Born a century or so ago, dead for over twenty-five years, Joseph Stalin should soon become an historical figure rather than a deep-dyed villain, as he is for most in the West, or an outstanding hero, as he still is for a few at least in the West and for many elsewhere. True, objective appraisal remains hampered by several persistent obstacles, ranging from absence of source and solid information to an over-abundance of prejudice and passion, but these have been overcome in other cases and may turn out to be surmountable in this one. Even if Soviet archives were to be thrown open to all comers, certain questions, including to what extent Stalin was personally responsible for the purges, would probably not be definitely answered. And many questions of the 1930s, including the level of economic performance, completeness of cultural revolution and aims of foreign policy, have recently been among the subjects of convincing analysis made almost exclusively on the basis of documents and memoirs already published. As for the hate and the fear that the name has aroused, time is at last healing the even these great wounds, while the reverence and adulation that still exist serve as reminders that our own scale of values is not universal and that there may have been some positive aspects to Stalin’s work even according to the Western outlook.
While confident that Stalin is about to enter history, I myself must confess that I have a somewhat confused view of the man, having been officially informed as a child during the Second World War that Stalin was our ally and friend, and gone through adolescence during the most frigid days of the Cold War when he had become the antithesis. But the confusion has been accompanied by the persistent reminder that here is one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century, and that anybody who purports to teach the history of the Soviet Union cannot avoid constant consideration and reappraisal of him. Partly to take my understanding at least a little further, I took a trip to the Soviet Union along with a group of students at the end of 1979, including the fateful day, December 21st. That very morning, we were travelling from Kiev to Leningrad by train and the first words that I heard were an old man’s announcement to the company in general that today was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joseph Stalin. Nobody else made any comment; perhaps it was too earl, but even later on after exchanging whisky and vodka and many other toasts, others in the open carriage were unwilling to say anything about politics, except that whites should stick together in the face of a growing threat from the coloured races. On the other hand, in Kiev we have seen some of the many unofficial centenary portraits that adorned buses and taxis throughout the Soviet Union in 1979, and in Moscow I had held a conversation with two middle-aged women confirming the strong impression gained from earlier trips that many of those who have survived the 1930s retain a powerful reverence for the departed leader. Who could tell that he personally ordered all those deaths, they had said, particularly since he gave his advisers his full confidence, and weren’t they very perilous days throughout the whole world when dangerous people need to be eliminated anyway? Stalin was strict but not cruel, they had insisted, and it should also be remembered that he lived modestly, spoke briefly and simply.
Certainly, listening to such apologies or, some years before, sitting in a Moscow cinema and hearing the applause that spontaneously broke out when Stalin made a brief appearance in the film Liberation , I found it difficult to accept the frequent Western assertion that the dreaded name of Stalin is held in reserve by his successors as a threat to the masses should they become unruly. On the contrary, it seemed to me rather that the leader still held a considerable place of affection in the hearts of many of those who remembered him, and that they made unflattering comparisons with Khrushchev, Brezhnev and other of his successors. Justa s some British people looked back to the days of the war and Churchill and yearned for a new strong man made in the same stamp, so did their Soviet contemporaries hark back to their finest hour and their own great hero.
Such musings were interrupted by the arrival of Pravda and the opportunity of finding out what the Party had to say for itself on the dominant subject of the day, even if it was relegated to less than the bottom half of page 3, as opposed to the front page lead of Pravda and other journals for the fiftieth birthday on December 21st 1929. Here in the centenary appraisal, the tone was restrained and an evident attempt made at an evaluation that the Soviet reading public would consider balanced, even though most Western readers would find it not only weighted but also too selective.
The newspaper article began with a brief account of Stalin’s early life, all the more necessary perhaps for a Western journal. Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born on December 21st, 1879 at Gori, about 100 kilometres to the north-west of Tbilisi in Georgia. Joseph was the fourth but only surviving child of Vissarion, a poor shoemaker and Ekaterina who eked out the family income as a washerwoman and became the family provider after her husband’s death which was possibly brought on by drink. There are many other uncertainties in Stalin’s early – as in his later- career because of a shortage of solid information and many overlays of hagiographic embellishment, but his mother, apparently a devout and protective woman and wanting the best for her son, certainly got him into the seminary at Tiflis, where he was exposed to revolutionary as well as theological doctrine and soon acquired the first of nearly a score of undercover pseudonyms. Coming to Lenin’s attention with a paper on the nationalities question, he helped to edit Pravda for a time among other activities on behalf of the Bolshevik cause. He was sent to jail and into exile for several terms, returning from Siberia to play a somewhat controversial part in the Revolution of 1917. He then began to obtain the positions that enabled him to acquire the leadership of the Party after Lenin’s death, the most important of which was that of General Secretary.
Afterits brief biographical introduction, Pravda explained that Stalin was a complicated and contradictory historical figure, who came to power at a complex moment both internally and internationally. The threat from outside was continued after the withdrawal of the foreign interventionists in the Civil War which followed the October Revolution and was exacerbated by the advent to power of fascism in Germany. Meanwhile, against a background of arduous economic recovery, and advance, a bitter class struggle was raging at home, and hostile elements in the Communist Party itself – Trotskyists, right opportunists and bourgeois nationalists – were, on the basis of anti-Leninist arguments, denying the possibility of the victory of socialism in any country and thus essentially leading towards the possibility of the restoration of capitalism. Such conditions made necessary the centralisation of leadership, the imposition of iron discipline and the adoption of a high degree of awareness. These in turn involved the temporary restrictions of democracy, which could gradually be lifted as the Soviet state became stronger and the forces of socialism and democracy developed throughout the world as a whole.
In such difficult times, Stalin played a vigorous part in the struggle, and thus achieved great authority and popularity. But praise turned his head and he began to exaggerate the extent of his services. The warnings voiced by Lenin in 1922 about Stalin’s rudeness and capriciousness which were suppressed in the cause of party unity, now revealed themselves as all too well justified as Stalin attempted to make the temporary restrictions on democracy permanent, advancing the erroneous thesis on the intensification of the class struggle along with the arrival of socialism. There were serious infringements of Soviet legality and mass repressions, as a result of which many unjustified sufferings were inflicted upon outstanding Party activists, state functionaries, military leaders and many rank-and-file both in the Party and outside it.
During the Second World War, called by Stalin the Great Fatherland War, and the Cold War, the years of destruction and reconstruction, the people as a whole made tremendous efforts. Stalin continued to play an important part in these epic proceedings, but after his death the Party condemned his infringements of legality, coarse abuses of power, his deviations from the Leninist norms and principles of collective leadership, all the distortions engendered by the cult of personality. Now the Party engaged in a resolute struggle with the consequences of the cult, success coming with relative ease because millions of Soviet Communists and the broad masses had never forgotten the basic guiding concepts of Marxist-Leninism. A cult of personality, however large, could not change the course of history and destroy its objective laws – this would be to fall into idealism and voluntarism and to ignore the creative energies of the people. For their part, the bourgeois propagandists of the West exaggerate the importance of the cult for their own pernicious purposes, and keep quiet about the fact that the Party has openly and unreservedly condemned it and created firm guarantees against its reappearance, with the energetic leadership of ‘that true continuator of the great work of Lenin, that tireless fighter for peace’, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.
So much for Pravda : what about the truth? Obviously, from the standard Western point of view, there are several inadequacies in this Soviet analysis. For example, why did those who so energetically dismantled the cult of personality after Stalin's death allow it or even encourage it to be built up in the first place? Is it possible to talk of the achievements of the 1930s without making more mention of the terrible dislocation that accompanied them, especially in the elimination of the kulaks and the purges? Did his shortsighted clumsiness not lead towards the Second World War and the disastrous nature of the Soviet Union's entry into it, and then to the years of extreme tension with former allies known to them as the Cold War?
On the other hand, while giving our own emphatic answers to these and other questions not even posed in Pravda, we should also recognise the fact often ignored in the West that, however we define it, a staggering amount of growth and change was accomplished in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. To begin with human distribution: before 1928 four-fifths of Soviet citizens were rural inhabitants, while soon after the death of Stalin, the majority were living in cities. As the Five Year Plan was being launched, there were probably only three towns with more than half a million people in them; not long after 1953 there were ten times as many. There had been a steep rise in population in western Siberia, Central Asia and the Far East as well as significant shifts within European Russia. Accompanying this rapid urbanisation there was a vast expansion of industry; even if some of the official figures given during the implementation of the early Five Year Plans were exaggerated or even inventedfor propaganda purposes, there was substance enough in at least a sufficient number of the others for it now to be widely accepted that a firm basis of heavy industry was laid during the decade or so leading up to the Second World War.
It is true that a vigorous argument still rages about the extent to which Soviet technology had become independent of Western models as well as about the methods employed to accomplish the aims of the Plans. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that a considerable body of native expertise was built up and that there were many impressive feats such as the dam over the Dnepr River and the metallurgical complex at Magnitogorsk. Even if Alexis Stakhanov did not really overfulfil his quota by as much as 1,300 per cent to become the most famous of the heroes of Soviet labour, there were many such as he prepared to make sacrifices for the cause in a voluntary manner as well as millions of others obliged to make their contribution in a manner that was ultra-draconian, especially those peasants dispossessed of their land by the notorious collectivisation.
While excesses and failures were largely Stalin's responsibility, it is also the case that, to a considerable degree, the undoubted successes of Soviet industry in the 1930s were the result of such decisions as his initiation during the years of the First Five Year Plan of a programme through which over 100,000 workers and Party members were specially selected for training at higher technical schools with emphasis on engineering. Those who graduated from these special courses including Brezhnev and Kosygin – developed a strong sense of pride allied with another of indebtedness; they had forced themselves upon the Leader's attention, and he had helped those who had helped themselves. Moreover, as Stalin's control tightened over the Party and government apparatus at the centre, there were many other functionaries like him, and often promoted by him, establishing a similar stranglehold in the provinces and contributing to the cohesion of the Soviet state.
Generally speaking, as Nadezhda Mandel'shtam pointed out in her Hope Abandoned : '"unanimity" did not fall from the skies.... It was eagerly created by crowds of active, energetic supporters of the new order'. And along with the thousands in the new elite that had their own advancement to be grateful for, there were millions of others voluntarily joining in the worship of Stalin with no more tangible return for their devotion than the meanest level of material comfort, and no educational advance beyond mere literacy. Propaganda came from many quarters, including not only the politicians but also the writers and artists, enrolled in the drive forwards as 'engineers of the soul' with socialist realism as their blueprint. Radio and the cinema supplemented more traditional media of communication, often in a manner that made converts abroad as well as encouraging the faithful at home. And where the energies of those giving themselves to the implementation of the Five Year Plans began to flag, the stick was given more powerful application if the carrot failed.
Whipping the peasant and worker nag into a trot and even into something like a gallop was a policy brought about by an intense consciousness of in- security in an unstable world. Stalin him- self gave eloquent expression to this feeling in a famous speech of February 5th, 1931, listing the disastrous consequences of Russia's pre-revolutionary backwardness and concluding: 'We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under'. The launching of Hitler's Plan Barbarossa for the conquest of the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941, appeared at first to be an all too complete fulfilment of this nightmarish prophecy. And in the period leading up to that dread date, there were many alarums of war and suspected incursions. From Murmansk to Vladivostok, along the USSR's almost interminable land frontier, foreign agents were thought to be breaking and entering socialism's one country. The odyssey of Fitzroy Maclean, so graphically described in his Eastern Approaches , showed how easy it was for an enterprising individual to evade or manipulate the internal police and frontier guards, and the realisation by the government of the many inadequacies in its 'totalitarian' controls must have made no small contribution to the frenetic vigour of its persecution of its opponents real and imagined. Just how many of those eliminated fitted into each category it is certainly difficult and perhaps will always be impossible to say, but 'bourgeois nationalism' was as much a concern in the peripheral republics as were 'Trotskyism', 'right opportunism' and other deviations from the Pacific to the Baltic and the White Sea. Fears concerning domestic security were intensified by the ever growing threat of the disintegrating international situation, with Japan threatening from the East and Germany from the West, and the two expansionist powers coming together in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 later to be joined by Italy and Spain. A limited war was fought against Japan at the Manchurian border in 1938 and again in 1939, while the clouds gathered to the West as a prelude to the major storm of 1941.
How did Stalin become involved in the largest scale action of his life, the Great Fatherland War'? In the days of' the Weimar Republic, he had been a strong supporter of the Rapallo agreement made in 1922 between the outcasts from Versailles, arguing in Pravda of October 27th, 1923 that 'The German steam hammer and Soviet wheat will conquer the world'. And then, even if aware of the rantings of Mein Kampf concerning the need for Lebensraum and the menace of 'Jewish Bolshevism', he did not believe them to be in sufficient danger of implementation for him to encourage the German Communists to oppose the rise of Nazism. Indeed, on the contrary, possibly because he believed that Hitler would not remain long in power, possibly because he realised that a Communist takeover from a moribund Weimar would alarm Western powers much more than that by the Nazis, he appears to have actively discouraged such opposition.
Since Hitler not only remained in power but gave several indications of his desire to fulfil the aims of Mein Kampf , with at least some connivance and even encouragement from the West, Soviet anxiety grew rapidly and vigorous emphasis was placed on the policy of collective security. Exclusion from the Munich Conference and cold rejection of all Soviet offers to enter into joint guarantees of Czech integrity forced Stalin to make a complete turnabout in foreign policy. If Great Britain and France could agree on the judicial dismemberment of the Sudetenland with the Czechs being held responsible for any damage they wrought on their frontier fortresses, and then move only tardily towards action when Bohemia and Moravia were swallowed up as well, then the Soviet Union would have to look after its own interests in a manner which also infringed national sovereignty and international law. Hence, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939, an embarrassment to supporters of the USSR and an anathema to its opponents, but in retrospect an understandable enough piece of realpolitik . If Churchill could pronounce his readiness later in 1941 to make a pact with the devil if necessary in order to win a war, Stalin could now decide that in the interest of the security of the Soviet Union he too would do a deal with the same evil one. And he was not only anticipating Churchill, but also acting in the tradition of Lenin and even of tsarist predecessors.
It is true that Stalin's niggardly and tardy support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, like his earlier abandonment of the German Communist Party could hardly be recognised as implementation of the first avowed intents of the Third International, but even before the Comintern's Coundation, the difficulty of carrying out a consistently Communist external policy had been starkly revealed in the negotiations leading up to Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 3rd, 1918. To achieve his basic aim of the nascent Soviet Republic's survival, Lenin had to overcome the arguments of Bukharin for revolutionary war and of Trotsky for 'neither war nor peace' and agree to the imperial German demands for the Baltic Provinces, Poland and the Ukraine. Now, in making his similarly expedient agreement with Nazi Germany, Stalin was in a sufficiently strong position to take back much of what had been lost in Brest-Litovsk and later treaties. Looking back beyond 1812, he was also to argue that he had emulated the Tilsit agreement of Alexander I with Napoleon, which had given Russia the time to make best use of its vast space in a prototype 'scorched earth' policy.
There was perhaps some retrospective wisdom in this analogy, for. Stalin's immediate reaction to the Nazi onslaught of June 22nd, 1941 appears to have been not so much far-sighted resolution as blind panic (not that the immediate Russian response to Napoleon's invasion in 1812 was attended with as much heroic resolution as Stalin attributed to it). While the assertions of Khrushchev in his 'secret speech' of 1956 that Stalin was a pigheaded simpleton who trusted Hitler too much and then planned military operations on a globe are no longer repeated, the conventional Soviet view remains that he made serious miscalculations in the summer of 1941, even if he made up for this fault to a considerable extent in his later conduct of the war. And some military memoirs praise him for his powers of insight and decision.
Western analysis gives Stalin's wartime performance a rating somewhere between that of Khrushchev and the memoirists. As far as the Leader's policies after the war are concerned, the gap between positive and negative estimates is often wider. Ironically while for some of his enthusiastic supporters this is the period of his life when exhausted by his earlier labours and above normal retirement age in any case, Stalin too often for too long hid himself away in his Kremlin apartment or his rural dacha, for some of his bitterest opponents it was the time when he was outwitting Western statesmen and masterminding the takeover of eastern Europe and preparing for the spread of Communism into what has come to be known as the Third World. Ironically, too, among his stoutest defenders in that Third World is its largest and most powerful state, the Chinese People's Republic, the creation of which Stalin did very little to help and a considerable amount to delay.
The Chinese centenary view was that Stalin was fallible, but a great leader and a great Marxist. Probably the violence associated with the man does not shock observers in other areas long accustomed to natural and manmade disasters on a scale comparable to the collectivisation and the purges. In the Soviet Union, as we have seen, attitudes to Stalin are somewhat mixed: he remains 'a complicated and contradictory historical figure', to recall Pravda 's words. Western appraisal, except for a few sectarian groups, remains almost uniformly negative, if for differing reasons. Trotskyists condemn him for his failure to promote world revolution and would reject as an infamous perversion of the truth Pravda 's charge that Trotsky's denial of the possibility of socialism in one country led towards the restoration of capitalism. On the other hand, others persist in finding him repulsive for promoting world revolution too assiduously, seeing in the construction of socialism in one country the building of a launching pad for almost ubiquitous Communist aggression. Here, the attempt has been made to look for the man as he was in a context of his time and place leading towards a fuller comprehension of his historical significance. This is not necessarily to say that to understand him more is to award him a greater measure of exoneration.
As an individual, the man remains, in Trotsky's phrase, something of a 'grey blur', partly, perhaps, because he was somewhat without colourful character, partly because so many of the details of his personal life remain a matter for conjecture. We lack, therefore, the data necessary for psychohistorical analysis. Was he worried about his lack of height – about 5 feet 4 inches – or perturbed about the smallpox marks that disfigured his face? How responsible was he for the suicide of his second wife and for the death of so many erstwhile comrades and supporters? The most intimate portrait, done by his daughter Svetlana, tends to be charitable, drawing a sometimes idyllic picture of a kind master, solicitous for all the members of his small domestic staff, and a fond 'little papa', romping whenever time allowed with his 'little sparrow'; the shadows are cast by the true villains such as Lavrenty Beria and other sinister hatchetmen. Svetlana Stalin urges us all to recall that 'We are all responsible for everything that happened' and before pointing out the mote in our neighbour's eye to see the beam in our own. For the rest of us, even when acknowledging the case for collective responsibility and even when at our most conscience-stricken, the beam in our own eye is likely to loom less large than the mote in that of our erstwhile neighbour, J. V. Stalin.
Further Reading:
For Stalin's own words and a vigorous introductory defence of the man, see Bruce Franklin ed - The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-52 (London, 1973); the best biography remains Isaac Deutscher - Stalin: A Political Biography (Penguin, 1966); while the most worthwhile dissident Soviet analysis is Roy Medvedev - Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Spokesman, 1976); Svetlana Stalin's account may be found in Svetlana Alliluyeva - Twenty Letters to a Friend (Penguin, 1967); for recent works see RW Davies - The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia , (Macmillan, 1979); John Barber - Soviet Historians in Crisis 1928-32 (Macmillan, 1980); N Lampert - The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State: A Study of Soviet Managers and Technicians 1928-35 (Macmillan, 1979); and Robert A Lewis - Science and Industrialisation in the USSR (Macmillan, 1979); on foreign policy see J Haslam's article 'The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1938', J. Contemp Hist , Vol 14, No 3 (1979).
- Dr Paul Dukes is Reader in History at the University of Aberdeen.