Man of steel, heart of stone: Stalin died 50 years ago

Man of steel, heart of stone
March 5 2003
By Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University.
The Age - Melbourne, Australia

He was nothing more than a tyrant, nothing less than evil. Robert Manne examines the legacy of Joseph Stalin, who died 50 years ago today.

In November 1940, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Soviet foreign minister Molotov visited Berlin. "I know that history will remember Stalin," Hitler told him, "but it will also remember me."

Hitler was right. Both he and Stalin were destined to be remembered as the 20th century's two most consequential political figures and the two most terrible tyrants known to history.

Stalin died 50 years ago today. He was born, as Iosif Dzugashvili, of poorest Georgian peasant stock. The family was not close. Stalin's father was a cobbler, a wife beater and a drunk. From the time he left the Orthodox seminary to join the Bolshevik party in 1904 to the year of her death in 1937, Stalin met his mother on no more than four occasions. With the partial exception of his first wife, who died in 1907, Stalin appears to have experienced throughout his life no attachment to any human being.

The Bolshevik party was the most extreme tendency of Russian Marxism. Before the abdication of the tsar in February 1917, Stalin worked as a professional revolutionary, and he was arrested and exiled several times. By the time he was voted onto the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912, he had become the party's expert on the problem of the empire's non-Russian minority nationalities.

While Stalin's personal role in the almost bloodless seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 was considerably less glorious than he would later pretend, he did play a significant part in the military victory over the White Armies in the unbelievably savage civil war of 1918-20.

Yet, at that stage, even his more brilliant comrades continued to look down on him as a nonentity, as the "grey blur", or as Leon Trotsky put it, the "outstanding mediocrity". Stalin never forgot a slight. For their condescension, Stalin's comrades would later pay a high price.

Lenin suffered a series of strokes between November 1922 and his death in January 1924. During these months his misgivings about Stalin grew, because of his brutal administrative style, and the unheard of insolence he displayed towards Krupskaya, Lenin's wife.

In his final political will, Lenin suggested removing Stalin from the general secretaryship. Because they feared Trotsky and not Stalin, and because Lenin had been less than complimentary about all of them, Stalin's colleagues helped to suppress Lenin's will.

During the 1920s, the members of the post-Lenin Politburo became absorbed in a fierce and complex political struggle. The stakes were high - not merely the Lenin succession but the very future of the revolution, which all accepted was the most important historical event in the movement towards ending class oppression and emancipating humankind.

In the first phase of the struggle Trotsky was isolated and defeated by all his colleagues. In the second phase the "Right-Centre", led by Bukharin and Stalin, routed the Zinoviev-Kamenev "Left". In the third phase, Stalin detached himself from, and politically destroyed, the Bukharin "Right".

Why did Stalin triumph? In part, he triumphed because his opponents took each other far more seriously than they did Stalin, until it was too late; in part because Stalin had an unparalleled capacity to separate questions of power from questions of ideology; in part because, as general secretary, Stalin possessed vast resources of political patronage, which he dispensed with great skill; and in part, it must be said, because in his cunning and unscrupulousness, and also in the sensitivity of his antennae to the mood of the Bolshevik rank and file, Stalin proved to be far superior politically to his more theoretically gifted colleagues.

By the late 1920s Stalin's victory over his rivals was complete.

Stalin now lurched violently to the policies of the ultra-Left. In the space of a few months in 1929-30, in conditions of indescribable chaos, the Stalin leadership used an iron broom to sweep the entire peasantry from their ancestral communes onto vast state-controlled collective farms. As part of the collectivisation drive, millions of slightly more prosperous peasants, the so-called "kulaks", were either deported for resettlement to the remotest regions or transported, as forced labour, to the Soviet concentration camp system, the Gulag Archipelago.

Collectivisation coincided with Stalin's decision to industrialise the Soviet Union at breakneck speed. The most immediate purpose of collectivisation was to force peasants to deliver grain to the regime, either to feed the factory workers, or for the export income needed to pay for the imports of foreign machinery Soviet heavy industry required.

In the early 1930s, Stalin collected grain quotas even when there was nothing for the peasants to eat. In his "man-made famine" of 1933, perhaps five million Ukrainian peasants starved to death.

The Communist Party celebrated the economic achievements at the Congress of Victors in 1934. Stalin was acclaimed, not merely as the leader of the party, but as a towering, universal genius in every human sphere.

Beneath the surface, however, reality was more complex. At the congress, corridor discussions about removing Stalin from his post as general secretary took place. In the secret ballot for the Central Committee, more than 100 of the 2000 or so delegates crossed out Stalin's name. Only three had crossed out the name of the popular Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov.

The Congress of Victors marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin no longer trusted the Communist Party. As an immediate measure he arranged for the assassination of Kirov, whose death he ostentatiously mourned. More important, he decided that there existed inside the Soviet Union a vast anti-socialist conspiracy. Stalin was convinced that the leader of this conspiracy was the man he most feared and loathed, Leon Trotsky.

Unfortunately, because he had been sent into foreign exile by Stalin, Trotsky was not available for arrest, trial and execution. However, Stalin was also convinced that the Trotsky conspiracy inside the Soviet Union was led by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both were arrested and, in 1936, were put on public trial where they confessed abjectly to heinous crimes. They were executed without delay. Stalin soon came to the opinion that the conspiracy had spread to the Right. In 1938 the show trial of Bukharin and his supporters took place.

In an atmosphere of hysteria, a Soviet-wide drive to root out the entirely fictitious Trotskyite conspiracy began. In 1937 and 1938 - the most horrific years in Russia's long and terrible history - almost one million "counter-revolutionaries" were executed, while perhaps five million were dispatched to the Gulag Archipelago, where the vast majority died.

Stalin personally signed thousands of death warrants. He often took pleasure in taunting former comrades with hints about their impending deaths. In these years, more than half the delegates at the Congress of Victors disappeared.

Stalin believed that the conspiracy had reached the Soviet army. Three of the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 army commanders were executed. As the Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev, puts it: "The shocking truth can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army suffer such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in the time of peace."

During the 1930s, Stalin became the champion of the international anti-fascist movement, and the withering critic of the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the democratic powers, Britain and France. It was because of this that many left-wing intellectuals joined communist parties at this time.

By mid-1939, as the German invasion of Poland loomed, Stalin was effectively offered a choice between a military alliance with Britain and France or acceptance of a non-aggression pact with Germany. The West offered Stalin participation in the front-line of a continental war, while Hitler offered him the mirage of peace, the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and more time to arm. Stalin chose Germany.

Between August 1939 and June 1941, he was almost fanatical in his determination to do nothing that could be construed as a provocation to Germany. Consequently, when the massive German attack inevitably came, on June 22, 1941, the Soviet Army was militarily and psychologically unprepared. For the only time in his life Stalin's resolution broke. But it soon returned. According to his Russian biographer, General Dmitri Volkogonov, while Stalin was not a brilliant supreme commander of the Soviet armed forces he was highly competent. He listened to his talented generals; he developed a broad strategic grasp; he showed judgement in his refusal to evacuate Moscow and in his appeal to old-style Russian patriotism rather than proletarian solidarity.

On the basis of the 1930s industrialisation, the USSR became one of the world's great arsenals. In order to secure victory over Germany, Stalin was unconcerned about how many millions of his soldiers or civilians died. Nazi Germany was essentially conquered on the eastern front. This represents Stalin's one and only contribution to the improvement of mankind.

Soon after the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the Soviet-British-American alliance began to fall apart. The British and Americans encouraged the Soviet Army into eastern Europe. Generally, they were sympathetic to Soviet border claims and demands for the creation of "friendly" governments in the lands between Germany and the USSR. They found it impossible, however, to reconcile themselves to Soviet political methods or the gradual imposition of single-party dictatorship in the areas the Red Army occupied. By 1948 Europe was effectively divided between a Soviet East and an Anglo-American West. Eastern Europe was swiftly Stalinised. In response to the Soviet military threat, NATO formed. In Germany, a dangerous military stand-off over the Soviet blockade of West Berlin arose. The Cold War had arrived. A third world war seemed more likely than not.

As always, inside Stalin's mind, morbid suspicions, mirroring the situation in the external world, took hold. Stalin dispatched to the Gulag vast numbers of returned Soviet soldiers who were tainted by knowledge of another, non-Soviet, reality.

Then, following the creation of Israel, Stalin's thoughts turned to the Jews. In 1952, he brought the leaders of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to trial. A vast anti-Semitic action was, most likely, being planned. As his health deteriorated, Stalin's gaze turned towards those around his bed. The organs of Beria's secret police began to investigate what was called "the doctors' plot". On March 5, 1953 - most likely to the genuine anguish of the Soviet people and the no less genuine relief of the members of his close entourage - Stalin finally died.

Stalin left after him nothing but the taste of ash in the mouth. He was not responsible for the creation of the brutal single-party dictatorship in Russia. Credit for that belongs to Lenin. Yet upon the Leninist foundations a number of possible futures - none that was likely to be democratic or prosperous - might have been built. That it was Stalin who succeeded Lenin, and not Trotsky or Bukharin or someone else, mattered a great deal.

For it was Stalin who was responsible for the needless deaths of perhaps 20 million human beings. And it was Stalin, more than anyone else, who cut the utopian 19th century idea of socialism from its humanitarian moorings and transformed it into a 20th century nightmare of economic irrationality and privation, mind-numbing ideological conformity and hypocrisy, barracks-style social regimentation, primeval leader worship, and universal fear.