Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin is a historical and imagined presence whose name marks the crisis of Shmuel Ash’s socialist commitments. In waking life, the exposure of Stalin’s terror fractures the circle Shmuel belongs to; in a dream, Stalin becomes a mocking judge before whom Shmuel cannot explain either Jewish rejection of Jesus or the persistence of that rejection. Together, these appearances connect political disillusionment with Shmuel’s private insecurity and his abandoned research.

Political Presence

The socialist-renewal circle responds to revelations about Stalin’s terror by revisiting its allegiance to him. Most members accept the condemnation voiced at the Soviet Communist Party’s twentieth congress, but a more intransigent faction wants to question not only Stalin but the foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat as conceived by Lenin. Two members invoke the young Marx against the hardened doctrine of the mature Marx. When Shmuel tries to prevent the group from coming apart, four of its six members announce a split and the formation of an independent cell. The breach leaves Shmuel estranged from friends as well as from the movement’s former certainty.

Stalin’s political legacy remains difficult for Shmuel to separate from the ideals it has compromised. When he later explains the split to Gershom Wald, he asks whether social justice must be abandoned because the Soviet party has become corrupt and strayed from its path. His comparison with the Inquisition’s use of Jesus’s name makes the problem explicit: a compromised institution does not, in his view, automatically disprove the ideal it claims to serve. Stalin therefore signifies both the historical discrediting of a revolutionary regime and the unresolved question of whether its proclaimed hopes can survive that discrediting.

Stalin in Shmuel’s Dream

During a period of wandering and exhaustion, Shmuel dreams of meeting Stalin in the back room of the blackened café where the socialist circle gathers. In the dream, Stalin orders Professor Gustav Eisenschloss to relieve Shmuel’s father’s financial troubles. The scene draws on a real strain in Shmuel’s life: after his father loses an appeal in a business dispute, his parents can no longer provide the monthly allowance that has supported him during his studies.

The dream shifts from that practical need to the question that Shmuel has been unable to answer through his research. From a distant observation post on the roof of the Monastery of the Dormition on Mount Zion, he points Stalin toward a corner of the Western Wall, trapped across the border in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. He cannot explain why the Jews rejected Jesus or why they continue to turn away from him. The inaccessible wall and the unanswerable religious question occupy the same divided scene: Shmuel can indicate what is separated, but cannot make the separation intelligible to Stalin—or to himself.

Stalin laughs beneath his moustache and calls Shmuel Judas. For an instant, the lean figure of Nesher Shereshevski appears, handing Stalin a whimpering puppy in a metal box. The dream ends not with an explanation but with Shmuel’s suspicion that his tangled account has made matters worse, provoking Stalin’s mockery and distrust. Its images bring together the political rupture in the café, Shmuel’s financial dependence, his unfinished study of Jesus, and his sense of being judged as a betrayer.

The Dream’s Political and Personal Afterlife

The dream does not resolve Shmuel’s political questions; it stages them as an encounter in which authority is at once powerful and absurd. Stalin can command the professor to repair a family’s financial distress, yet Shmuel cannot persuade him about the religious question that has occupied his research. The scene thus joins material vulnerability to intellectual failure without making either one a simple consequence of the other.

When Shmuel later recounts the socialist circle’s dissolution to Gershom Wald, the dream’s tensions find a waking counterpart in his defense of ideals damaged by institutions. Stalin’s name remains attached to the historical terror that divided his comrades, while the dream turns Stalin into the listener whose ridicule Shmuel fears. Across those appearances, the novel presents political disillusionment not as a settled renunciation but as an unresolved struggle over what can still be believed after authority has betrayed its claims.