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I Killed Stalin
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 18, 2007
A phenomenal fictional tale that presents itself as non-fiction in such a manner that I sometimes forgot that it was fiction. Alexis Bodine was a character I could truly care about, and the book ended in such a manner that it left you wanting more but not needing more.
You WILL love Dottie.
You WILL love Dottie.
March 16, 2023
Sterling Noel's splashily titled 1951 I Killed Stalin is an interesting little artifact from the very early years of the Cold War. I debated mightily on whether it might be 3.5 stars for me, which I would round up to 4, but I finally decided not. I think that 3 to juuuuust below 3.5 stars will do it.
First, though, in order to understand this novel, we probably should note just how precarious the world was at the time the book debuted. After four years of fighting together against Nazi Germany--during which the United States in public papered over things like forced collectivization and purposeful famines in Ukraine, almost literally insane show trials and then executions of supposed enemies, the system of gulags that swallowed millions, and Communist espionage in the U.S.--the war against a common enemy was over, and as the Western powers demobilized rapidly, the Red Army stayed in occupation of all of Eastern Europe and looked disinclined to withdraw.
Winston Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain" in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. In 1948 and 1949 the Soviet Union violated the Four-Power Treaty governing Berlin by closing the access of road and rail lines from the West through the Soviet zone of Occupied Germany, causing the U.S. to organize the Berlin Airlift to break the blockade rather than surrender American, British, and French treaty rights to the city. The year 1949 saw a Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and also the other profound shock to postwar American complacency, the Soviet Union's test of its first atom bomb, a portentous event which General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, famously had predicted would take 20 years. In mid-1950 North Korea attacked U.S.-supported South Korea across the 38th Parallel in what many believed might be a feint to draw Western attention from Europe so that the Soviets might attack there and take the rest of the continent.
When I Killed Stalin was published in 1951, therefore, with United Nations soldiers, sailors, and airmen still dying by the thousands as they fought against the Soviet-supported North Koreans and Chinese, the Soviet menace seemed very, very real. With the thousand-fold more powerful hydrogen bomb not yet imagined, nor the complete destruction of humanity in a holocaust of nuclear overkill, the idea that in the then-near future of 1959 "the shooting war between Russia and the United States" might start with "the Soviet Union's atom-bomb attack upon eight principle cities of America" (1952 Eton paperback, page 3) did not seem far-fetched. The thought that Stalin, "the mad-dog dictator of the Kremlin," might be assassinated, "executed as the first war criminal of World War III, on the day he started the conflagration that is now engulfing so much of the world" (page 3), would have seemed an appropriate corollary.
The vitriol of the anti-Communism--and occasional anti-Russianism--tossed off so axiomatically in the book, far worse than Ronald Reagan's not-incorrect "evil empire" language of 30-odd years later, thus must be understood in context. Does the caricature, and the attack not just on Communism but on the culture of a Russia that supposedly has been "grim, ruthless, [and] unsmiling," "a land of toil and poverty and hopelessness...for hundreds of years" (page 116), go a tad overboard here and there? Of course. When this happens, the book does suffer a bit.
Mind you, this book ain't exactly high literature to begin with. It's a spy story, a hard-boiled shoot 'em up--we are told on the very first page, after all, that the narrator "put a bullet through the heart" of Stalin nine months earlier--with plenty of two-fisted shenanigans throughout. Alexis Ivanovich Bodine had had for a father "one of the very few Old Bolsheviki who escaped with a whole skin" (page 4). It isn't exactly clear why the older man fell out with his former revolutionaries, but this "toughest, most irascible, most wary[,] and most lovable old guy...taught [the narrator] everything [he] knows[s], including five languages, a score of dialects, and a reasoned dislike of Communism and all its works. He amassed and squandered several fortunes in the free world" and just happened to be "approaching the acme of his fifth and largest when coronary thrombosis laid him low, in 1941" (page 4). So Alex has a huge pile of dough in the bank. Handy.
The really odd thing about the narrator's past, though, is that during the Second World War he worked for "Naval Intelligence behind the lines in the Balkans" and somehow--get this--"had killed, for one reason or another, some eleven N.K.V.D. men, among others" and thus was, "like [his] father before [him], a favorite quarry of the Russian secret police" (page 4). But, come on--how does such a thing happen when the Soviets nominally were our allies then? Being suspicious of them, yes. Outfoxing their atomic spying back in the States, yes. But actually killing 'em, and not just one by accident but nearly a dozen purposefully? I mean, yeah, killin' Commies is fun an' all, but this sho' does stretch credulity...
In any event, the narrator was declared MIA during the war (page 5), then given a couple of name changes (pages 5, 11) with plastic surgery (page 5) that somehow includes a fingerprint switcheroo (page 11) and airtight documentation yea even unto "changing Navy records" (page 11). After some man-of-the-world tough-guy escapades he ends up recruited into "the International Intelligence Agency, familiarly known as 'Bureau-X' (or 'Bu-X')," which foresightedly spends "years of labor and planning" (page 3) on getting an agent in to bump off Uncle Joe.
The book thus starts quickly, with secrecy and intrigue and plenty of action. "Of necessity, the path that Bureau-X charted for its assassin, to approach within gun range of the world's most closely guarded person, [leads] through blood," but the narrator "stress[es]" that, essentially, Bu-X already was "at war" (page 3) against the Soviets, who of course would start World War III sometime.
And as we have seen, Alex Bodine, or Steve Ellery, or John Hamilton, or Romanian national Jan Miles, or whatever he should be called, is no stranger to the rough stuff. In not too long, he gets himself recruited into the MVD, working higher, ever higher, eventually put in charge of "all the Communist sabotage on the East Coast," thereby "causing the ruining of irreplaceable machinery, the wrecking of trains, the time-bombing of airplanes on crucial flights, the arson of untold millions of dollars worth of buildings, the sinking of ships, and the general disruption of the American defense effort and the national economy" (page 76). This is the deepest and ugliest of deep cover, but a fella has to establish his bona fides, I guess, and of course Bu-X is playing for keeps...
Basically, the book moves from one crazy pinnacle to the next, driven by the hardest-core of Cold War logic. Thinky it ain't, nor is the narrator given to much introspection, but we don't expect any book whose three-word title begins with "I Killed" to be of profound artistic and moral value, do we? No, but for what it is, and for when it was written, Noel's I Killed Stalin still is a decently entertaining novel of fast-moving tough-guy escapist action, a read of 3 or perhaps allllllmost 3.5 stars.
First, though, in order to understand this novel, we probably should note just how precarious the world was at the time the book debuted. After four years of fighting together against Nazi Germany--during which the United States in public papered over things like forced collectivization and purposeful famines in Ukraine, almost literally insane show trials and then executions of supposed enemies, the system of gulags that swallowed millions, and Communist espionage in the U.S.--the war against a common enemy was over, and as the Western powers demobilized rapidly, the Red Army stayed in occupation of all of Eastern Europe and looked disinclined to withdraw.
Winston Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain" in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. In 1948 and 1949 the Soviet Union violated the Four-Power Treaty governing Berlin by closing the access of road and rail lines from the West through the Soviet zone of Occupied Germany, causing the U.S. to organize the Berlin Airlift to break the blockade rather than surrender American, British, and French treaty rights to the city. The year 1949 saw a Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and also the other profound shock to postwar American complacency, the Soviet Union's test of its first atom bomb, a portentous event which General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, famously had predicted would take 20 years. In mid-1950 North Korea attacked U.S.-supported South Korea across the 38th Parallel in what many believed might be a feint to draw Western attention from Europe so that the Soviets might attack there and take the rest of the continent.
When I Killed Stalin was published in 1951, therefore, with United Nations soldiers, sailors, and airmen still dying by the thousands as they fought against the Soviet-supported North Koreans and Chinese, the Soviet menace seemed very, very real. With the thousand-fold more powerful hydrogen bomb not yet imagined, nor the complete destruction of humanity in a holocaust of nuclear overkill, the idea that in the then-near future of 1959 "the shooting war between Russia and the United States" might start with "the Soviet Union's atom-bomb attack upon eight principle cities of America" (1952 Eton paperback, page 3) did not seem far-fetched. The thought that Stalin, "the mad-dog dictator of the Kremlin," might be assassinated, "executed as the first war criminal of World War III, on the day he started the conflagration that is now engulfing so much of the world" (page 3), would have seemed an appropriate corollary.
The vitriol of the anti-Communism--and occasional anti-Russianism--tossed off so axiomatically in the book, far worse than Ronald Reagan's not-incorrect "evil empire" language of 30-odd years later, thus must be understood in context. Does the caricature, and the attack not just on Communism but on the culture of a Russia that supposedly has been "grim, ruthless, [and] unsmiling," "a land of toil and poverty and hopelessness...for hundreds of years" (page 116), go a tad overboard here and there? Of course. When this happens, the book does suffer a bit.
Mind you, this book ain't exactly high literature to begin with. It's a spy story, a hard-boiled shoot 'em up--we are told on the very first page, after all, that the narrator "put a bullet through the heart" of Stalin nine months earlier--with plenty of two-fisted shenanigans throughout. Alexis Ivanovich Bodine had had for a father "one of the very few Old Bolsheviki who escaped with a whole skin" (page 4). It isn't exactly clear why the older man fell out with his former revolutionaries, but this "toughest, most irascible, most wary[,] and most lovable old guy...taught [the narrator] everything [he] knows[s], including five languages, a score of dialects, and a reasoned dislike of Communism and all its works. He amassed and squandered several fortunes in the free world" and just happened to be "approaching the acme of his fifth and largest when coronary thrombosis laid him low, in 1941" (page 4). So Alex has a huge pile of dough in the bank. Handy.
The really odd thing about the narrator's past, though, is that during the Second World War he worked for "Naval Intelligence behind the lines in the Balkans" and somehow--get this--"had killed, for one reason or another, some eleven N.K.V.D. men, among others" and thus was, "like [his] father before [him], a favorite quarry of the Russian secret police" (page 4). But, come on--how does such a thing happen when the Soviets nominally were our allies then? Being suspicious of them, yes. Outfoxing their atomic spying back in the States, yes. But actually killing 'em, and not just one by accident but nearly a dozen purposefully? I mean, yeah, killin' Commies is fun an' all, but this sho' does stretch credulity...
In any event, the narrator was declared MIA during the war (page 5), then given a couple of name changes (pages 5, 11) with plastic surgery (page 5) that somehow includes a fingerprint switcheroo (page 11) and airtight documentation yea even unto "changing Navy records" (page 11). After some man-of-the-world tough-guy escapades he ends up recruited into "the International Intelligence Agency, familiarly known as 'Bureau-X' (or 'Bu-X')," which foresightedly spends "years of labor and planning" (page 3) on getting an agent in to bump off Uncle Joe.
The book thus starts quickly, with secrecy and intrigue and plenty of action. "Of necessity, the path that Bureau-X charted for its assassin, to approach within gun range of the world's most closely guarded person, [leads] through blood," but the narrator "stress[es]" that, essentially, Bu-X already was "at war" (page 3) against the Soviets, who of course would start World War III sometime.
And as we have seen, Alex Bodine, or Steve Ellery, or John Hamilton, or Romanian national Jan Miles, or whatever he should be called, is no stranger to the rough stuff. In not too long, he gets himself recruited into the MVD, working higher, ever higher, eventually put in charge of "all the Communist sabotage on the East Coast," thereby "causing the ruining of irreplaceable machinery, the wrecking of trains, the time-bombing of airplanes on crucial flights, the arson of untold millions of dollars worth of buildings, the sinking of ships, and the general disruption of the American defense effort and the national economy" (page 76). This is the deepest and ugliest of deep cover, but a fella has to establish his bona fides, I guess, and of course Bu-X is playing for keeps...
Basically, the book moves from one crazy pinnacle to the next, driven by the hardest-core of Cold War logic. Thinky it ain't, nor is the narrator given to much introspection, but we don't expect any book whose three-word title begins with "I Killed" to be of profound artistic and moral value, do we? No, but for what it is, and for when it was written, Noel's I Killed Stalin still is a decently entertaining novel of fast-moving tough-guy escapist action, a read of 3 or perhaps allllllmost 3.5 stars.
June 18, 2020
Some enjoyably hard-boiled prose in this piece of communisploitation... of course, you have to overlook the constant harping about the evils of communism. The alternate history angle is kinda interesting, though.
November 13, 2010
I'm impressed I found his one on goodreads. It was on my parents shelf forever (and stiill is).
They probably got it through a book club when it was first published - 1952!
I read it when I got old enough to understand it. If it had the dust jacket pictured here,
I would have read it sooner!
Cold War pulp fiction, entertaining.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews