In the aftermath of the war Stalin remained obsessed with constructing an adequate ‘historical alibi’ and thereby acquiring legitimacy. He needed something substantial in order to be fully absolved from his original political commitments. The war had seen the outline of the third panel of what was to form a veritable ‘triptych’, but it remained to display it to the full. The first panel corresponded to the elimination of Leninism and the taming of the party, the second to the extermination of the historical party via the purges and the rewriting of its history. The third would consist in dispensing with ideological liabilities and switching to a nationalist ‘great power’ ideology, comparable to Tsarism and adopting its attributes.
During these three phases, countless citizens had lost their lives, many of them valuable, independent-minded cadres. The whole society lived in terror. And yet Stalinism in its turn would be ‘buried’. It would be a mistake to think that the dictator’s death, eventually inevitable, was the decisive factor in this. After the end of the war, the system was in decline and Stalin, notwithstanding the impression of omnipotence he created, was in search of something to give it a new lease of life. The primary cause of the decline lay in the regime’s internal contradictions. Its absolutist features, befitting another age, were profoundly incompatible with the effects of a forced industrialization in response to the challenges of new times. The government that had summoned these furies was unable to accommodate the emerging realities, or interest groups, or constraints embodied in the social structures and layers generated by the developmental process. The pathological purges attested to this: Stalinism could not live with the fruits of its own policies, starting with its own bureaucracy; it could not live without it, but could not live with it either.
Stalin’s personal path was in a sense mapped out by his experience of the Civil War. The conclusions he drew about Russia’s present and future needs were those to which his personality, intellect and experience predisposed him. But we should not ignore the decisive part played in this by the specificity of Russian history: it not only produced a Stalin, but allowed him to seize power and lead the country in a particular direction. Throughout its vast territory and the regions surrounding it (Middle East, Far East, and also Eastern Europe), the political system of old Russia had numerous ancestors, neighbours and cousins with experience of agrarian despotism. The transformation of Muscovy into a centralized state involved combining numerous separate principalities into a single political unit. On the one hand this betokened a form of’de-feudalization’, in the sense that parcellization was reduced. But on the other hand it meant the introduction of a new type of feudalism, with the conversion of peasants into serfs on the land offered to the nascent gentry in exchange for service to the state: the concurrent creation of serf-owners (servants of the state) and serfs. Expansion of the personal domain of Moscow’s ruler coincided with the construction of an autocracy and the creation, over a huge territory, of a nation by means of colonization, which was the principal feature in the making of Russia. According to the term used by the nineteenth-century Russian historian Solovev, this process was ‘drawn out’ – in other words, it was extensive and repetitive. It dictated a highly centralized state under a sovereign who ruled by divine right.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the autocracy had sought with difficulty to shed its original agrarian mould, which had become an obstacle to its governmental methods and imperial image. The changes that had occurred over the centuries had rendered such a framework increasingly untenable, even if Tsar Nicholas II remained very attached to a model of autocracy that dated back to an era when the sovereign identified his state with a personal domain and ruled it like a family concern. In this connection, it is worth recalling that despotes in ancient Greek referred to the head of a household with many servants and slaves. But in the twentieth century, serfdom no longer existed and the patriarchal peasant system, where the master represented the equivalent of sovereign authority in the popular imaginary – something that could have served as the pillar of a sui generis popular monarchy – was changing rapidly. The head of the peasant family might have long supported Tsarism, for as a mini-monarch he sensed an affinity with the great monarch – a ‘little father’ (batiushka) like him. But the base of this primitive rural monarchism was giving way as peasants began to question the analogy.
Stalin’s growing tendency to identify with the imperial Russian past, and to tap its oldest traditions for the benefit of his regime, might seem puzzling in view of the fact that Tsarism had been in rapid decline. But it would be wrong to reduce the phenomenon to a device dictated by wartime mobilization against the German invader, or his repeated contention about the Russians to the effect that ‘they cannot cope without a Tsar’. It corresponded to a profound political and psychological need: a radical redefinition of both his and his regime’s political and ideological identity.
Stalin may have been aware of the historical evolution of the titles assumed by Russian rulers. Initially, a ruler was a kniaz’ (prince), which was not particularly prestigious since there were numerous princes. Visilii III then adopted the term gosudar’ (sovereign), but that was still too close to the title of other contemporary rulers. The title ‘Tsar’ – the Russian equivalent of the German Kaiser and the Latin Caesar – taken by Ivan the Terrible was more imposing; adopted by someone like him, it even sounded ominous. Finally, Peter the Great opted for Imperator as the most prestigious of all. His successors would retain the whole list of titles, beginning with Imperator. Stalin wanted to find his place on this ascending list. Given that there was nothing above ‘emperor’, however, he had to settle for ‘generalissimo’ – a title no Tsar had ever carried.
We would not be spending time on such ironies were it not for the fact that a taste for bombastic titles was not exclusive to Stalin; it was shared by other general-secretaries. The syndrome is indicative of the political vacuity that prevails when rulers do not know what to do with their power.
At the same time, the political and psychological calculations behind these borrowings from the past must not lead us to forget the main thing: the ‘generalissimo’ was now going nowhere. Asserting an affinity with the empire and especially its tsars, ruthless state-builders, allowed him to shed the liabilities entailed by the original promises to build socialism, which were impossible to fulfil. It thereby allowed him to close once and for all the chapter of Bolshevism, whose founders had turned against him. Lenin had characterized Stalin as a ‘Russian bully’ (a Georgian replica of the same), and requested that he be removed from the post of party general-secretary, which he was not fit to occupy. Stalin was precisely set on becoming an authentic ‘Russian bully’ and, as such, endearing himself to the core Russian nationality – something that demanded a switch of ideological identity. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than the adoption of a new chauvinist anthem to the glory of a mythical ‘Great Russia’, offensive to all the empire’s non-Russian nationalities, and of the worst kind of Russian nationalism, which was unleashed in the postwar campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’. These were constituent parts of Stalin’s design to renounce the revolutionary past in favour of a different past. Eliminating Bolshevik cadres was insufficient. And the issue was not whether phase 1, 2, or 2.5 of some ‘ism’ had been reached (or was about to be): that was so much empty talk. Stalin’s major success was the super-state he had created, unencumbered by promises to anyone – an agrarian despotism that may be counted as among the century’s most amazing historical twists. The Stalinist system restored an old historical model (more like that of a Xerxes than Nicholas I or Alexander III), and actually reinvigorated it by means of a breakneck industrialization neither Xerxes nor Nicholas was capable of.
The term ‘Oriental despotism’ proposed by the Orientalist Karl Wittfogel comes to mind. It refers to a bureaucratic system with a central role for a priestly caste (the equivalent of the party?). At its head is a monarch with enormous powers, endowed ex officio with supernatural origins. The economic and social base of the system consists in a vast rural proletariat. The similarities are striking, especially in view of the despotic ‘right’ that Stalin arrogated to himself to determine policy as his frenzies dictated, as well as the need for enemies whom he ‘nominated’ before unleashing a completely depraved secret police against them.
Yet ‘Oriental despotism’ is in fact the wrong term. The old despotisms only changed their rural societies very slowly. In the case of the Stalinist system, ‘agrarian despotism’ is more appropriate. Even if it issued from, and remained rooted in, a rural past – the peasantry still accounted for 80 per cent of the population under the NEP – the regime’s motor-force was industrialization, which induced enormous changes in society and ushered it into a new age. Initially, this marriage of two authoritarian systems – the old statist model and the industrial model – helped accentuate the regime’s despotic and repressive character, for they compounded one another in a state-run, state-owned economy.
It is this amalgam of forms that allows us to reconstruct the institution of a personal despotism, focused on the cult of a supreme leader, with roots stretching back into a very remote past, which was temporarily strengthened by the injection of a novel feature: industrialization. In fact, a similar pattern, albeit on a much smaller scale, can be observed in Peter the Great’s modernizing venture. Against this background and in this framework, we can make sense of the forced labour (the Gulag), a despotism that allowed free range to one individual’s delirium (purges, forced labour, mass deportations), and a huge repressive apparatus.
It is appropriate here to recall that the great purges and show trials were personally prepared and supervised by Stalin (with the help of Vyshinsky and his ilk). Writing and directing a play requires great skill of a playwright. But someone who runs an empire in the twentieth century in the manner of a puppeteer is simply a primitive ruler.
The super-state Stalin had created was – and was bound to be – bureaucratic: it was a character trait genetically inscribed in a state that owned all the country’s assets. This explains the enormous power acquired by the bureaucracy, but also prompts the question of whether Stalin could coexist with a power complex that eluded him. The response he hit on was as irrational as it was pathetic: mass purges to halt, or at least delay, developments that were ineluctable.
For Stalin, purges became his quintessential modus operandi and remained so until the very end. He regarded them as the most effective strategy. They acted like a drug, for they always seemed to succeed. Had Stalin been unearthing real enemies, the system, whilst still dictatorial, would have been very different. In 1953 new purges were still being planned; and it is likely that death alone prevented Stalin from having his closest acolytes – Beria, Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and several others – executed.
In a sense, the victory of 1945 ‘rehabilitated’ Stalinism – even, to a large extent, on the global stage – at the very moment when the system and Stalin personally had begun a phase of marked decline. In fact, he had lost the capacity to rule the country effectively. He seemed to have achieved all his objectives, and yet the road ahead, quite independently of his state of health, led in only one direction: backwards! It will suffice simply to mention Zhdanovism to indicate where he was headed – and that he had nothing else to offer.
We can now turn to the last point in our inquiry: why was the cult of Stalin so successful? For notwithstanding all his aberrations, his cult, his legend, his aura and his personality were widely accepted in Russia and throughout the world as those of a vozhd’ (guide) without historical parallel. And this cult persisted among many Russians even after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and his atrocities. The reaction of the masses in Russia to the news of his death is well documented: an outpouring of grief and a sense of irreplaceable loss and despair in the face of the unthinkable – the death of an immortal.
There were many reasons for this, and they can be briefly summarized here. We can begin by returning to the old rural-patriarchal image of the landlord (khoziain), whose severity is accepted so long as he is just – a tradition with deep roots in Russia. Victory over Nazi Germany was a potent ‘legitimizer’, even though Stalin’s regime was quite shaky. Skilful image-making was a further factor, to which not a few sophisticated minds succumbed. We shall have occasion to return to this image – that of awe-inspiring founder of a powerful empire – and the patriotic value placed on it, which was all the more resonant in that it did not altogether lack reality. A lack of information and the very immensity of the country compounded the mystery of its leader, whose every appearance was carefully staged: he knew how to reassure and charm, or how to terrorize. We must underscore the information deficit: when they were supplied, details were always wrapped up in powerful, effective propaganda. Many people were simply ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and could not conceive that the state was directed by someone who invented enemies and massacred innocents. How could this incredible image be reconciled with the quite different one Stalin projected at the beginning of the war, with his unforgettable radio speech at a crucial moment? ‘Brothers and sisters, I am turning to you, my friends. They came to enslave our motherland, but there will be another great holy day on our soil. The enemy will be crushed. We shall be victorious.’ I am quoting from memory what I myself heard on the radio; and this is what Soviet citizens heard, oblivious of the raging Stalin who signed endless lists of those to be done to death.
Moreover, even if they had known more, what weight would such information have carried at a moment when the destiny of Russia and Europe hung in the balance? It is difficult to say. Finally, religious – ‘Dostoyevskyan’ – elements can be adduced in our search for an explanation, without stressing them unduly. At all events, many – if not a majority – of the most honest, brilliant and creative people went through Stalinism and accepted it, whether permanently or temporarily. The list of such cases is long. But we could also draw up a list of those who, while involved in the process, never accepted Stalin or his Russia.
I shall conclude on this subject by stressing an aspect of Stalinism that is implicit in what has just been said. I have spared readers none of Stalin’s aberrations, but it must be appreciated that Stalinism rested on two historical imperatives: catching up with the West industrially as a precondition for constructing a strong state. The image and reality of a powerful state – in fact, a victorious great power (derzhava) that was recognized as such the world over – have to be underscored as a potent, even hypnotizing factor not only for many citizens but also for the political class, including those Politburo members who hated Khrushchev for removing from his pedestal the builder of a state of unprecedented dimensions in Russian history. The reasoning ran as follows: What need is there to concern ourselves with the irrationalities if the aim has been achieved? And such reasoning is not confined to Russia or its leadership. Insensitivity to the victims of atrocities committed by a strong state in the name of its strategic interests is widespread in government circles throughout the world. ‘State power’ is the highest value for many nationalisms and imperialisms.
Such qualifications in no way alter the conclusion to be drawn: Stalinism was riddled with irrationality that rendered it not only decrepit but abject. To exorcize it, a variety of shamanism was required; and this was what Khrushchev, following popular beliefs, supplied. When Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum in Red Square to be reburied elsewhere, it was carried out feet first. In peasant demonology, this ensured that the evil dead would not return to haunt the living. Exorcizing the spectre, as Nikita intended, would offer Soviet Russia another, rather promising chance – even if it proved relatively shortlived.