked it up. And I opened it up. And I started to read.

It’s a long book, almost 400 pages with quite small print and narrow margins. It is filled with details. It is well enough written, but the prose does not tug at your heartstrings. But something about it is weird, I thought. This just doesn’t feel right.

So, then, only about a dozen pages into the book, I looked up Andrew Rothstein in Wikipedia. Wow! How did I miss this (I admit not reading the mini-bio in the book). Andrew Rothstein was a Communist. This book seemed weird so quickly, because it was written from such a different perspective.

Now, to be sure, Penguin did mention that Rothstein was a “foundation member” of the British Communist Party. But this was on the 32nd line of a 34 line bio. And the cover of the book simply listed title and author, giving no hint (in a subtitle, perhaps) that this was a Communist history of the U.S.S.R.

Rothstein himself was British. That is, he was born in London in 1898, to parents who had come to London from Russia in 1890, would-be revolutionaries no longer comfortable in czarist Russia. His father, also an active Communist, was not permitted to return to Britain after a trip to Moscow in 1920, and remained in the Soviet Union, serving in a number of governmental positions, including as Soviet Ambassador to Iran.

Andrew, however, stayed in the UK, went to Oxford, helped found the British Communist Party, and became a journalist, working for years as the London bureau chief of the Soviet Union’s news agency, TASS.

With this in mind, this book becomes fascinating on many levels.

(1) First, because it deals with the same history that all other books on Soviet history deals with, but it approaches them differently that you can’t help but see them in a different light. Is Rothstein engaged in deception, in fake news? I don’t think so. I think this book is a scholarly attempt by a serious journalist to describe the history as he saw it.

(2) Without refuting what I said above, I do think that Rothstein engaged in self-censorship, as you must do to remain in good standing in the Party. I don’t know specifically what he self-censored, what he would have liked to have said but thought better of. But I don’t think that means he was engaging in fake news, or disinformation like Russians are prone often to do. He was simply telling a story from a different perspective.

(3) How does this show up? In dealing with conflict with Germany (so much of this book deals with the First and Second World Wars), Rothstein suggests that many Allied leaders (and Allied populations) were more worried and distrustful of the Bolsheviks than they were of the Germans (whether the Germans were Prussian jingoists, Nazis or post-war Germans), and that they certainly didn’t want to let the Soviets too closely into their post-war world. He points to the period after the First World War, when the Allies had armies that remained in Russian territory and where they gave support to the Whites during the Civil War period. He points to many things that happened during the the fight against the Nazis – attempts by the West to attempt to push the fight onto the Eastern front, and away from the West, limits on the amounts of and types of military equipment the Western allies allowed the Soviet Union to have. And he suggests a form of collaboration between the the Western Allies and the defeated Germany after World War II, to lessen the power of the Soviet Union in dictating terms of peace. How accurate these accusations are, I am not sure; they are not what you normally hear to the extent that Rothstein keeps repeating them, but I don’t think they can be discounted.

(4) Although Rothstein talks a lot about Soviet agriculture – the process of collectivization, the treatment of the kulaks (large scale farmers), etc., and gives a lot of detail on the hows and whys, and the ups and downs, successes and failures of this process, certain things are left out – most notably the government-led Ukrainian famine in the mid-1930s, as the regime required so much of the Ukrainian crops to be provided for the remainder of the country that so many of the Ukrainians themselves were left to starve.

(5) Rothstein talks from time to time about the various non-Russian nationalities and how the Soviet Union promotes their culture (OK, he does exaggerate a bit), but he doesn’t mention the Jews as one of these nationalities. Rothstein is obviously Jewish (his parents come from Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, the heart of the heart of the Pale), but he doesn’t mention anything about the Soviet treatment of the Jews. In fact, you wouldn’t know that there were any Jews in the Soviet Union (the only reference being in one sentence mentioning the establishment of Birobidzhan, the so-called Jewish autonomous district on the Chinese border in Siberia). From our perspective, this seems weird, but the Soviets were intent on denying all religions, including Judaism, and denying Jews as a race at the same time – there were many Jewish communists in the upper echelons of Soviet society, and almost all of them would share this opinion. Does that mean that they all would have left out reference to Jews in writing a history of the USSR.? Of that, I am not so sure.

(6) Following up on Rothstein’s failure to mention Jews as residents or citizens of the USSR, I should also mention – even more surprising – is that I don’t think that he once mentioned Jews as targets of the Nazis. Ever.

(7) Then there were the show trials of the 1930s, when so many loyal communists had their loyalty not only questioned but denied, and where they were either sentenced to long prison terms at hard labor in harsh weather or were killed (or both). Rothstein discusses some of the early trials, such as the trials of Kirov and his circle, but concludes that they were all traitors to the Soviet Union, and that their confessions were valid (although he admits that no one outside the Soviet Union seemed to have accepted their validity). He does not give any hint that the trials were not fair and the verdicts justified. He does not talk at all about prisoners being sentenced to labor camps in Siberia.

With all of these criticisms, and assuming you can take them into consideration as you read along, I think the book does give a fairly full and, as I have said, detailed versions of a lot of things. Rothstein’s description of the November 1917 revolution and how the Bolsheviks took power, of the course of the Civil War that followed, of the total revision of the agricultural system, of the remarkable buildup of Russian industry (including how Russian industry was affected by the Second World War and how it responded to the needs of the country’s defense), of the diplomatic relations with the West, and of the fighting during the Second World War on Russian soil. This is a serious book with, of course, a very different perspective.

What about Stalin? Interestingly, this book is neither an ode to Stalin or (obviously) a criticism of Stalin. Stalin is rarely mentioned in the book, except incidentally, but for one relative short sections that basically says: I should mention Stalin – here are some examples of his speeches during this period of time. That is really it.

I don’t think Rothstein ever fell out of favor the Soviet Union. He lived in Britain his entire life (although his work with TASS et al gave him the right to a Soviet pension), and he lived a long life, dying at 95 in 1993. This was two years after Gorbachev was forced from power and the Soviet Union collapsed. I don’t know if at 93, Rothstein was in shape to comment on that major event.

How many people read his book? What do scholars think of it? I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.