In times past, Mormon intellectualdom has been much exercised over the issue of objectivity and the writing of history. By and large, I think that these debates have focused on the wrong issues. Stalin’s toes help to illustrate one of the reasons why.

The middle two toes on one of Stalin’s feet were fused together. We know this because this fact appears in a dossier on the young communist radical Stalin (then called Koba), which was kept by the czarist secret police. Virtually every writer and biographer of Stalin in the west feels called upon to at some point or another mention this fact about Stalin’s toes. It has become an obligatory reference. My own theory is that the ubiquity of Stalin’s toes in his biographies can be traced to Shakespeare.

Stalin by all accounts — including post-Stalin Soviet accounts — was one of the great monsters of human history. He had his friends and long time associates shot. He ruthlessly suppressed any opposition to his power. He systematically starved millions of his own citizens and sent unnumbered others to die a slow death of malnutrition, overwork, and exposure in the Siberian gulags. The only person who comes close in terms of sheer body count is Mao. Hitler is not really in the same league, as the thousand year Reich was destroyed in twelve years. Stalin had decades to carry out his crimes. The toes are a wonderful device to paint the picture of Stalin’s monstrosity. The deformity of Stalin’s toes becomes an unstated metaphor for the deformity of his soul. They are an allusion to Richard III, another murderous tyrant whose deformed body acted as a metaphor for his misshapen spirit. Now if you asked Robert Conquest, or any of Stalin’s other biographers, if they thought that bodily deformity was an accurate indicator of moral depravity, they would certainly deny it. Stalin’s toes are not being offered as a causal explanation of his acts or even as evidence of his character. Still, the image of the misshapen monster is too powerful not to use.

Are the allusions to Stalin’s toes objective? Well they are certainly accurate by historical standards. It is well-documented that Stalin did indeed have fused toes on one foot. Yet this answer is obviously lame, and it points out the problem of asking the question. In one sense, the allusions to Stalin’s toes are the opposite of objectivity. They are being used as a literary device to show Stalin as a monster. They are not being shown as part of a mirror of nature, but rather they form a rhetorical flourish in an implicit (or just as frequently explicit) denunciation of Stalin. In another sense, however, the toes are entirely fair game. Allusion to them satisfies all of the cannons of historical documentation, and suggesting that Stalin was a misshapen monster does not seem to be entirely beyond the bounds of reasonable interpretation.

Stalin’s toes point to the central fact that historians are ultimate story tellers. This doesn’t mean that they make it all up, as suggested by a cynical Napoleon, or that all is subjectivity and there is no truth, as suggested by those of the 1970s and 1980s who OD-ed on post-modernism. It is not a neo-Kantian or Kuhnian point about the necessity of assumptions. Rather it is a point about writing.

History is narrative. It consists of authors putting together words to tell a story. The difference between a historian and a novelist lies in the differing disciplines that their media impost upon them. Historians cannot make up facts. They must rely on some sort of evidence for their claims (although what counts as good and bad evidence is always up for grabs). Yet like a novelist, historians must fill out their stories, provide them with a plot, and characterize the people that occupy the stories. In their way, historians are writing the truth. History can be false. The biographies of Stalin written during his lifetime were certainly false on many levels. Yet the truth or falsity of history does not ultimately lie, I think, in the objectivity of the historian. Rather than asking a question about the genesis of an author’s ideas or interests, we should look at the work that she produces. We should ask certain questions about the work. Does the story abide by the rules of history? Does it make up facts or make false claims about documents? But beyond these questions we ask questions about the story that it tells. Is it true? Does its interpretation illuminate or obscure? These are questions that cannot really be answered in terms of objectivity. But they do have answers. The use of Stalin’s toes seems true to me, in a way that a similar use of FDR’s misshapen legs would be false.