Total Terror - The Policies of Josef Stalin
Created | Updated Aug 19, 2003
Man of Steel
Josef Stalin was forty-five years of age when Lenin died in 1924. He played only a minor role in the October revolution and he was somewhat inconspicuous during the Civil War. However, by 1924 he had consolidated his political position somewhat as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, liaison between Orgburo and Politburo, and General Secretary of the Party. He thus had a good overview of party politics to help him in his bid for the position of Lenin’s successor, a feat he was able to manage despite Lenin’s qualified expressions of distrust and personal dislike. There followed a series of intruiges which culminated with the expulsion of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev (on the “left”) from the Party and then Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov (on the "right”). By the end of 1929 Stalin’s position as leader of the Party and inheritor of Bolshevism was relatively secure, it could be argued. Stalin, it would seem, disagreed. Exhibiting a shift in the emphasis of his policy goals, Stalin abandoned the NEP in favour of a radical program of argricultural collectivization and industrialisation, and defended his policies with a purge of his closest advisors and associates in a series of infamous show trials. His tool, his weapon, in pursuit of these objectives was a programme of terror, terror against the populace, and terror against members of the Party.
How does a man settle on the use of such methods? Can such a thing be justified, or even understood? Is the use of terror something all revolutionaries must consider as a viable option? Was Stalin’s terror the means to an end, or an end in and of itself? Some historians see Stalin as a depraved madman, clawing paranoically at power and crushing all affronts to his massive ego. Others concede Stalin a level of political genius and an indomitable will to carry forward towards the realisation of a utopian world at any cost. Or perhaps, as still others have pointed out, it may be inadequate to lay the responsibility for the horrors of Stalin’s regime directly at the feet of Stalin alone... the machinations of the terror may have been beyond his direct control. I contend that each viewpoint has some element of truth; whatever Stalin was, his place in history assures him a deserved amount of leeway for interpretation.
The New Soviet Man
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Kamonev would have agreed to the use of terror, to a limited degree, as a means to an end in the realization of their socialist utopia. But they were not in accord with the use of terror on a grand scale, and did not consider terror an end unto itself. Stalin, on the other hand, seemed driven by a single-minded, fanatical devotion to a grandiose vision, and saw that end as justifying any means, as being worth any price. Stalin’s contemporaries were largely of the opinion that the transformation of society took place top down, with the base, or infrastructure, of a society being unalterable, and the superstructure of a society being a natural offshoot of the infrastructure which could be shaped and molded to a degree. Stalin saw the superstructure as being nearly inconsequential, and undertook to reshape the infrastructure of society. To this end, perhaps emboldened by Nietzchian ideals of a ‘superman’, he envisioned a “new Soviet man” who would be perfectly attuned to and in harmony with the society and goals of Stalinist Bolshevism. Stalin planned to use terror on society as a whole the way a psychiatrist uses electroshock therapy to weaken the accustomed responses and associations of a particular patient during brainwashing... to break down the patterns of human association and mutual trust that are common to most societies so that devotion to the state could supplant such feelings.
In 1930, Stalin addressed the Sixteenth Party Congress and uttered, rather cryptically, “We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorships of the proletariat, which represents the most powerful and mighty authority of all forms of the state which have existed up to the present day.”
This sinister statement seems to reflect Stalin’s view that the state’s ultimate achievement of power will come at the point at which the state is indistinguishable from mankind. This is totalitarian theory taken to its extreme; not a Party above the people, or a Party by the people, or a Party for the people, but a Party indistinguishable from the people. And as Orwell pointed out, the sort of ludicrous irrationalities characteristic of Stalin’s regime, that in another person or leader might be sollipsistic and mindless, become something much more when the societal mind aligns with the policies of the party to the point of being indistinguishable. Indeed, it could be argued that sollipsism ceases to be such when it is collective and consensual.
If this sounds terrible, it should; it was. Hence the word, 'Terror’. Still, the methods Stalin pursued in attaining his objective seem to indicate that he pretty much knew what he was on about.. most particularly, that he seemed to know when to stop, when to compromise, and when to change tactics to make the best of an oversight or error. Throughout his career, Stalin often risked his personal security and reputation in vast political gambles... the success of such gambles attests to Stalin’s political genius.
Consider, for example, the creation of the Stalin cult... a fine exercise in totalitarian principles, in recognition of the impact on mass psychology of the totem of a mythical, superhuman leader who would stand at the forefront of a program requiring mass sacrifice... the equivalent of an alpha male monkey in a chimpanzee society. It was not merely egotism that emboldened Stalin, that drove him to pass policies which would glorify, and perhaps, diefy his own likeness... if anything, it indicates that Stalin (who was short, pockmarked, unimposing, and certainly not the rousing statesman that contemporaries like Hitler or Churchill were) recognized his own limitations and set out to overcome them by limiting personal appearances and using posters, leaflets, and other ‘still’ mediums to disseminate his likeness and his ideas. Stalin kept his private life private; he did not want to be seen by the public to indulge in human weaknesses like illness, recreation, or family. Histories of Bolshevism were rewritten, and Marxism-Leninism became Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. After the victory at ‘Stalingrad’, Stalin took a military postion as a marshal in the Soviet army, and then was ‘promoted’ to ‘Generalissimo’. Stalin was thereafter always photographed in military regalia, and this indicates that he again understood the psychological need for a figurehead by those who were about to sacrifice their own lives for an intangible cause. To insure that the popular national victory would be associated with Stalin, the decisive Soviet offensives of 1944 were recorded as the ‘Ten Stalin Thrusts’. It seems likely that, even if Stalin was indulging a personal zeal for self-aggrandizement, he was doing so in harmony with his totalitarian principles; in allowing himself to become the Party and become the State, he was leading the way for others to do likewise, to blur their identities until they were indistinguishable from that of the Party.
It must also be recognized that the Terror served a very basic purpose; negative reinforcement can be an effective motivator, and in this sense the Terror could be likened to the use of an electric fence around a cow pasture. The economic objectives set forth in the Five Year Plans were ambitious. Stalin himself was known to refer to this as “thumping heads”, which reminds one of a stern master disciplining an unintelligent dog (Russian dog training methods, did, in fact, involve thumping them on the head).
Stalin thumped a lot of heads in his attempts to collectivize agriculture (an undertaking which was initially a miserable failure) and to reinvigorate industry (an undertaking which enjoyed various degrees of success and failure). Collectivization met with heavy resistance when peasants started slaughtering their own livestock rather than give up their goods to the state. After Stalin’s call for a “liquidation of the kulaks (middle-income peasants who owned land) as a class”, entire villages were wiped out in the ensuing civil war. Noone knows with certainty how many were shipped to remove labour camps, but the 1930 creation of the Gulag (“Chief Administration of Camps”) indicates that the deportations were substantial in number. Stalin’s undertakings in industry met with more initial success, and Stalin (after purging a number of leading economists) adapted the Five Year Plan from being a scientific approach to a rational, planned economy into an adjunct of the myth of the leader, and rationality quickly gave way to immensity and grandeur as a guiding principle. After the purging of a number of industry managers, Industrial growth soared from 2% to 15% in a short time (though it fell again a short time later). The striking economic growth during the early 1930’s is doubtlessly attributable to the Bolshevik regime’s maintenance of high investment rates at the cost of the national standard of living; something that could not have been so handily achieved in an enfranchised society. By 1934, even the collectivization of agriculture was largely a fait accomplit, though the U.S.S.R.’s livestock herds had been devastated in the process.
One of Stalin’s sharpest strategems, though, was the marriage of Bolshevism to Russian nationalism in an effort to bolster war efforts. After the military’s failure to annex Finnish territories, it had become apparent that fighting men would die in battle more readily for their homeland and its traditions than they would for the lofty goals of a Bolshevik Utopia; this was witnessed, too, during the collectivization drive. Other forms of nationalist zeal, were, however, sharply repressed.
A House of Cards
Can such atrocity and suffering as was wrought by Stalinism really be layed at the feet of one man? One must remember that his orders were not carried out by he himself... deportation and assasination in his regime came at the hands of the police, the military, the swelling ranks of the Party, and often complicity by friends and family was a factor in the deportation or execution of an individual.
Stalin himself admitted a few times that there had been deviations from his will, for instance in March, 1930 when he ordered a temporary relaxation of the terrorizing of the peasants in his collectivization drive (though this may have been simply a strategic withdrawal to recalculate the process). It is worth noting that orders issued by the Party did forbid the deportation of non-kulaks during collectivization, though this may have been in the spirit of the ‘Stalin constitution’ which guaranteed enfranchisement and civil liberties (so long as said guarantees did not find themselves at cross-interests with Soviet policies). Again, after the Terror in 1939 when Stalin had finished with his show trials, Stalin admitted to excesses and mistakes; Industrial growth, which by 1934 had reached 20%, had fallen again to 2% by 1939.
Stalin’s attempt to annex Finnish territory so that the Soviet Union would have a seaport for trade and military purposes showed poor results, and a sweeping series of military purges followed. Although it is worth noting that these were ‘light’ purges (many military officers were not executed or jailed but merely dismissed, to be recalled if needed) it did leave the Soviet military sorely lacking for leadership, an error which showed when the Nazis finally invaded several years later. The navy was similarly disarmed, with all eight admirals being purged.
Stalin’s paranoia and suspicion were legendary; it is recalled that often he would invite someone to dine with him as a friend, and that person would never know if he was bound for jail or for home after dinner. Krushchev recalled that Stalin would often demand his colleagues and associates to look him in the eye, and would get angry if they seemed uncomfortable doing so. If the recent reports that Stalin in fact met his end at Kruschev’s hands are at all accurate, then one might sardonically calculate that Stalin wasn’t paranoid enough. Still, it seems worth noting that Stalin himself, whether mad or rationally calculating, knew better than to feel his position was secure. That he would use odious tactics in ensuring his position, seems therefore inevitable, rather than questionable... it has been noted that any successor of Lenin would have found themselves in a similar position, because only Lenin himself had the personal charisma to hold such a post without fear of reprisal.
More than this, it must be realized that the bureaucratization of the Party meant that the link between the decision-making apparatus and localities proved to be a particular problem; often, the so called ‘right hand’ didn’t know what the ‘left hand’ of the Party was doing. To comprehend this, consider an order issued by the Stalin himself to a henchman in the Party. That henchman would pass the order along to the next in chain of command, and during transmission the order would be variously interpreted by officials at different levels in the State and Party, each according to his (her?) own aims and/or agendas. Local Party secretaries, used to catching themselves in Catch-22 situations and conflicts between resource availability and command expectations, would often be pressed to defend the interests of their particular sector, interpreting orders as they saw fit, or ignoring those they couldn’t obey. Stalin, when he saw this was happening, responded by complaining local officials were ‘dizzy with success’. The best example of this sort of thing was when the Party seized the entire year’s grain production of the Ukraine at Stalin’s orders, plunging the entire region into gross famine which resulted in some 5 million casualties by starvation.
Did Stalin really believe the Ukraine’s low grain yields
represented resistance to agricultural policies, or did he simply set out to make an example of those living there? Were his orders misinterpreted? Whatever the case, the fact remains that no amount of propaganda or revisionist history could cover up the gross levels of conflict and dissent which riddled the system.
Stalin’s Madness
Was Stalin mad? Was his legendary viciousness, his megalomania, his appetite for the grandiose, his paranoia, a reflection of a deranged mind? This seems not only plausible, but desirable... to think that such atrocities as were perpetrated by the Bolshevist regime could be attributed to pragmatic determination seems an affront to reason, empathy, social conscience and to fundamental human dignity.
Krushchev certainly seemed to think Stalin mad, particularly in his later years as he doddered towards old age. Still, Churchill, at least, seemed convinced that Stalin possessed the faculty to make rational decisions, and treated Stalin with a guarded respect for a political equal.
There is some support for the notion that many others who came and went from the Politburo suffered some form of mental illness. Lenin frequently suffered nervous breakdowns. Trotsky suffered from weird psychosomatic illnesses, and it was such an illness that cost Trotsky dearly in his bid to succeed Lenin; while Stalin paraded Lenin’s corpse around Red Square and gave a stirring eulogy that established him in the minds of the populace as the heir apparent to Bolshevism, Trotsky was out of the country at a medical retreat. Then there’s the matter of Krushchev’s (much later and much-publicized) infantile shoe-banging incident at the U.N. And perhaps there is some merit in the idea that any man of power... any man attracted to power and competent at wielding it... is by necessity of their strength of character cut of a different cloth. Hitler was a certified weirdo. Churchill suffered from severe bouts of depression. It is an interesting exercise in political theory to take a view of political history as the history of empowered madmen and of those who supported and opposed them.
Although we have discussed that the methodology of totalitarianism does make good use of grandiose and mythic symbols, we should reflect that Stalin’s personal taste for the epic seems prevalent in many of the policies he undertook. His ‘Stalinization’ of the first Five Year Plan is the best example of this, but we must also look to the immense statue of himself that he had built, to the extravagantly huge hydroelectric dam that was created, to the plans for the Palace of Soviets, to be touted as the largest building in the world, which never got off the ground.
Was Stalin a megalomaniac? Daniel Rancour-Laferriere makes the interesting point that a regular person suffering megalomania and paranoia can be easily diagnosed because of the absense of real-world confirmation for their fantastic delusions, but if one takes a paranoid megalomaniac and puts them in a position of power that must be maintained by force of terror and paranoid levels of astute observation, the very traits that might make such a person unviable for a normal life in any society would adapt quite well to such an environment. Is it paranoia if they really ARE out to get you? Is it megalomania if you really DO have total control over all you survey? Stalin’s sanity becomes difficult to quantify because of this. And it seems appropriate that if Stalin’s totalitarian goals included a sublimation of the individual to the identity of the state, that he would lead the way by himself merging his internal predispositions with the functions of his office.
Beyond Definition
The truth of the matter, as usual, doubtlessly lies in the grey territory between these varying points of view. Stalin did exert great control with focus and determination over a vast number of people, and he did so mercilessly and at great human cost. He achieved some goals but fell short of others; his greatest talent was improvisation, as when he turned the disastrous pact with the Nazis into a victorious military conquest. Mistakes were made and admitted to and covered up. And underlying it all, we have a dim glimpse of a man who was able to annihilate and remake himself in his own image, a snake eating its own tail, refining himself continually into someone more merciless and steadfast in pursuit of his dream of a Bolshevik utopia.
His terrible genius is undeniable; his political accomplishments are a matter of a record of his own devising. He was the Big Brother Orwell warned us of. He forged a political system in his own image through force of will. He externalised his malice and madness and used it as a tool to reshape a people. We can take a terrible lesson from this, but it’s unclear what such a lesson might be... perhaps the story of Stalin must simply be preserved and allowed to speak its own truth without a historian’s attempt to tack a moral judgment onto it. While victims of the holocaust have museums and movies to mourn them, many of those swept away by Stalin are simply gone; lost to history, vanished in the name of a utopia that never materialized.
Josef Stalin was forty-five years of age when Lenin died in 1924. He played only a minor role in the October revolution and he was somewhat inconspicuous during the Civil War. However, by 1924 he had consolidated his political position somewhat as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, liaison between Orgburo and Politburo, and General Secretary of the Party. He thus had a good overview of party politics to help him in his bid for the position of Lenin’s successor, a feat he was able to manage despite Lenin’s qualified expressions of distrust and personal dislike. There followed a series of intruiges which culminated with the expulsion of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev (on the “left”) from the Party and then Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov (on the "right”). By the end of 1929 Stalin’s position as leader of the Party and inheritor of Bolshevism was relatively secure, it could be argued. Stalin, it would seem, disagreed. Exhibiting a shift in the emphasis of his policy goals, Stalin abandoned the NEP in favour of a radical program of argricultural collectivization and industrialisation, and defended his policies with a purge of his closest advisors and associates in a series of infamous show trials. His tool, his weapon, in pursuit of these objectives was a programme of terror, terror against the populace, and terror against members of the Party.
How does a man settle on the use of such methods? Can such a thing be justified, or even understood? Is the use of terror something all revolutionaries must consider as a viable option? Was Stalin’s terror the means to an end, or an end in and of itself? Some historians see Stalin as a depraved madman, clawing paranoically at power and crushing all affronts to his massive ego. Others concede Stalin a level of political genius and an indomitable will to carry forward towards the realisation of a utopian world at any cost. Or perhaps, as still others have pointed out, it may be inadequate to lay the responsibility for the horrors of Stalin’s regime directly at the feet of Stalin alone... the machinations of the terror may have been beyond his direct control. I contend that each viewpoint has some element of truth; whatever Stalin was, his place in history assures him a deserved amount of leeway for interpretation.
The New Soviet Man
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Kamonev would have agreed to the use of terror, to a limited degree, as a means to an end in the realization of their socialist utopia. But they were not in accord with the use of terror on a grand scale, and did not consider terror an end unto itself. Stalin, on the other hand, seemed driven by a single-minded, fanatical devotion to a grandiose vision, and saw that end as justifying any means, as being worth any price. Stalin’s contemporaries were largely of the opinion that the transformation of society took place top down, with the base, or infrastructure, of a society being unalterable, and the superstructure of a society being a natural offshoot of the infrastructure which could be shaped and molded to a degree. Stalin saw the superstructure as being nearly inconsequential, and undertook to reshape the infrastructure of society. To this end, perhaps emboldened by Nietzchian ideals of a ‘superman’, he envisioned a “new Soviet man” who would be perfectly attuned to and in harmony with the society and goals of Stalinist Bolshevism. Stalin planned to use terror on society as a whole the way a psychiatrist uses electroshock therapy to weaken the accustomed responses and associations of a particular patient during brainwashing... to break down the patterns of human association and mutual trust that are common to most societies so that devotion to the state could supplant such feelings.
In 1930, Stalin addressed the Sixteenth Party Congress and uttered, rather cryptically, “We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorships of the proletariat, which represents the most powerful and mighty authority of all forms of the state which have existed up to the present day.”
This sinister statement seems to reflect Stalin’s view that the state’s ultimate achievement of power will come at the point at which the state is indistinguishable from mankind. This is totalitarian theory taken to its extreme; not a Party above the people, or a Party by the people, or a Party for the people, but a Party indistinguishable from the people. And as Orwell pointed out, the sort of ludicrous irrationalities characteristic of Stalin’s regime, that in another person or leader might be sollipsistic and mindless, become something much more when the societal mind aligns with the policies of the party to the point of being indistinguishable. Indeed, it could be argued that sollipsism ceases to be such when it is collective and consensual.
If this sounds terrible, it should; it was. Hence the word, 'Terror’. Still, the methods Stalin pursued in attaining his objective seem to indicate that he pretty much knew what he was on about.. most particularly, that he seemed to know when to stop, when to compromise, and when to change tactics to make the best of an oversight or error. Throughout his career, Stalin often risked his personal security and reputation in vast political gambles... the success of such gambles attests to Stalin’s political genius.
Consider, for example, the creation of the Stalin cult... a fine exercise in totalitarian principles, in recognition of the impact on mass psychology of the totem of a mythical, superhuman leader who would stand at the forefront of a program requiring mass sacrifice... the equivalent of an alpha male monkey in a chimpanzee society. It was not merely egotism that emboldened Stalin, that drove him to pass policies which would glorify, and perhaps, diefy his own likeness... if anything, it indicates that Stalin (who was short, pockmarked, unimposing, and certainly not the rousing statesman that contemporaries like Hitler or Churchill were) recognized his own limitations and set out to overcome them by limiting personal appearances and using posters, leaflets, and other ‘still’ mediums to disseminate his likeness and his ideas. Stalin kept his private life private; he did not want to be seen by the public to indulge in human weaknesses like illness, recreation, or family. Histories of Bolshevism were rewritten, and Marxism-Leninism became Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. After the victory at ‘Stalingrad’, Stalin took a military postion as a marshal in the Soviet army, and then was ‘promoted’ to ‘Generalissimo’. Stalin was thereafter always photographed in military regalia, and this indicates that he again understood the psychological need for a figurehead by those who were about to sacrifice their own lives for an intangible cause. To insure that the popular national victory would be associated with Stalin, the decisive Soviet offensives of 1944 were recorded as the ‘Ten Stalin Thrusts’. It seems likely that, even if Stalin was indulging a personal zeal for self-aggrandizement, he was doing so in harmony with his totalitarian principles; in allowing himself to become the Party and become the State, he was leading the way for others to do likewise, to blur their identities until they were indistinguishable from that of the Party.
It must also be recognized that the Terror served a very basic purpose; negative reinforcement can be an effective motivator, and in this sense the Terror could be likened to the use of an electric fence around a cow pasture. The economic objectives set forth in the Five Year Plans were ambitious. Stalin himself was known to refer to this as “thumping heads”, which reminds one of a stern master disciplining an unintelligent dog (Russian dog training methods, did, in fact, involve thumping them on the head).
Stalin thumped a lot of heads in his attempts to collectivize agriculture (an undertaking which was initially a miserable failure) and to reinvigorate industry (an undertaking which enjoyed various degrees of success and failure). Collectivization met with heavy resistance when peasants started slaughtering their own livestock rather than give up their goods to the state. After Stalin’s call for a “liquidation of the kulaks (middle-income peasants who owned land) as a class”, entire villages were wiped out in the ensuing civil war. Noone knows with certainty how many were shipped to remove labour camps, but the 1930 creation of the Gulag (“Chief Administration of Camps”) indicates that the deportations were substantial in number. Stalin’s undertakings in industry met with more initial success, and Stalin (after purging a number of leading economists) adapted the Five Year Plan from being a scientific approach to a rational, planned economy into an adjunct of the myth of the leader, and rationality quickly gave way to immensity and grandeur as a guiding principle. After the purging of a number of industry managers, Industrial growth soared from 2% to 15% in a short time (though it fell again a short time later). The striking economic growth during the early 1930’s is doubtlessly attributable to the Bolshevik regime’s maintenance of high investment rates at the cost of the national standard of living; something that could not have been so handily achieved in an enfranchised society. By 1934, even the collectivization of agriculture was largely a fait accomplit, though the U.S.S.R.’s livestock herds had been devastated in the process.
One of Stalin’s sharpest strategems, though, was the marriage of Bolshevism to Russian nationalism in an effort to bolster war efforts. After the military’s failure to annex Finnish territories, it had become apparent that fighting men would die in battle more readily for their homeland and its traditions than they would for the lofty goals of a Bolshevik Utopia; this was witnessed, too, during the collectivization drive. Other forms of nationalist zeal, were, however, sharply repressed.
A House of Cards
Can such atrocity and suffering as was wrought by Stalinism really be layed at the feet of one man? One must remember that his orders were not carried out by he himself... deportation and assasination in his regime came at the hands of the police, the military, the swelling ranks of the Party, and often complicity by friends and family was a factor in the deportation or execution of an individual.
Stalin himself admitted a few times that there had been deviations from his will, for instance in March, 1930 when he ordered a temporary relaxation of the terrorizing of the peasants in his collectivization drive (though this may have been simply a strategic withdrawal to recalculate the process). It is worth noting that orders issued by the Party did forbid the deportation of non-kulaks during collectivization, though this may have been in the spirit of the ‘Stalin constitution’ which guaranteed enfranchisement and civil liberties (so long as said guarantees did not find themselves at cross-interests with Soviet policies). Again, after the Terror in 1939 when Stalin had finished with his show trials, Stalin admitted to excesses and mistakes; Industrial growth, which by 1934 had reached 20%, had fallen again to 2% by 1939.
Stalin’s attempt to annex Finnish territory so that the Soviet Union would have a seaport for trade and military purposes showed poor results, and a sweeping series of military purges followed. Although it is worth noting that these were ‘light’ purges (many military officers were not executed or jailed but merely dismissed, to be recalled if needed) it did leave the Soviet military sorely lacking for leadership, an error which showed when the Nazis finally invaded several years later. The navy was similarly disarmed, with all eight admirals being purged.
Stalin’s paranoia and suspicion were legendary; it is recalled that often he would invite someone to dine with him as a friend, and that person would never know if he was bound for jail or for home after dinner. Krushchev recalled that Stalin would often demand his colleagues and associates to look him in the eye, and would get angry if they seemed uncomfortable doing so. If the recent reports that Stalin in fact met his end at Kruschev’s hands are at all accurate, then one might sardonically calculate that Stalin wasn’t paranoid enough. Still, it seems worth noting that Stalin himself, whether mad or rationally calculating, knew better than to feel his position was secure. That he would use odious tactics in ensuring his position, seems therefore inevitable, rather than questionable... it has been noted that any successor of Lenin would have found themselves in a similar position, because only Lenin himself had the personal charisma to hold such a post without fear of reprisal.
More than this, it must be realized that the bureaucratization of the Party meant that the link between the decision-making apparatus and localities proved to be a particular problem; often, the so called ‘right hand’ didn’t know what the ‘left hand’ of the Party was doing. To comprehend this, consider an order issued by the Stalin himself to a henchman in the Party. That henchman would pass the order along to the next in chain of command, and during transmission the order would be variously interpreted by officials at different levels in the State and Party, each according to his (her?) own aims and/or agendas. Local Party secretaries, used to catching themselves in Catch-22 situations and conflicts between resource availability and command expectations, would often be pressed to defend the interests of their particular sector, interpreting orders as they saw fit, or ignoring those they couldn’t obey. Stalin, when he saw this was happening, responded by complaining local officials were ‘dizzy with success’. The best example of this sort of thing was when the Party seized the entire year’s grain production of the Ukraine at Stalin’s orders, plunging the entire region into gross famine which resulted in some 5 million casualties by starvation.
Did Stalin really believe the Ukraine’s low grain yields
represented resistance to agricultural policies, or did he simply set out to make an example of those living there? Were his orders misinterpreted? Whatever the case, the fact remains that no amount of propaganda or revisionist history could cover up the gross levels of conflict and dissent which riddled the system.
Stalin’s Madness
Was Stalin mad? Was his legendary viciousness, his megalomania, his appetite for the grandiose, his paranoia, a reflection of a deranged mind? This seems not only plausible, but desirable... to think that such atrocities as were perpetrated by the Bolshevist regime could be attributed to pragmatic determination seems an affront to reason, empathy, social conscience and to fundamental human dignity.
Krushchev certainly seemed to think Stalin mad, particularly in his later years as he doddered towards old age. Still, Churchill, at least, seemed convinced that Stalin possessed the faculty to make rational decisions, and treated Stalin with a guarded respect for a political equal.
There is some support for the notion that many others who came and went from the Politburo suffered some form of mental illness. Lenin frequently suffered nervous breakdowns. Trotsky suffered from weird psychosomatic illnesses, and it was such an illness that cost Trotsky dearly in his bid to succeed Lenin; while Stalin paraded Lenin’s corpse around Red Square and gave a stirring eulogy that established him in the minds of the populace as the heir apparent to Bolshevism, Trotsky was out of the country at a medical retreat. Then there’s the matter of Krushchev’s (much later and much-publicized) infantile shoe-banging incident at the U.N. And perhaps there is some merit in the idea that any man of power... any man attracted to power and competent at wielding it... is by necessity of their strength of character cut of a different cloth. Hitler was a certified weirdo. Churchill suffered from severe bouts of depression. It is an interesting exercise in political theory to take a view of political history as the history of empowered madmen and of those who supported and opposed them.
Although we have discussed that the methodology of totalitarianism does make good use of grandiose and mythic symbols, we should reflect that Stalin’s personal taste for the epic seems prevalent in many of the policies he undertook. His ‘Stalinization’ of the first Five Year Plan is the best example of this, but we must also look to the immense statue of himself that he had built, to the extravagantly huge hydroelectric dam that was created, to the plans for the Palace of Soviets, to be touted as the largest building in the world, which never got off the ground.
Was Stalin a megalomaniac? Daniel Rancour-Laferriere makes the interesting point that a regular person suffering megalomania and paranoia can be easily diagnosed because of the absense of real-world confirmation for their fantastic delusions, but if one takes a paranoid megalomaniac and puts them in a position of power that must be maintained by force of terror and paranoid levels of astute observation, the very traits that might make such a person unviable for a normal life in any society would adapt quite well to such an environment. Is it paranoia if they really ARE out to get you? Is it megalomania if you really DO have total control over all you survey? Stalin’s sanity becomes difficult to quantify because of this. And it seems appropriate that if Stalin’s totalitarian goals included a sublimation of the individual to the identity of the state, that he would lead the way by himself merging his internal predispositions with the functions of his office.
Beyond Definition
The truth of the matter, as usual, doubtlessly lies in the grey territory between these varying points of view. Stalin did exert great control with focus and determination over a vast number of people, and he did so mercilessly and at great human cost. He achieved some goals but fell short of others; his greatest talent was improvisation, as when he turned the disastrous pact with the Nazis into a victorious military conquest. Mistakes were made and admitted to and covered up. And underlying it all, we have a dim glimpse of a man who was able to annihilate and remake himself in his own image, a snake eating its own tail, refining himself continually into someone more merciless and steadfast in pursuit of his dream of a Bolshevik utopia.
His terrible genius is undeniable; his political accomplishments are a matter of a record of his own devising. He was the Big Brother Orwell warned us of. He forged a political system in his own image through force of will. He externalised his malice and madness and used it as a tool to reshape a people. We can take a terrible lesson from this, but it’s unclear what such a lesson might be... perhaps the story of Stalin must simply be preserved and allowed to speak its own truth without a historian’s attempt to tack a moral judgment onto it. While victims of the holocaust have museums and movies to mourn them, many of those swept away by Stalin are simply gone; lost to history, vanished in the name of a utopia that never materialized.
