CONCLUSION

Stalin’s Legacy

Stalin’s approach to political power was conceived in terms of control and, wherever either real or imaginary resistance might be encountered, he resorted to violence and coercion.

He had continued Lenin’s work of bringing the intelligentsia to heel by dragooning them into organizations, the so-called ‘creative unions’, and by despatching to the Gulag or executing recalcitrants, of whom there were naturally many. For modern painters, it had been a choice between emigration while Lenin was still alive or poster-art and photography, some of it innovative and significant. Writers had had to choose between accepting official commissions for work that fulfilled the party’s idea of revolutionary literature, or a life of harassment, waiting for the axe to fall.

Marginalizing his political rivals by the late 1920s, and master of the party by 1930, Stalin then turned his attention to the peasants, forcing them by death and starvation to accept his concept of efficient agriculture. The workers were brought under control by the industrialization programme of the 1930s with its system of threats, punishment and graduated rewards.

He removed all threat of opposition in the party by removing its intellectual and organizational leadership, purging the upper and middle echelons of experienced members and replacing them with functionaries whose loyalty was to him alone, and who had no qualms about applying his methods. He did the same with the army, liquidating its educated top layers and putting in their place commanders, most of whom lacked a higher military education.

The society that emerged from the cauldron of the 1930s was Stalin’s creation. Through ‘socio-political’ education, show trials and an unending string of campaigns demanding their public show of support, the people were conditioned by constant propaganda to respond to whatever outlandish slogan, against whatever new enemy, the Leader might invent. They had it drilled into them that the system under which they lived was the most democratic on earth, and that all their sacrifices would be rewarded in the future communist paradise.

Disillusioned and even further dispossessed by the failure of the post-communist regime at the end of the twentieth century, many Russians long for the past, believing that their country was more humanely and rationally organized under Stalin and his heirs than it is today. They are understandably nostalgic for the minimal provision of life’s necessities that his parsimonious regime could provide: basic food supply, basic accommodation, basic health and educational provision for the many; and a privileged, if precarious, life for a select few.

If they do not hanker for the insecurity of the Stalinist past, the Gulag and the show trials, they may still be deluded by unscrupulous politicians into thinking of Stalin as the ‘firm hand of leadership’, whose absence they blame for Russia’s present ills. Stalin’s mother knew better: on her deathbed in 1937 she said she still wished he had become a priest.