5 | STALIN AND THE FALL OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE
Public Opinion Poll: Russia, 2013. Statement: Stalin was a wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity.
Completely Agree | 14.8% |
Mostly Agree | 32.0% |
Great Historical Figures, 2012:
Lenin | 37% |
Marx | 4% |
Peter the Great | 37% |
Pushkin | 29% |
Stalin | 49% |
More than sixty years after Stalin’s death, Russia has yet to come to terms with his legacy. At the time of the Twentieth Party Congress with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech, many thought that this stage had been reached or would be very soon. But far from it: There now is a Stalin Encyclopedia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006) that tells us there is no conclusive proof that Khrushchev killed him, together with Lavrentiy Beria or alone or with about any member of the Politburo or his family except perhaps Vyacheslav Molotov. Poor man, whatever his gigantic achievements, he seems to have been surrounded by enemies and traitors. Far from blaming him for engaging in too many purges, we should be sorry that “the father of the people” had not been more watchful, that he was not able to evade those who succeeded in killing him before he had carried out the great reforms he still had in mind.
But why should these issues matter now, more than sixty years after his death? The Soviet Union of which Stalin was the great leader does not exist anymore, nor does the Communist Party of which he was for so many years the general secretary. Yet the debate continues. Stalin the great purger has been purged—and reinstated. And the process of reinstatement continues, with no end in sight. It continues because a great leader shapes to a decisive degree the character of the country, and until this continuity is broken, the debate is bound to continue.
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WITH the possible exception of Hitler, it is difficult to think of a political leader of a major country in modern times who was less suited for such a mission. Stalin was unattractive; he had neither charm nor charisma, was not particularly intelligent or distinguished by great foresight. Most of the great endeavors in which he engaged failed, some in his lifetime, others after his death. Those that succeeded owed their outcome to the competence of others. Yet this man was characterized as follows in a private letter that was not expected to be read by anyone else:
Stalin appears to be the greatest human being of our era. We do not find in the history of mankind a similar example of the greatness of one person, of depth of popularity, of reverence and love. We ought to be proud that we are his contemporaries and his collaborators, however minute our part in his actions. How often do we forget—and this goes particularly for the young generation—that we breathe the same air he does—that we live under the same skies. How often do people shout “Dear beloved Stalin”—and then they turn to their own affairs and behave meanly at work or in their relations with others. Coexistence with Stalin demands from his contemporaries boundless purity and devotion, belief and will, moral and social heroism.
This was written on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949 by a leading composer of popular music. One of his songs, which carried the refrain “There is no other country in the world in which people breathe so freely,” was for many years the signature tune of Radio Moscow. The composer who wrote these lines was bound to know that in virtually every family of his acquaintance, someone had been “repressed,” to use the euphemism of later years, that the person about whom he wrote was one of the greatest mass murderers in modern history and one of the greatest liars. Yet he referred to “boundless purity” and “moral and social heroism.”
Stalinism has been analyzed against the background of the general zeitgeist, the great enthusiasm, the backwardness of the country, the naïveté of the enthusiasts, the dangers luring from outside, and so on. But once all allowances have been made, how to explain the cult after the truth about Stalin had become known—in small part after the Khrushchev thaw; in far greater detail following glasnost, when impeccable witnesses such as historian Dmitri Volkogonov had the opportunity to research Stalin and his period in great detail; after biographical and autobiographical accounts were published, along with novels, movies, and documentaries about the Stalin period? Why is it still so difficult, often impossible, to speak the truth about Stalin?
Memorial, a historical and educational society, was founded in January 1989. It collected source material on the victims of Stalinism. Owing to its initiative, the Law on Rehabilitation was passed in 1991. However, much of the financial support came from outside Russia.
There was and is by no means unanimity in this respect. Stalinism had its ideological defenders, and there were many who benefited from Stalinist policies. Originally, support for Stalin came from Communist hard-liners, but within a few years they were joined by circles and individuals—mainly Russian nationalists—who had not been among Stalin’s early defenders. As critics of Marxism-Leninism, they had been among Stalin’s enemies. But as time passed, their perspective changed radically. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union gradually became a superpower, which was a source of great pride to Russian patriots. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the status of Russia in the world diminished. This was what ultimately counted. Marxist-Leninist doctrine had been a transient phenomenon, and “proletarian internationalism” had been quickly discarded and forgotten, but superpower status had been a matter of enormous pride and its loss a tragedy—certainly in the eyes of Russian nationalists. For them, the great challenge and mission was to regain such status. True, Stalin had not been an ethnic Russian, but he had become an honorary Russian who had identified with them and had done all he could to enhance their cause.
Few Russian nationalists would identify with every one of Stalin’s actions, but the good things (they believed) he did outweighed by far his failures and mistakes. In the circumstances, it is historically wrong to emphasize Stalin’s failures. He is an inalienable part of Russian history.
What were Stalin’s great achievements? Above all, of course, that under his rule the country greatly expanded and became a superpower. He built a powerful, modern industry and made agriculture efficient. Owing to his wise and efficient leadership, the Nazi invasion was defeated. Owing to his iron fist, the many plots against the Soviet Union came to nothing.
Certain of Stalin’s achievements are no longer mentioned—for instance, that owing to him as much as to Lenin, the great October Revolution was victorious; or that owing to his assistance to Trotsky, the Reds prevailed in the civil war. Most Russians believe they would have been better off without revolution and civil war.
What of the other achievements? As for the expansion of Russia, czarist Russia was more successful in this respect. The czarist empire included Finland and most of Poland; the Soviet Union no longer did. The great strides in industry and agriculture? During Stalin’s rule and for many years after, the Soviet Union was lagging behind the developed countries. The price in suffering was tremendous for whatever progress was made. Stalin was a disastrous strategist in the beginning of World War II. He ignored numerous warnings about the Nazi attack, and as a result, the number of Soviet soldiers killed and taken prisoner was enormous. If the Soviet Union was successful later in the war, it was mainly because Stalin interfered less with his marshals and generals. The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany, as Russia defeated Napoleon. But the czar still did not become the greatest military leader of all time. The price that had to be paid for all of Stalin’s achievements was staggering—with regard to the number of people killed and sent to the gulag. The political system that came into being was a brutal dictatorship based on primitive, mendacious propaganda and repression as well as an unprecedented cult of the leader often bordering on the ridiculous—Stalin as the greatest genius ever born, the greatest saint, as well as the greatest hero.
One example among millions is an article about Stalin commenting on a picture by Fyodor Shurpin, which was awarded the state Stalin prize in the late 1940s. The painting depicts Stalin on a bright, early morning walking in the vast collective farm fields with high voltage power transmission lines in the distance. He is wearing a white tunic with his raincoat over his arm. His exalted face and his whole figure are lit with the golden rays of springtime, and his whole figure is lit with the golden rays of sun. One recollects verses that the people’s poet Dzambul wrote on Stalin:
Oh Stalin, the sunshine of springtime is you. He walks confidentially towards the new dawn. The image of Comrade Stalin is the triumphant march of Communism, the symbol of courage, the symbol of Communism, the symbol of the Soviet people’s glory, calling for new heroic exploits for the benefit of our great motherland, in this image are immortalized the features of a wise, majestic, and at the same time amazingly modest and unpretentious man who is our beloved leader …
From the records it is known that Stalin visited a village once in his life and this was before collectivization.
This, then, was the spirit and the style of the time. It was this style that made Mikhail Prishvin note in his diary that “Pravda is the worst liar the world has ever known.” Prishvin was not a political scientist or even particularly interested in politics. He was a beloved author of children’s books, but he knew the difference between truth and lies. And he knew that Pravda was his master’s voice.
Ultimately, the house Stalin built did not last; it came crashing down after his death. It is said in his defense that this was not his fault but the responsibility of his incapable and traitorous successors. However, these successors were chosen and trained by him. Whichever way one looks at it, Stalin cannot escape responsibility.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, the restart of the Stalin cult began in earnest with articles and books by Yuri Zhukov in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Vadim Kozhinov in Nash Sovremennik and Molodaya Gvardiya, journals of the “Russian party” that had enjoyed a certain amount of freedom even during the 1980s, although Yuri Andropov as head of the KGB had taken a dim view of their opinions.
According to Kozhinov, Stalin was really a Russian nationalist, even though he regarded himself as a faithful Marxist-Leninist. However, at the same time Stalinism was not a specific Russian phenomenon, “powerful global forces transformed Stalin into an omnipotent leader.” In other words, foreigners were responsible for the cult. Some of the Russian Right went further: Stalin’s aim had been to purge the party of the “internationalists,” and this was all to the good. And last, there were the protagonists of the anti-Semitic explanation. According to them, Stalin was merely a puppet in the hands of the Trotskys and Kaganoviches.
During the 1990s the defense of Stalin continued, albeit in a lower key, but it went into higher gear after the turn of the twenty-first century. The new master in the Kremlin was of the opinion that the “demonization of Stalin” had gone too far. Statues of Stalin were erected again in various cities. With some exceptions, books about the period of repression were not to be published. The main exception was Solzhenitsyn, whose bona fides as a Russian nationalist could hardly be doubted. During an interview, Putin asked, “What is the essential difference between Cromwell and Stalin? Can you tell me? No difference…” But Putin should have known that there were certain differences. True, what Cromwell did in Ireland had been defined as genocide by some historians. But it did happen a few centuries earlier, at a time when humanitarian standards were not those of the twentieth century. And even if one ignored human lives and rights, there was that small matter of loyalty, of which Putin has reportedly always been a leading proponent—loyalty for instance toward one’s colleagues. There was a public discussion whether Stalin should be honored at the Kursky metro station in Moscow. At the same time, opinion polls were showing that almost half of the population took a positive view of Stalin and his policies.
True, on one or two occasions Putin said that Stalin (and his whole era) was controversial, that not all his deeds were admirable. After all, Stalin had given orders to murder twenty thousand of Putin’s colleagues from the NKVD/KGB, the famous sword and shield. Did this count for nothing? And Medvedev went on to mention totalitarianism and a closed society, implying that at least some of the policies of the time were no longer desirable. But generally speaking, the impression was gained that each year anti-anti-Stalinism became louder, more pronounced, and more official. At a history teachers’ conference in June 2007, Putin announced the preparation of a textbook that according to reports was to present Stalin as a cruel but successful leader acting rationally; terror was an instrument of development, and the aim had been to instill in young people a feeling of pride in their homeland.
A little later, in July 2009, it was announced by the Ministry of Education that Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for Russian high school students. However, teachers were free to choose from a list of some forty books covering the Stalin period.
According to a variety of polls, there was a growing opinion that the debates about Stalin and his historical role were of interest mainly to intellectuals and historians, not to the public at large. However, as far as publications were concerned, there was a clear majority of the anti-anti-Stalin school of thought. As far as the government was concerned, the main assignment was to promote a sense of pride in one’s country, and for this reason a one-sided anti-Stalin line would not do.
The impression was created that during the Putin period there was a steady process of re-Stalinization. A stream of books claimed that Stalin’s purges and many of his so-called excesses had been justified, that most political leaders of the time had betrayed Stalin, and that but for Stalin’s energetic, decisive actions just before and during World War II, the Soviet Union would have been defeated.
Some argued that the so-called purges (the mass arrests and executions) had in fact been instigated and carried out not by Stalin, but by his enemies. The anti-Semites among these writers claimed that it was the work of the Jews. Once the Jews had been removed from the NKVD/KGB, the purges ceased.
Stalin had been a paranoiac, his paranoia was infectious, and the aim of this new literature was to show that his fantasies had been justified. He was convinced that those around him in the Politburo and the security apparatus were at best simple-minded, trusting, and naïve people unaware of the fact that the world was full of enemies and that without a leader like him, the country would be lost. He was irreplaceable. This paranoia reached its limit during the last year or two of his life with the “doctors’ plot,” when he claimed that the physicians treating the leading politicians and generals had tried systematically to kill their patients; apparently, no one in the Kremlin from Andrei Zhdanov and Alexander Shcherbakov onward had died of natural causes. Most of the doctors happened to be Jewish, and Stalin apparently planned to arrest all or most Jews in Russia and deport them to some faraway place in the Soviet Union.
The general tendency of this new wave in apologetic literature was to justify whatever Stalin did. Some of the authors were professional naysayers who doubted or opposed anything that had been stated by others. Others, professional or semiprofessional historians, tried to provide more sophisticated theories to justify Stalin’s mass murders.
It made a great deal of difference whether these books were the private fantasies of sensationalist writers intending to shock their readers, whether they were forgers or confabulators or genuinely convinced that their fantasies were correct, or whether they were true Stalinist believers out to make their fantasies the official party line in the years to come.
All these various motives could be found among the Stalin apologists. It is not surprising that there should be such apologists; throughout history, the most far-fetched, unlikely statements and theories have found their believers. And the more emotional or political the motives, the greater the temptation to to swim against the current.
The decisive issue was whether the authorities would accept these findings as the basis of a new party line, but there was no clear answer; the authorities made it clear where their sympathies lay, but they still could not bring themselves to sanction the Stalinist version.
As time passes, the importance of the Stalin issue is bound to decline. Even now the issue is of little importance to the younger generation. Nevertheless, it remains a matter of concern, for Stalin is indeed part of Russia’s history, and if its rulers believe that the truth about this part of the history of their country cannot be revealed because it would have a detrimental effect on patriotic education—if, in other words, pride overrules truth—this raises troubling questions about the character of such a society. The history of all nations, especially its beginnings, is shrouded in myth, but there is a difference between the question of whether Romulus and Remus ever existed and consciously opting to cover up the crimes of a particularly evil dictator and the society he created. What is one to make of a people who find it impossible to see the difference between truth and falsehood, between a monster and a saint?
Stalinism is one of the issues bedeviling the emergence of a new doctrine of Russian society. It raises the question of truthfulness in history in general and what kind of heritage the new Russia would like to emphasize and base itself upon. Another widely discussed issue has been Byzantium, in particular the reasons for the fall of the empire.
Why this question should be of such importance is not immediately clear. According to the Eurasian nationalist school of thought, the Byzantine heritage had much less of an impact on Russia than the Mongols and Tatars. Nevertheless, empires do not last forever, so it becomes a matter of interest to explore both why Byzantium lasted as long as it did and what caused its downfall.
In January 2008, Russia’s main TV channel aired a documentary entitled Gibel Imperii (The Fall of the Empire), produced by Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov). Born in Moscow in 1958, Tikhon serves as head of the Sretensky Monastery, an Orthodox religious seminary in Moscow. He has been reported to serve also as Putin’s spiritual adviser but refused to answer questions concerning this in interviews.
Father Tikhon originally trained as a filmmaker and graduated from the leading institute in the field. As for the circumstances of his conversion and becoming a monk, it says in his autobiography that he belonged to a group of students who were dissatisfied with the intellectual poverty and lack of attraction of Communist ideology and engaged in spiritualist experiments with a Ouija board. The group to which he belonged tried to converse in one of its sessions with Nikolai Gogol, the famous Russian writer. Gogol (or his ghost) duly appeared, angrily upbraided the students, and told them to swallow poison as soon as feasible. Frightened, the students consulted a priest the following day, who told them that they had obviously been victims of some tricksters—if they were truly interested in religion, they should study it seriously. This Tikhon did, with creditable results.
The documentary starts with a paean on Byzantium. It stretched from Gibraltar to the Euphrates and lasted longer than any other empire. Its jurisprudence was monumental; its engineering and architecture were unrivaled; its financial system was superb. Its capital city’s wealth was incalculable, while its beauty and elegance amazed the European barbarians who happened to visit it. All this at a time when crude, ignorant, and primitive Scandinavians, English, French, and Germans engaged in one thing only—robbing and stealing. On the basis of robbing and looting the treasures of Constantinople, European banks began to spring up and the monstrous modern lending system was established—the famous capitalist system with its inevitable lust for profit. The first significant Jewish capital was the result of speculation in Byzantine relics. The barbaric West became the civilized West only after having taken over, stolen, destroyed, and swallowed up the Byzantine Empire.
But this was only the beginning. Byzantium gave up control over its trade and finances to its foreign “friends” from the West. The West subsequently lured Byzantium to join all kinds of Western unified trade organizations. Byzantine capital was flowing to the West, and Byzantine traders became bankrupt or dependent on the West. By the time the empire realized what was happening, it was too late to do anything.
Sixty years later, Byzantium attempted to recover its lost glory, but to no avail. The emperor who strove to restore power (Andronikos) was brutally murdered, and Byzantium became “the evil empire.” As time went by, this image would continually be pulled out for use from Western ideological arsenals. Evil contact with the West brought to Byzantium oligarchs and corruption. Cultural contacts generated a Western fifth column. Young people went abroad to study, with predictable consequences.
All this unfolded at the beginning of the epoch historians call the Renaissance, which the author regards as an unmitigated evil. The first to give in to these foreign influences was the intelligentsia, “the worldwide creation of a nationalistic, Hellenist, Greek, pagan ideal.” Thus the story continues to the bitter end: “The elite sacrificed higher ideals for the sake of practical advantages. The soul collapsed in a great nation. It had given the world grandiose examples of flights of spirit but now reigned in that nation unbridled cynicism and squabbles.”
Describing the final death agony of Byzantium, the narrator concludes: “The vengeful hatred of the West towards Byzantium and its heirs continues to this day. Without understanding this shocking but undoubted fact, we risk not understanding not only the history of long-gone days, but also the history of the twentieth and even the twenty-first century.”
This documentary was repeatedly shown on the first channel of Russian television, and it was widely discussed for about three months. The judgment of most, but by no means all, historians was negative; both sides agreed that the documentary was really about contemporary Russia, not Byzantium. Political and literary critics were also divided; a majority disagreed with Father Tikhon’s conclusions.
The screening of a documentary of this kind on Russia’s main TV channel shows that a significant part of Russian public opinion did indeed believe not just that the West was deeply hostile to Russia and everything it stood for, but that such hostility was so deeply rooted that nothing Russia could do would possibly affect it. The aim of the West, therefore, was bound to be the destruction of Russia, and it would only wait for an opportunity to do away with the eternal enemy. If this was the case, was it not the duty of Russia’s leaders to take care that such a situation should never arise?
The production of a documentary of historical interest by a filmmaker/monk, however well connected, was not the only indication of a prevailing sentiment. There have been similar endeavors on various levels of sophistication. One other worth mentioning is Mikhail Yuriev’s bestselling novel Tretya Imperia (Third Empire).
This is a massive (620 pages) fantasy written by a leading businessman who was also a member of the Duma. It deals with the visit to Russia by a young Brazilian sociologist at some not very distant future date. By that time Russia has swallowed Europe, China, and more or less the rest of the world. After it had been clarified that American Special Forces had been responsible for all terrorist attacks inside Russia, the Kremlin retaliated in Chicago and Ohio; there were twenty-five hundred victims in Chicago, more in Ohio.
But this was not all: Following some warnings, Russia dispatched several nuclear missiles to the Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico deserts; for humanitarian reasons, these little-populated areas had been chosen. America had to pay $1 trillion in compensation for holding on to Alaska. Even before, in 2014, Russia had left all international organizations and ended all obligations under international treaties. Inside Russia, Ukraine had ceased to exist, for the Ukrainians had all become Russians. The parliament had been abolished because it was no longer needed. The country was ruled by an emperor.
It could be argued that fantasies of this kind are not worth serious discussion. Father Tikhon’s documentary, for instance, was not endorsed by the Moscow patriarch, and other highly ranking church dignitaries announced that Tikhon’s views did not express the opinions of the Orthodox Church. There have been in recent years strange occurences among senior church dignitaries. One of them, Vyacheslav Polosin who had been head of the Duma committee in charge of religious affairs, converted to Islam and has since then devoted much of his energy to proving that the Rothschilds and George Soros had instigated the Arab Spring, which in his view was a very negative phenomenon. Another leading dignitary went public with the allegation that among the church leadership was a very powerful lobby trying to prevent anti-gay legislation. (If true, the lobby was singularly ineffective.)
Given the troubling scenarios conjured up in Third Empire, one would have expected the author to build a deep underground shelter in his house far from the center of Moscow or to retire to some South Sea island. Instead, Yuriev moved to the United States, arguing that business opportunities are better there. Of course, this could be the case, but it raises questions concerning the sanity of writers and publishers in the Russian capital as well as the genuineness and depth of their patriotism. Why take seriously a television documentary by a mere archimandrite—not a very high rank in the church hierarchy? After all, Mr. Putin is known for his pragmatism; neither he nor his colleagues would be swayed in their political decisions by utopian or dystopian fantasies.
Such arguments may have sounded convincing in 2008 and 2007, when the two works in question were first offered to the public. Unfortunately, as time passes one feels slightly less certain in this respect.