Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Yet the desire to rehabilitate Stalin persisted. In July 1984 — less than a year before Mikhail Gorbachëv came to power — the Politburo mulled over the question. The older members retained affection for him and hostility to Khrushchëv:11

  Ustinov: In evaluating Khrushchëv’s activity I would go to the stake, as they say, for my opinion. He did us great harm. Just think what he did with our history, with Stalin.

  Gromyko: He delivered an irreversible blow against the positive image of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the rest of the world…

  Tikhonov: And what did [Khrushchëv] do with our economy? I myself was forced to work in a [regional] council of the national economy!

  Gorbachëv: And [what did he do, too,] with the party, dividing it into industrial and rural party organisations!

  Ustinov: We were always against the council of the national economy. And, as you’ll recall, many members of the Politburo of the Central Committee spoke out against [Khrushchëv’s] position. In connection with the fortieth anniversary of the Victory over fascism I’d like to propose a discussion of one further question: shouldn’t we name Volgograd again as Stalingrad? Millions of people would receive this very well.

  At Stalin’s death Ustinov had been Minister for Armaments, Gromyko had been ambassador to the United Kingdom and Tikhonov the Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy.

  The idea of rehabilitation came to nothing because Gorbachëv, who had avoided saying anything about Stalin in the Politburo, became Party General Secretary in March 1985. The movement quickened to reseat Stalin on the bench of the accused. The massive scale of his abuses, which had been only partially revealed under Khrushchëv, was described. The ‘administrative-command system’ established by Stalin was denounced. Films, novels and poems as well as historical works pointed in the same direction. Gorbachëv encouraged the intelligentsia to convince society that total repudiation of the Stalinist legacy was vital for the regeneration of Soviet society. The process slipped out of his control as several critics of Stalin insisted that Lenin too was guilty of fundamental abuses. They traced the administrative-command system to the origins of the USSR. Yet this same openness of discussion also allowed some intellectuals to offer praise for Stalin. His role in securing industrialisation in the 1930s and then victory in the Second World War was repeatedly proclaimed.

  Yet there was no going back. Gorbachëv went on to castigate Stalin as one of history’s greatest criminals. When the USSR fell apart at the end of 1991 and the Russian Federation became a separate state, Boris Yeltsin continued the damnation of Stalin — and, unlike Gorbachëv, he rejected Lenin and Stalin in equal measure. So things lasted until 2000 when Vladimir Putin became President. Putin’s grandfather had worked in the kitchens for Lenin and Stalin. President Putin was averse to hearing about the abuses of power in the 1930s and 1940s; instead he wished to praise the achievements of the Soviet state in those decades.12 ‘Denigration’ of the past was frowned upon again. Putin, in a symbolic gesture, restored the old USSR national anthem, albeit with new words. He spoke fondly of his own early career in the KGB, the successor organ to Stalin’s security police agency.13 It was not Putin’s purpose to rehabilitate Stalin but rather to affirm the continuities linking the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This process, though, relieved Stalin’s shade from torment for the first time since the late 1980s. Putin was relegating him to the status of a historical figure and leaving it to the scholars to battle out their verdict. This was the ultimate indignity for the long-dead dictator. So long as he was being posthumously denounced, he remained a living force in Moscow politics. Stalin suffered the ignominy of official neglect.

  He was not forgotten, however, in society. Despite the revelations about his despotism, a residual nostalgia remained for Stalin and his period of rule. Surveys of popular opinion in 2000 confirmed this. When asked which period of twentieth-century history they regarded with greatest admiration, most respondents chose the Brezhnev years. Khrush-chëv’s rule attracted the approval of 30 per cent. The Revolution gained 28 and Nicholas II’s reign 18 per cent. Yet Stalin’s despotism, with 26 per cent, did not do badly. Adverse opinion about the despotism was still higher at 48 per cent, but the fact that over a quarter of respondents rejected the case against Stalinist rule was depressing to those in Russian public affairs who aspired to a transformation of social attitudes.14 Not everyone was kindly towards his memory. Families existed whose members solemnly toasted the health of ‘the American doctor’ Cheyne-Stokes on each anniversary of Stalin’s death. They were recalling the fatal breathing problem diagnosed at Blizhnyaya in March 1953. (In fact there had been two doctors, Cheyne and Stokes, and they were not Americans but Irishmen.)15 Indeed millions of Soviet citizens regularly spat on his memory while the politicians switched between public semi-denunciation and, at least in many cases, private admiration.

  Abroad the decline in his reputation was precipitate and near-universal. The communist order collapsed in eastern Europe in 1989 and in every country no one could speak or write in defence of Stalin without incurring massive public displeasure. In the West most communist parties had long ago disavowed Stalinism. ‘Eurocommunism’ in Italy and Spain had been critical of both Lenin and Stalin since the 1970s. Western communist parties anyway fell apart with the dismantling of the USSR and it was no longer a matter of much interest what they thought about the Stalin period. Even in the People’s Republic of China, where a general respect for Stalin was formally maintained, spokesmen stressed the difficulties he had caused for China’s particular interests. In only one little country were many admirers of Stalin widely to be found. This was in his native Georgia, which regained its independence at New Year 1992. Georgians frequently forgot his maltreatment of their forebears. He was celebrated as a Georgian of worldwide fame who had tamed the Russians and given them a lesson in statecraft — and this was enough to save him from execration. Both his statues and the shrine of his childhood house stand untouched and venerated in Gori. Surviving relatives, especially grandchildren who did not know him personally, tend his cult. Georgia’s veteran communists praise his memory.

  This is not a unique fate for homicidal leaders. Genghis Khan is revered in Mongolia. Hitler has admirers in Germany and other countries (including even Russia). People remember what they want in the circumstances in which they do the remembering; they always select and often invent their memories. In Stalin’s case those who think fondly of him — at least many of them — are reacting against the contempt shown towards the achievements of themselves or their parents before 1953. Like Putin, they want to remove the taint on the name of their families. They are also reacting against the unpleasantness of their situation in Russia after communism. They feel that Stalin gave them pride, order and predictability; they overlook the fact that his rule was characterised by systematic oppression. His era has become a reassuring fiction for those individuals and groups who seek a myth for life in the present. Even many persons whose forebears were shot or imprisoned on Stalin’s orders have taken comfort in fairy stories about a ruler who made a few mistakes but usually got the basic direction of state policy right.

  This is evident to anyone who visits Moscow. Down from Red Square by the side of the Manège there is a building which used to be the Lenin Museum. In the early 1990s it became a favourite gathering place for assorted kinds of Stalinist. Passers-by could listen to elderly Russians denouncing everything that had happened in the country since 1953. Individuals sold newspapers rejecting the entire course of history from Khrushchëv to Yeltsin. (Mingling with the Stalinists were still odder individuals advertising herbal cures for AIDS.) Their ideas were a jumble. The Stalinists hate Jews, freemasons and Americans. They support Russian nationalism while advocating the restoration of a multinational state. They hymn social sacrifice. They are a pathetic bunch, steeped in nostalgia, and the police refrain from arresting them even though their wild statements contravene the Russian 1993 Constitution.

 
The authorities have acted as if they assume that the reverence for Stalin will fade as the older generation dies off. Yet what will count in popular opinion is the degree of success attained by the Russian government in improving the living conditions of most citizens. Such amelioration seems far off. Wages are low and the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy minority known as the ‘new Russians’ earns deep resentment. Moscow flourishes while most cities and nearly all villages languish. About a third of society subsists below the UN-recognised poverty level. The political and economic elites have no strategy to effect a rapid transformation whereas parties of the far right and far left argue that simple solutions do indeed exist. Both Vladimir Zhirinovski’s Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation under Gennadi Zyuganov have invoked the name of Stalin as a figure who did the country proud in his day. They contend that but for him the USSR would not have become an industrial and military power capable of defeating Hitler’s Germany. Neither party has won a majority at elections to the Presidency or the State Duma; and although nostalgia for Stalin persists, most Russians abhor the prospect of a return to violent politics. Until Russian society becomes materially more comfortable, however, the menacing icon of Joseph Stalin will be waved in banners raised by extremist politicians.

  He continues to stir up controversy in Russia. Stalin bequeathed a consolidated system of rule to his successors. Personally he had remained devoted to Lenin and his rule had conserved and reinforced the Leninist regime. The one-party state established by the Bolsheviks within months of the October Revolution stayed firmly in place. The exclusion of alternative ideologies from public life was strengthened. The instruments of dictatorship, terror and a politicised judiciary were oiled and sharpened, and society and economy continued to be treated as a resource to be mobilised at the Kremlin’s command. The state’s economic control, substantial since the Civil War, was dramatically tightened. The party was said to know best about past, present and future. History was said to march in step to the drumbeat tapped out by Lenin and Stalin.

  The continuities between the despotism of Stalin and the earlier Soviet period were cardinal features of the country’s history — and historians who wrote fondly about an essential contrast between Lenin the Humanitarian Idealist and Stalin the Ogre had turned their eyes from the historical record. Stalin was Lenin’s keen pupil. But there were also contrasts between them. Stalin made choices of his own, and some were almost certainly different from those which Lenin would have favoured if he had lived longer. A cautionary note must be attached to this verdict. Lenin was unpredictable in his policies even though his underlying assumptions changed little. Yet even Lenin was unlikely to have opted for the chaotic violence of the First Five-Year Plan and agricultural collectivisation. Not that Lenin would have been permanently patient with peasants, priests, nepmen and nationalists: he had his own moments of volatility. But he had a degree of self-restraint not shared by Stalin. Lenin did not overdo the persecution of internal party dissent. Such was his supremacy in the party that he did not need to remove troublemakers with exterminatory methods. Stalin’s terror campaigns of the 1930s were excessive even by the standards of Bolshevism, and Lenin would surely have given them neither encouragement nor approval.

  Yet neither Lenin nor Stalin was a wholly free agent. They were constrained by the nature of the regime which they had created, and Stalin’s actions from the late 1920s were conditioned by the critical problems arising with the NEP. Lenin and Stalin led a party hostile to market economics, political pluralism and cultural, religious and social tolerance. They had established a one-party, one-ideology state beleaguered by capitalist powers; there was a limit to the kinds of policy they would accept.16 Without dictatorship the USSR as a communist order would have fallen apart. With freedom of expression or private entrepreneurship it would have been buffeted by opposition; and had it not built up its industrial and military might it would have risked conquest by a foreign predator. The institutions and practices available to deal with such difficulties were not infinitely malleable. Hierarchical state command would have to be the guiding principle. Administrative surveillance and punitive sanctions would be necessary to enforce compliance; and recurrent recourse to mobilising campaigns, moral invocation and purges — whether peaceful or not — would be unavoidable.17

  Stalin could not act alone. While leading the NEP’s destruction, he had wide support in the central and local committees of the communist party. The enthusiasm for reinforcing state control was shared in sections of the party, political police, armed forces and Komsomol in the late 1920s. But a set of objectives is not the same as a plan. Stalin had no grand plan and his supporters lacked one too. Yet he operated with basic assumptions which they held in common with him. All the same he did not simply listen to the music of his times and adjust his behaviour to its rhythms. Stalin was not just a bureaucrat. He was a man driven by ambition and ideas. The general assumptions were fashioned by him into policies conforming to his intemperate nature and despotic inclinations.

  As his authority increased, the need for support from his original close associates diminished. He could always replace them if they annoyed him. He imposed political, economic and cultural policies with increasing imperturbability. The Great Terror was instigated and supervised by him. The decision to sign a pact with Nazi Germany was his. Stalin’s, too, were the methods chosen to direct the Soviet war machine. His were the choices in external and internal policy after the war. Indeed the whole architecture of the Soviet state, once it had been consolidated at the end of the 1920s, was Stalin’s work based upon Lenin’s design. Even Stalin, though, needed to restrain himself. He had to act within the framework of the communist order. He objected to the patronage networks in politics and general administration. He knew he could not trust the information reaching him from below. He criticised the lack of conscientiousness among workers and peasants. He was annoyed by the weak impact of the regime’s Marxist–Leninist propaganda. But he had to operate with the human material and institutional resources available to him. The Great Terror strengthened and secured his despotism, but it also revealed to him the dangers of campaigning for total personal control. Although his methods remained intrusive, violent and ruthless, his purposes were more realistic after 1938.

  That he succeeded to this large extent flowed from his skill in forming a central team of willing, if frightened, subordinates. He also managed to promote millions of young men and women to all levels of public activity who gave him their support in return for the power and comfort they received from him. Moreover, he ruled for so many years that those youths who had been through schooling in his time were affected by the propaganda; and the victory in the Second World War strengthened this tendency. Probably only a minority in society keenly admired him. Nevertheless many silent critics respected him for his policies of welfare and patriotism: Stalin did monstrous things and yet the popular attitude towards him was not wholly negative.

  But what is his position in the history of his country and the world? Without Stalin and his rule, the USSR would have remained a brittle state with a fading grip on its society. Stalin modified Leninism and its practices and attitudes just as Lenin had subjected Marxism to his peculiar adaptation. This whole process — from Marx and Engels to Lenin and through to Stalin — involved a combination of reinforcement and emasculation. Lenin had invented a cul-de-sac for communism; Stalin drove the party down it. Under Stalin, no aspect of public and private life was exempt in theory or reality from central state interference. Communists pursued, in an extreme fashion, the objectives of comprehensive modernisation — and Stalin, like all communists, claimed that his party’s version of modernity outmatched all known others. He achieved a lot: urbanisation, military strength, education and Soviet pride. His USSR could claim impressive achievements. It became a model for radical political movements — and not only communist ones — elsewhere in the world. And at a time before the Second World War when liberal-
democratic government signally failed to stand effectively up to fascism, Stalin appeared to have established a plausible alternative (at least until the Non-Aggression Treaty of September 1939). If this had not been the case, he would never have gained the support necessary for him to survive and flourish.

  His standing in popular opinion was a complex matter. Countless people found it possible to give approval to several basic professed aims of the regime while withholding it from others. Victory in the war, moreover, turned Stalin into the embodiment of patriotism, world power and a radiant future for the country. And such was his despotic authority that innumerable people lived their lives on the assumption that they had to accept the political structures and the official ideology. Many millions of course hated him in the 1930s and continued to detest him to the end of his days. But supporters of one kind or another certainly existed widely among people in the USSR.

  Nevertheless Stalin drove the Soviet order not only down the cul-de-sac but into the wall at its end. His system of command achieved immediate subjugation at the expense of a general consensus. The terror campaigns traumatised whole generations. Most people ignored official policies and intensified engagement in practices of clientelism, localism, fraud and obstructiveness. As he himself recognised, there were limits to his power. Leninism in any case was distinctly ‘unmodern’ in many ways and Stalin magnified this among its features. The USSR in the 1930s and 1940s was governed as if always there was a single correct set of policies. Stalin treated debate from below as a danger to desirable unanimity, and he arrested and killed to secure dominion. Potential as well as overt enemies perished. The result was a maelstrom of murder which left behind fear, distrust and self-withdrawal. The primacy of state interests led to political immobilisation as Stalin’s sprint to industrial and cultural transformation reached a dead end. His regime’s patterns of thought and action ultimately precluded the dynamic, open-ended developments characteristic of liberal-democratic, capitalist countries. He had saved and consolidated the Soviet order at the expense of making it durably competitive with its main rivals.