ESSAY/ESSAI

THEODORE H. VON LAUE (Worcester, Mass., U.S.A.)

Stalin among the Moral and Political

or How to Judge Stalin?
Imperatives,

"I was never in doubt when visiting [Stalin] that I was in the presence of one of the world's most remarkable men-a man great, if you
will, primarily in his iniquity: ruthless, cynical, cunning, endlessly dangerous ; but for all of this-one of the truly great men of this age."
George Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 1
Judgment-the
quintessence of human relations in any form-runs both
we judge ourselves. In judging Stalin on the occasion
in
others
ways:
judging
of his centenary we judge ourselves for our capacity to understand our times
and to prevent a repetition of Stalinism. We also judge our country, the United
States set into the global order where it collides as the foremost super power
with the other super power, the Soviet Union; we judge the biggest political
phenomena extant. In these extraordinary dimensions awesome responsibilities flow from even the slightest move affecting the balance of nuclear terror
that determines American-Soviet relations.
Putting Stalin in responsible focus is a painful and controversial theme
touching many fundamental convictions; it requires bold yet careful handling.
Let us begin cautiously, by recalling a high point-the high point perhaps-in
that masterful and compassionate documentary film on France in the Second
World War called Le Chagrin et la Pitd (the Sorrow and the Pity). It is the
scene recording Anthony Eden's answer to the question sprung on him by the
interviewer: did he think that Marshal P6tain was guilty of treason? In reply
Eden covered his distinguished face with his hand as if to say: "Oh God, why
am I called upon to pass such verdict?" And out of some remote depths of
moral integrity he answered: "No, he would not judge. Only men who had
lived through the agony of foreign occupation could do so." Having spent the
war in the relative security of the British Isles-and having subsequently as
Prime Minister borne the ultimate burden of supreme power himself-he felt
unqualified to settle an issue of life and death for an old soldier who had seen
much grief.
This scene may indicate that there are moments when the most moral and
honest response is to refuse moral judgment-or rather: to consider the limita-

tions of any moral judgment and thereby grope for a more transcendent, a
more moral morality.
This is the spirit, it would seem, by which to judge Stalin responsibly, and
in more than one dimension of human judgment. What counts are the proper
perspectives, the framework of conditions and circumstances, of individual
volition and collective need that shape judgment, Stalin's as well as ours. As
befits the tragedies of our age, we also should take a humble view of human
power: men are the products rather than the masters of their times. If they
show greatness, it is by gaining an edge, however slight, over the necessities
under which they work. Conditions and circumstances, furthermore, differ
sharply between the United States and the Soviet Union. Fairness and moral
responsibility require that we take cognizance of the differences, accepting
the fact that what people instinctively take to be their morality-particularly
their political morality-is relative. This truth never emerges more clearly
than in the judgment of Stalin.
American and western historians generally have sat, solemnly and selfrighteously, in judgment of Stalin. One wonders by what right, by what standards, by what power of their imagination? How can the bookish tribe of
scholars judge the harsh realities (which shaped Stalin and his judgment?
How well prepared are American historians-by the security of their studies
and classrooms, by their whiggish view of history and their commitment to
humaneness in human relations, by their often arrogantly flaunted pride in
their academic institutions and the preeminence of their country-to understand humiliated and exasperated patriotic Russians faced with the disintegration and annihilation of their polity?
More generally, by what right do Americans judge the conduct of citizens
of the Russian empire at a time of civil chaos and crisis of collective survival?
In world perspective-none other is relevant today-Americans
are the beneficiaries of the most advantageous setting perhaps in all modem history: secure
from foreign attack and destructive invasion (at least until the 1960s); blessed,
except for the Civil War, by a pervasive consensus and managing their considerable diversity for the most part under an effective two-party system; enabled, in their security, to concentrate for the better part of their existence
on domestic improvement, thereby raising productivity in agriculture and industry to record heights; guided, more recently, by expectations and human
values geared to unprecedented affluence and power in the world; setting,
with all these achievements grown in the hothouse of largely unearned privilege, a model in form of government as well as in style of life for the peoples
of the world who in their culture had adjusted to far crueller conditions; and
finally, in the inescapable invidious comparison, saddling these people with a
humiliating burden of inadequacy and inferiority or inspiring them-in the
name of equality-with a fierce ambition to match that unattainable model.
In judging the Russians (or all non-western peoples), let us never forget these

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American boons and the notorious American innocence regarding the conflict
of ends and means in political style that grew out of them.
Many Americans admittedly take a different view, emphasizing the persistent hardship, tension, and violence in their midst-and for good reason. Such
harsh judgment is part of the internal dialectics of a liberal polity trying to
live up, very imperfectly, to its promise; the American conscience-if it still
possesses a collective validity-has been shaped by these dialectics. But is it
fair to apply this conscience to polities existing under totally dissimilar conditions ? That is the crucial question with which to preface all judgment of
Stalin. Put bluntly: can we, without becoming guilty of moral imperialism,
annex the vast Russian Empire to American conditions and judge it and its
leaders as if they were part of the United States?
The instinctive American response has always been to treat the others as if
they were fellow Americans, trained by the same exceptional historic experience, holding the same values, and acknowledging the same restraints; if they
did not live up to them they were considered bunglers, deviants, or criminals.
If from this angle we examine the run of American (or even Western) scholarship dealing with Stalin and the Soviet Union we find, I fear, that it has never
given up-to paraphrase Hegel-raising the litany of western private virtues
against men and conditions that functioned entirely outside them. The scholars too-some more, some less-have been part of the power politics of moral
gut reaction, expanding their concepts and perceptions into totally alien settings. Soviet scholars and ideologists, no doubt, have done likewise, or perhaps
even more aggressively. What good can come from such moral imperialism in
our terror-fraught world?
For the finer points we need to reconstruct the circumstances that shaped
Stalin and Stalinism as best as limited knowledge and imagination permit, abstractly and non-experientially, and in words admittedly inadequate to the
scale of frightfulness under discussion.
II
To begin with the young Stalin as he moved from one pre-existing stage of
conflict to the next. By Robert Tucker's account he was an exceptional fellow, of strong will and sense of independence, of considerable mental ability
with the imprint of training in a Russian Orthodox seminary, of a lively and
expansive ego, prompted by a rebellious but also idealistic temperament.
Both his temperament and idealism were nurtured by the embittered national
struggle between Georgians and Russians, and perhaps more broadly, by the
millenia of blood feuds traditional in the mountains of the Caucasus. Here
liberator and outlaw, heroic benefactor of the oppressed and crafty warrior,
combined in "oriental" extremes-a cultural trait kept alive in Stalin's life not
only by virtue of early conditioning but also by its continued relevance. Koba,

the hero of Kazbegi's novel The Patricide-his favorite-became Josef Djugashvili's first revolutionary pseudonym.
By a remarkable quantum jump that does him credit, Koba-Djugashvili
advanced from Georgian parochial nationalism to revolutionary Marxism, putting his personal fortune, his ego, and his imagination into the global struggle
between capitalism and rising socialism, the largest conceivable drama in man's
social evolution; it combined Friedrich Engels' Realpolitik with western humanitarian socialism. As adapted to Russian conditions by Lenin, Marxism
became Stalin's world view. Prompted by his rebellious idealism he freely
chose the exceptionally risky and demanding career of professional revolutionary, moving himself toward center stage in the greatest political show on
earth.
In this frame of mind he entered into a well-worn mainstream of political
ruthlessness, the struggle of Russian autocrats for survival and power. In this
struggle the autocrats had unscrupulously used whatever instruments of rule
had been handy. They had faithfully followed Machiavelli's maxim: "Where
the safety of the country depends on the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame,
should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the
only question should be: what course will save the life and liberty of the country." Was it the autocrats' fault that under the exceptional geopolitical circumstances of their multinational empire the political imperative of survival
was more demanding and the gulf between ends and means, between the supreme good of political stability and the violence needed to guarantee it,
more extreme than in western Europe (let alone the United States)? In the
name of state security the autocrats also tried to stamp out all dissent, foisting their penchant for drastic measures on their opponents, which widened
the tragic discrepancy. As Chemyshevskii, the mentor of Russian radicals,
wrote in 1861: "A man with an ardent love of goodness cannot be but a
sombre monster." Revolutionary monsters soon arose: witness Nechaev.
Stalin entered this battleground of refined infamy at some of the most
violent troublespots during the first great spurt of Russian industrialization
that lasted, with minor ups and downs, from the late 1890s to the outbreak
of World War I. In his formative years, between the ages of twenty and thirtyseven (if we include his last Siberian exile), he suffered eight arrests, seven
banishments, six escapes, and all the infighting, intrigue, and treacheries of
the revolutionary underground. Under Lenin's guidance he also kept up with
Marxist theory, combining it with revolutionary practice far more heroically
and selflessly than Lenin (or the run of leading Bolsheviks). Inevitably, his
sensibilities hardened. Of a churlish temperament and suspicious, he was marked
for life by the traits of his calling: fear, ever-alert caution, and determination
to be revenged for all injustices when the opportunity came. We know fromGorkii's works how insidious and pervasive brutality was in Russian society-

certainly more so than in American society by any comparison. Moreover,

in the struggle between revolutionaries and the tsarist police the endemic
cruelty was harnessed for political ends as never in American life.
The combination of power with brutality was part of the political culture
in which Stalin was raised. Solzhenitsyn's vision of a golden morality in the
days of his great grandfathers notwithstanding, the moral quality of public
affairs had always been deplorable. Those who wanted to succeed had to adjust ; softness was an invitation to futility. Stalin's choice of his revolutionary
pseudonym as "the man of steel" was a remarkable symbolic act of accepting
necessities that could not be gainsaid; yet he did no more than follow in Russian terms Max Weber's advice of 1895 to his Germans: become hard. The
brutal necessities called in turn for maximalist ideals: revolution for the sake
of a social order to end all exploitation. Sceptical of all utopianism, American
liberals can hardly deny the psychological need for the communist vision as a
counterfoil to the ruthlessness demanded of Bolshevik revolutionaries (what
was the communist vision but an extreme secular version of the western liberal
belief in progress?). Even in western society the routine nationalism current
at the outset of World War I gave way to the extravagant expectations of
ideology sustaining the final exertions of the war to end all wars.
That landmark war, a frightful ending ofan era and an even more terrifying
beginning of a new, was crucial also for the making of Stalinism. Since Disraeli
the public in western Europe had been presented with a fatal either-or: either
to belong to a great empire with the capacity to shape the future of mankind,
or to descend to political oblivion and ignominy; the age of imperialism was
also an era of final solutions. After the outbreak of war the results of such
apocalyptic talk were harvested; the scale of human sacrifice for the sake of
power was raised to match the global scale of political ambition. General Erich
von Falkenhayn was determined in 1916 to bleed all French manpower to
death before Verdun.
When the survival of great empires was at stake, what did the individual
count? For the great battles on the western front statesmen and generals sent
hundreds of thousands of men to their death, sometimes by carelessness and
bungling, for the sake of a few yards of earth and the ultimate goal of victory.
In the First World War the western nations (including after April, 1917, the
United States) set a new style in power politics, particularly for young combatants like Mussolini or Hitler, and with special urgency for the Bolshevik
leaders. Not having started the great escalation, the latter reaped the worst
consequences.
Stalin admittedly was not one of the combatants, but when in March 1917
he returned to Petrograd, he found himself among veterans in the city's garrison and in a country where deserting soldiers became a major political force.
We can trace the brutalizing effect of the war on a people already inured to
brutality in Sholokhov's novels on the Don Cossacks. We also know how after

the fall of the tsarist regime violence became more politicized than ever in a
fierce crescendo that lasted to the end of the civil war. Yet something even
more frightening had come: the collapse of government and all civic discipline.
The March Revolution led to an elemental explosion of the accumulated deepseated resentment against all authority, whether of government, privilege,
education, wealth, or nationality; it spelled self-determination in its most
primitive atomistic form. The real enemy, to be destroyed forever, was autocracy, guilty of trying as best as it could, from native resources, to create a modern, responsive, and monolithic polity that could stand comparison with the
Great Powers of Europe.
It was indeed doubly a time of final solutions. By one of the tragedies not
entirely uncommon in Russian history the domestic explosion coincided with
a supreme crisis of Russian power in the world. By the end of 1917 the survival of the Russian empire hung in the balance. Had the German armies not
been defeated on the western front, the German leaders would have divided
northwestern Eurasia to suit their interests. For patriotic Russians the shocking powerlessness, driven home by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was traumatic
beyond description. Stalin's generation of communists carried the blow in
their bones for the rest of their lives, reinforcing it by the long-standing fear
of weakness embedded in Russian relations with the West. That shock, aggravated by the intervention of the Western allies, the United States, and Japan,
became one of the mainsprings of Stalinism.
Inescapably, as a result of the great escalation accompanying World War I,
Russia's humiliation was set into a world context. As Lenin interpreted the
war, it became a final showdown between the war-torn imperialists on the
one hand and, on the other, their proletarian victims allied with the oppressed
colonial and semi-colonial peoples. In calling for world revolution to succor
his hapless country he took as universal a view as Woodrow Wilson who wanted
to make the world-the whole world-safe for democracy. Free of liberal illusions, Lenin accepted as normal the power struggles of colonialism and world
war. What on this bloody stage of world history did the individual count?
use Stalin's phrase of 1922-played with huge
"The God of History"-to
stakes. The Communists were ready to join that game, if necessary with the
special callousness inherited from the Russian past and in typically Russian
combination with the highest ideals.
On this over-sized stage the communists became larger-than-life players.
As followers of Hegel, Marx, and Engels they acted with a keen sense of history, which gave them, inexperienced as they were, the inflated egos and selfjustifications needed for their world-historical roles. Traditional wielders of
power have their justifications and moral support built into the legitimacy of
their offices (even so, ego-building is the first prerequisitive of success). The
brash newcomers have no choice but to puff up their chests and blow their
own trumpets.

To be fair to them: the tasks they faced were extraordinary, far beyond
any crises confronting western statesmen in the postwar era, even in Italy or
Germany. How in the elemental relapse into backwardness-in this "explosion
of atavism" (to use Solzhenitsyn's phrase)-could they reconstruct a government more powerful, efficient, or more civilized than tsarist autocracy? As
revolutionaries they had no choice but to side with the rebels and their deepest instincts: they were committed to mass politics in theory and practice.
They had to roll backward with the wave of anarchy and yet at the same time
go forward with all their might, establishing a "socialist" discipline far stricter
than that imposed by the tsars. The combination subjected them to continuous contradictions and prevarications and to a demeaning hypocrisy. What else
could they have done? Certainly the liberal prescriptions of consensus politics
were utterly out of place in their Russia. Moreover, the elemental anarchy was
reinforced by endemic heinous violence and brutality. Power issued from millions of guns left over from the war. No government worth its name could prevail unless it out-trumped all violence-which meant raw terror employed as an
instrument of governance, deliberately and rationally. Instigated and encouraged by Lenin, terror took its own freewheeling course among lesser cadre who
in turn knew how to incite the population at large, by word and deed.
The escalation of brutality has been blamed-by Solzhenitsyn among
others-on the communists and their ideology. Responsible historic judgment,
however, would suggest that it was circumstantial. It was caused by the precariousness of the communist regime-any effective regime would have acted
similarly; by the traditional cruelty escalated by the war and politicized by
revolution; by the vastness of the Russian empire; and, last not least, by the
climax of global universalism in World War I. The stakes of the global power
game-in terms of weapons, political mobilization, and the acceptance of mass
brutality-were dramatically upped over those wagered under the old European
balance of power.
Unfortunately, compassionate understanding of Russian events is still lacking in the West; no equivalent experience, no rational analysis, no sociological
theory is available to fathom their depths. Hobbes' description of the Leviathan (though not the gist of it) is entirely too tame, as is all relevant Western
political theory. Stressing class above all else, Western Marxism is blind to the
overriding importance of state power and political mobilization in a competitive world order. Leninism, although incisive in its directives, is radically instrumental, not all-inclusively analytic. The communist leaders, including
even Trotsky, were action-oriented extroverts and highly inarticulate in matters not covered by the Marxist book. The anti-communists possessed even
less comprehension of the conditions they faced; too often, like recent dissenters, they were preoccupied with the horrors of the foreground. We can
catch better glimpses of Russian reality from novelists like Sholokhov or Pasternak, but their works do not explicate the necessities of government. The

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best key to communist rule still lies in Machiavelli's maxim suitably adjusted:
"When the safety of the revolution and its promise for Russia and all of humanity depends on the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or
injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to
The only question should be: what course will save the life and
prevail....
of
the
revolutionary regime?"
liberty
While offering no insight into the complexities of Soviet rule, and devoid
of the idealist universalism mandatory for twentieth-century ideology, Machiavelli's maxim at least covers in principle Lenin's prescription for survival:
dictatorship, total mobilization in the manner of the German war effort, world
revolution, uninhibited terror, and an ideology correspondingly extreme in its
vision of a redeeming future. Obviously the Bolsheviks could claim no popular legitimization by free election. Like the tsars they held power in trust for
people too ignorant of political realities to know their own best interests and
too rebellious to submit voluntarily to the civic discipline needed for their
security and advancement.
And if western moralists now ask whether such ugly if tragic combination
of ruthless power with utopian ideals justifies global political ambition in the
Leninist manner, a negative answer inevitably issues into the ultimate question : who has a moral right to be first in the world? That question, if pressed,
triggers an event even uglier: the nuclear holocaust. It might therefore be
more moral to side with Machiavelli and consider it a matter of virt, of human
greatness, in men like Lenin and Stalin if they braved adversity by competing
for first place in a world where the most privileged countries set the style. If
we recognize the right of others to a basic equality no matter what their circumstances-and that would seem to be part of the moral imperative-we have
taken the first and the most essential step toward an eventual-if distantmutual accommodation. With these disquietening but fundamental reflections
we turn again to Stalin.
III

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Stalin was apprenticed to the realities of power under Leninist theory and
practice from 1917 to 1921. During the years of Lenin's incapacity he then
tried, in harness with other communist oligarchs, to apply what he had learned.
It was not an easy apprenticeship. Who under the strain of personal danger
carried a more demanding load with so little private self-indulgence and outward recognition? Who was saddled with such utterly utopian tasks as making
survive Lenin's uncomprea go of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate-and
to
the housekeeping chores
attended
criticism?
Who
equally diligently
hending
in the party, the core of Soviet power? Who built the party into an effective
instrument of governance? Who had the longest experience with the Russian
masses on the groundfloor of political agitation? Who took the toughest assign-

ments ? It may have been unfortunate that the human raw material of Russian
mass politics was so crude and the available talent for Soviet leadership so
limited (although compared with its tsarist predecessors its all-round calibre
was far superior). But among the candidates for the succession to Lenin, Stalin
stood out by his command of the essentials. Only wishful thinking combined
with utter disregard for the conditions then prevailing could suggest that there
existed an alternative.
For better or worse, Soviet Russia, like the world, had to live with the political talent thrust up in the great upheavals of war and revolution. Stalin certainly was closer to Russian life and popular temperament than the other
leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself. He gained his ascendancy by merit:
by his physical resilience, unflagging close attention to detail, capacity to
stand up under extreme strain, and the ruthlessness needed for dealing with
rivals as unscrupulous and uncompromising. Up to the age of fifty he had not
been notably corrupted by power, certainly not beyond the going rate among
top Bolsheviks in a setting where virtually no institutional and moral restraints
on power existed. Whatever weaknesses of personality he labored under, he
was a paragon of the Leninist organization ethic far removed from the selfindulgence of oriental despots.
And if it be held against him that as Secretary General of the Party he built
a network of loyal support for himself, let it be proved that others could have
found better ways of rebuilding an effective core of cadre out of a fractious
party and an anarchical society. Given the chances for an unprecedented upward mobility, Russian workers-the social base of the Communist Partywere at best willing human raw-material for indoctrination in a primitive
organization-mindedness; they knew nothing of the ethos of proletarian socialism envisaged by Marx. Among the leading communist Stalin had the longest
and most intimate acquaintance with the low cultural fibre and the deep xenophobia of Russian workers; more than his rivals he was willing to adjust communist practice to it. In his rise to power none of his critics have been able to
show that he violated the organizational principles of party government laid
down by Lenin and his rivals. The organizational (as well as the moral) underpinnings of Stalin's power were prepared for him by others and by the conditions of his times. Only he had the courage and cynicism to make full use of
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them.
There remains the charge that he lusted for power. Nothing illustrates more
clearly the arrogance and hypocrisy of western ethnocentricity than this reproach taken over from Stalin's defeated enemies. In the West too power is
trump, although it is commonly played down because it is routinized, disguised, and generally legitimized by usage, mitigated by law, and supported
by extensive voluntary cooperation under a shared sense of goals. None of
these protective mufflers of power existed in post-revolutionary Russia.
Power stood out nakedly and illegitimately, a Leviathan upstart out of social

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10

chaos, with but faint legitimation from a discredited autocracy; it stood out
on a larger and more demanding stage than ever before, trying to command
all of Russia and imperiously reach out into the world at large. The question
was: who possessed the self-confidence and psychological strength to assume
such power and mold the available resources of state and society to meet the
communists' most basic goals?
His sole power established, Stalin in 1929 resolutely set out, as best he
could, to make the Soviet Union immune to any repetition of the crisis of
survival that had shaped the beginnings of communist rule and to overcome
the traditional backwardness that had humiliated Russian patriots for centuries. His vision was not only to create a powerful Soviet Union but also, in true
twentieth-century fashion, to set an example of a superior social order for
the entire world. Let us always keep in mind that the unspeakable suffering
caused by Stalin and Stalinism came wrapped, by the traditional Russian combination of extremes, in the millennial secular vision of communism. Again, it
was a sign of the times that the polarity of political ends and means was yet
further accentuated; it was no peculiarity of Stalin's temperament.
The task facing Stalin was staggering by any account. It meant, at a minimum, transforming the Soviet Union, a huge backward agrarian country with
a small (though not insignificant) industrial base and a highly diverse and obstinate population, into an industrial giant capable of withstanding, by its
own resources, a war as ferocious as the First World War. In the late twenties
Stalin did not foresee the Nazi invasion of 1941, but cataclysms of that magnitude were part of his sense of the times. In his assessment of the world he
enlarged the personal fears that had haunted him in the revolutionary underground to include his country as well. Like other dictators of that era he was
a political expressionist projecting his anxieties upon the external reality. Yet
was he less realistic in his assessment of the times than say the Wilsonians?
His task was complicated by the fact that, like Mao and other Third World
leaders-or even like Hitler-he was the product of a pre-industrial society,
ignorant of the subtle complexities of an urban-industrial order and therefore
confident that by a mere act of will he could master them. He shared the
widespread but entirely unwarranted and un-Marxian optimism that by copying the visible ready-made instruments of technology a pre-industrial society
can skip the lengthy incubation of invisible ingredients like human values,
attitudes, individual and collective skills of social cooperation necessary to
make the machines hum.
But he possessed two prerequisitive insights. He was aware of the stubborn
resistance he would encounter from a people who for centuries had learned to
distrust the innovations foisted upon them by the tsars. He knew the gnarled
hardened wills of the small enterpreneur in town and countryside. Not ideological dogma but practical experience had turned the Bolsheviks against the
kulaks as the arch-enemies of the social docility that is part of industrial

11

society. Like Lenin he also hated the Oblomovs in Russian society, the drifters
and idlers, the careless and sloppy, the slow-moving and easy-going among the
common people and, among the intellectuals, the hyper-sensitive, individualistic, and emotionally self-indulgent. He also feared the arrogant westerntrained experts eager to apply western experience to unreceptive Russian conditions. He needed hard-headed, obedient engineers and organization men
suited to Russian backwardness and the temper of the people.
Stalin also knew that he had no time to waste. Speed was of the essence,
given the country's weakness and the nature of the times. No matter how
protracted the rise of industrialism in the West and how well prepared in advance, Soviet Russia, he felt, could afford no delay. The cost of precipitous
industrialization by command had to be measured against the cost of foreign
domination. The calculation was not the product of a paranoid mind, but of
the First World War as interpreted by power-conscious patriots with long wills
and long memories. Stalin can hardly be faulted for its simplistic crudeness.
Mobilization for the sake of national power has been a hallmark of politics
the world over-after the Second as much as after the First World War. Yet in
no other instance have the external pressures been so overwhelming as in the
case of Soviet Russia. No other country-and none with similar potential or
past political ambition-was faced with such dire choice between foreign domination and precipitous mobilization out of its own resources; none were located next door to the foremost industrial power in Europe with an expansionist ambition undiminished by defeat in the First World War.
Aware that, as Machiavelli put it, "nothing is more difficult than to carry
out a new order of things," Stalin felt entitled to put aside all considerations
of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, of glory and shame, and declared
war not upon the nation, but upon its backwardness in the name of a worthier
nation. The enemy was the Russian national character, and the war a revoluto the
tionary-a psychological, sociological, even an anthropological-war
would
have
a
and
as
westerners
of
industrializafinish,
not,
preferred, process
tion by the refined techniques proper to western society where technology,
political organization, and human values had long been reasonably harmonized. He deployed all the terror needed to dislodge sloth, slovenliness, inertia,
and resistance to uncomprehended innovation. The twenty or more million
victims of the purges were guilty not of the crimes which they were tortured
to confess, but of being accomplices in one way or another of backwardness,
lacking the skills or the will necessary for building "socialism" under Russian
conditions. Skipping the historical evolution of "capitalism" in the Russian
setting meant cultural learning by obedience to command-and inexperienced,
ignorant, and all-pervasive command at that. Inevitably, the key to success lay
in submission to authority. Stalin put first things first: absolute unity of will
and the cohesion of guiding organization that was more or less taken for granted
in the West. Thus the Stalinist revolution was bigger than Lenin's revolution

12

of 1917, because it was a one-man show, willful and contrived, unaided by

any concurrent elemental social convulsion. It certainly was as creative, the
achievement of a practical genius who worked not with ideas but with coarsegrained human beings.
There is some truth in what Robert Conquest, in typical anti-Soviet hyperbole, has written: "Stalinism is one way of attaining industrialization as cannibalism is of attaining a high protein diet." Yet the point is that as a country
Russia was in the condition of the survivors of the airplane crash in the Andes
who unashamedly attributed their survival to having eaten human flesh. By
what moral right do the overfed rich criticize starved desperadoes? As Bertold
Brecht observed: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral" (the finer things
of life grow only on a full stomach). This brazen maxim may be translated
into the discourse of politics: "Before you attain the insular security, social
cohesion, and prestige in the world found among the western democracies,
you have no right to talk about freedom and human rights."
Such an assertion of the relativism of political morality strikes at the jugular of American self-righteousness. But let us face the issue squarely: in our
interdependent world Stalinism-or even its memory-poses a profound moral
challenge. Is it going to evoke a kindred harshness of moral indignation that
invites an escalation of conflict? Or does it call for an extraordinary effort to
raise our moral awareness and compassion to a corresponding intensity, sufficiently capacious to do justice to both Stalin and his victims? Can we afford
to let the Stalinist preference for extreme solutions spread into our own
midst? Have we no moral depths to disarm it?
But to continue with Stalin. In his imperious search for national security
he set, in 1929, the mood of the regime back to the rawest years of Lenin's
rule; the true context of the First Five Year Plan and Collectivization was not
the late twenties, but revolution, defeat, civil war, and Russian history back
to the Tatars. What followed, closely resembled the grimmest days of the
Russian past: incredible bungling and wastefulness of the people and resources,
relentless and often heroic improvisation by trial and error, and indiscriminate
deliberate terror designed to produce the required fluency and malleability
of individual and collective will. The essence of "interrogation" by the organs
of state security was not obtaining a confession but breaking the will of the
arrested person-often
a difficult task considering the hardened will of the
victim (would that we had comparative studies of American conformism and
Russian obstinacy).
Despite the horrors of the early Five Year Plans, the 1930s, like the early
years of Soviet rule, were not wasted years. Heavy industry grew, and with it
the military might of the country; eventually Soviet tanks were better than
German tanks. Even the consumers recouped some of their losses. Moreover,
there came into being a growing and reasonably well-trained and well-disciplined if cowed people with a vested interest in the Soviet system and its im-

13

provement, operating under a realistic-and therefore rather traditional-system

of allocating scarce resources by merit according to the tasks at hand. More
significantly perhaps, the peoples of the Soviet Union were frightened out of
their tradition and transformed, though in danger of constant backsliding,
into a more cooperative, pliant, and alert society. Stalinism enjoyed a surprising measure of popular support, even at its worst.
Western minds trained within western horizons still bridle at the frightful
and repulsive cost of Soviet industrialization. What of the fate of Russian agriculture ? What of the scientists, engineers, managers, military experts-not to
mention the artists-who were sent to their doom? What of the waste of scarce
materials? What of the legacy of timidity and loss of creativity? Surely Stalin's
haste was counterproductive. Yet by what standards? Long used, perforce, to
handle huge issues by improvisation Stalin was never worried by lack of replacements from the inexhaustible pool of the country's resources; the riches
of Russia were an article of patriotic faith. What was scarce was proper human
motivation. Comforted by the long-run perspectives of Marxism-Leninism he
concentrated on short-run necessities. Only the secure can take the long view;
the panic-stricken are riveted to the immediate foreground.
As Stalin saw it, the alternatives were either another Brest-Litovsk or the
frantic dictatorical control over the cunning resistance of man and nature in
the Eurasian plain which system-oriented uncomprehending westerners have
called totalitarianism. The impressive yet flimsy, forever fraying network of
all-inclusive "socialist" planning was strictly speaking neither a system nor
total. The totality lay in the imperiousness of the leader's will, its most visible
symbol. Yet Stalin's impressive powers were ever too feeble to suit him-the
guiding will was so murderously ravenous precisely because it was so ineffectual. Even Stalin could not modernize Russia overnight; he could not escape
the paradox that those who want to bring about drastic change must rely on
massive continuities. A polity entirely cut off its moorings cannot affect a
purposeful change; when everything is in flux, chaos prevails. In retaliation
Stalin instinctively, like Peter the Great, revenged himself on people for the
adversity of circumstance.
IV
What then of Stalin himself as a human being in the second communist
revolution? We have already outlined the unprecedentedly huge-the suprahuman-dimensions of the tasks he had imposed upon himself in response to
party ethos and state interest. How could a fallible human being fit himself
into that hugeness, as the central pillar upholding both the pretension and the
organization necessary to carry it out? His answers again were not of his own
making. They had been prepared by a number of factors: by the Hegelian
acceptance reflected in Marxism of the extraordinary dimensions of political

14

leadership in times of crisis; by the Russian tradition of the autocrat as the

prime mover of state and society; by an elemental instinctive will among the
common people in chaotic times to believe in an infallible source of right
and wrong, in a solid authority to cling to. What was lacking was his own inner
conviction, his self-confidence. Was it lacking because of a built-in psychological insecurity (for which the scholars have discovered some evidence) or because of the hugeness of the job that raised him into the dizzying loneliness
of absolute power by circumstance rather than by personal vanity?
What astounds the historian is the deliberate, cold-blooded manner in which
Stalin late in 1931-fully matured at fifty-two years of age-started to build
up the cult of personality, some years before Beria's flattery is said to have
taken its toll. Stalin enjoyed no ego-supporting legitimacy in the country at
large; even within the Party his ascendance could be revoked. He held his
position because of his wits, by his successes, without guarantee of continuity
in the face of hardship or adversity. Given the precariousness of the regime,
of Russian power in the world, and the vicious habit of destructive criticism
all around him, he knew the penalties of failure. He also knew his own worth
and the weaknesses of his rivals: why should he not be counted among the
great like Marx or Lenin? He was not an unfeeling man, though he hid his
emotions and steeled them to his task, more than ever perhaps after the suicide
of his wife Alliluyeva in 1932.
Under the full weight of his burden thereafter he hardened, giving at last
free reign to the promptings of his suspicious temper; in the narrow realm of
politics he came to resemble an uninhibited oriental despot, quite likely fallBut there was no trace whating back upon Caucasus-or Asiatic-tradition.
ever, at the time of the Great Purge, of insanity. No true psychopath could
have carried the enormous and unrelenting burden of administrative oversight
of the entire apparatus of Party and government at a time of almost continuous minor crises at home and abroad. Apart from getting his personal revenge and assuaging his craving for unquestioned obedience and submission,
he allowed himself no unusual personal extravagance. And as in everything
else, the personal ingredients of the Great Terror were well hidden behind
clear-cut and rational signals to the population at large: follow the leader, distrust all foreigners, work unsparingly for the Plan, strengthen the country
against a hostile world. Everything told, the Bolshevik ethic kept the corruption of power within surprisingly narrow limits.
Moreover, in exculpation of Stalin, let us admit that he had many willing
accomplices. As Solzhenitsyn has asked: "Where did this wolf-tribe [of Blue
Caps, the Secret Police] appear from among our people? Does it really stem
from our own roots? Our own blood?" Devastatingly he answered: "It is our
own." In letting no consideration of humanity or cruelty stand in his way,
Stalin fell back on what help tradition offered. He gave a deadly political
twist to the endemic brutality of man and nature in the Russian setting.

15

In this he was aided by circumstances utterly unknown in Western Europe

or the United States: a total collapse of all political morality. The tsarist regime and the Orthodox Church had been overthrown and all religion discredited. This drastic disorientation was aggravated by the enforced change to
industrialism and collective farming, which even more cut off the people from
their accustomed moorings. In the well-nigh complete moral disarray only the
smallest coppers, as Solzhenitsyn put it, were left from among the golden
coins of traditional morality under which "the distinction between good and
evil was very simply perceived by the heart." No wonder that people with
confused moral perceptions succumbed without protest to arrest and torture,
or that they became willing agents of terror. Even discerning men like Bukharin
in the end submitted to the authority of the Party, for there was nothing else
to cling to. When all continuity and traditional truth have melted away, the
only source of certitude or of morality left is raw power and the Leviathan
that organizes it; so even Hobbes recognized. In the Soviet Union that Leviathan was the Communist Party. Thus brutality, inhumanity, evil-call it what
you will-became routine and banal, part of the temper of Russian life at the
time (though not necessarily forever). They were not ends in themselves, but
means for indispensable boons: security, order, and the precipitous mobilization of national power, with the communist utopia beckoning as the ultimate
destination.
Western onlookers will still be tempted to cover their eyes in despair: Oh
God, how coudst Thou permit such unspeakable torment? But let us remember for the sake of historical objectivity that, under circumstances considerably
less extreme, English and American bomber crews have killed over a hundredthousand people in one fell swoop and that Americans have committed untold atrocities in the Vietnam war, and that the present generation of Americans is prepared, by the judgment of its military establishment, to unleash
nuclear death upon many more millions of people-Russians as well as themselves-than were killed by Stalin. All talk of human rights not withstanding,
human lives have become dirt cheap in this age of politically-steered moral
righteousness, nuclear weapons, and the population explosion. Recognizing
the awesome escalation of the human price of power as a common fact of the
twentieth century, we may look with greater compassion on Stalin as an embattled human being suspended in the bull's eye of global social and political
conflict.
And more: let us never forget the fact that the ultimate source of Russia's
tragedies-and of Stalinism as well-lay outside the Russian Empire. Proper
historical perspective indicates that the great escalation of power competition to which we have pointed, originated in the massive upswing of productivity and socio-political organization that took place in the second half of
the nineteenth century around the North Atlantic. The countries on the fringe
of Europe, including Russia-not to mention the non-western peoples-became
by comparison ever more backward. Their cultural humiliation was compounded by military defeat. Defeat gave way to political and even cultural

16

dissolution, as in Russia after 1917 (experts may set that date back to 1905
or even earlier).
The threat of political annihiliation imposed upon aroused patriots a burden
never faced in the West: to counter an external superiority that had spilled
over into their own utterly unprepared midst. What their western neighbors
had built up over time in cultural continuity and freedom from outside interference, they had to match, under panic conditions, out of the inappropriateness of their past cultural evolution. In the last analysis the unspeakable
miseries that followed from the pursuit of political self-preservation were not
due to the excesses of the tsars or the Soviet leaders, but to the extreme
duress under which they were placed by western ascendancy and the threat
of foreign domination. The guilt of the West-if it may be called that-is
admittedly abstract and collective, but real all the same. Only if we recognize
the effectiveness of seemingly abstract cultural forces operating around the
world as inescapable forms of power can we claim to understand the age in
which we live. Such understanding perhaps can treat with equal compassion
Stalin, his victims, and the gracelessness of much of Soviet life, thereby preventing worse' disaster.
V
And so back to Stalin once more. A mortal dictator, he made many egregious mistakes, none greater than in discounting the evidence of Hitler's
forthcoming attack in June 1941. But who among his peers in other countries
erred less? Consider Neville Chamberlain's confidence after Munich that Hitler
would not strike again, or Hitler's expectations in August 1939 that Britain
and France would forsake Poland, or Roosevelt's disbelief in a Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor-or his mistaken assessment of the Soviet system let alone of
China. In those days all statesmen found themselves out of their depths-as
they surely do in our own. Yet no serious critic has been able to find fault
with Stalin's concentrated single-mindedness of purpose. He never considered
his power an end in itself as it had been for that infamous ancient'tyrant Agathocles with whom he is sometimes compared.
Khrushchev's verdict still stands: the crimes of the Stalin era, so he said in
his famous speech of 1956, were not "the deeds of a giddy despot." Whatevei
Stalin did was "done in the interest of the party, of the working masses, in
the name of the defense of the revolution's gain." Stalin had at least achieved
his minimum goal: to strengthen the Soviet Union beyond challenge. The stagnation in Soviet life and his pronounced psychological deterioration during
his last years may seem a high price to pay for the services he had rendered
his country, but considering that he had lived under exceptional strain for a
longer time than any public figure in the present century, it may hardly be
judged excessive. In any case, at the time of his death his country not only
possessed atomic weapons like the United States but it also was on the way to
mastering the technology that gave it parity as The Other Super Power. That

17

was a major turning point in modern history, creating a new world order: and
Stalin, in Sidney Hook's phrase, was the "event-making" man responsible for
it. On that measure of security, unprecedented in the Russian past, his successors have restored the Party as the ruling class, democratized their ideology,
and achieved under their improved yet still adverse circumstances a remarkably
civilized normalcy. They have proved that in the fluidity of history Stalinism
is not a congenital flaw in the Soviet form of government.
Our sights cleared at last, we are left to praise Stalin as a tragic giant set
into the darkest part of the twentieth century, into the most nightmarish
cleavage between ends and means in politics. He was raised by circumstances
beyond his making and beyond his grasp-and by his own steely resilience-to
heights of power unmatched in known history and utterly abnormal by common understanding on the ground floors of life anywhere, in his own country
even by his guiding ideology, as well as in the West and the world at large.
The only comparable contemporary figure, as monumental and controversial,
was not Lenin, who emerges a lesser man never compelled to put his views to
the full test, but Mao Zedong. The only person competent to judge Stalin experientially, Mao professed himself to be, despite all slights he had received
from Stalin, an adherent of Stalinism. All other statesmen have strutted on
the world stage for shorter periods, under easier conditions and, it might
seem, with no more comprehension of the forces among which they were
trying to steer their course.
Praise then to the strength and fortitude of mind and body that raised
Stalin to such heights-and compassion too for his frailties which he shared
with ordinary mortals. Praise also to Solzhenitsyn who, with heroic determination worthy of his antagonist, has uncovered the depths of human depravity
in the. prison basements of Stalin's rule. These men have shown us both the
stupendous magnitude and the appalling price of power in our century and
the tragedies that go with the tensions of global interdependence for which
we too, in proper perspective, bear some responsibility.
The century of two World Wars, the Holocaust, atomic weapons and defoliants, mass revolutions of national mobilization and self-determination, overflows with human tragedy. Who would predict that the escalations of megamurder here traced have ended? Who can foretell how Americans will react
under the kind of chaos to which Stalin reacted? What book-bound scholar
would stand up to the responsibilities that fell in 1917 on the rulers of the
Russian Empire (or subsequently on China)? Who can claim to read the signs
of the times and chart the crosscurrents agitating our world?
We return to Anthony Eden covering his handsome face while recollecting,
in sorrow and in pity, the tragedies he had witnessed in his times. Who dare
judge without inflaming the righteous indignation of incomprehension that
breeds yet more unspeakable suffering?
Clark University