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Stalin in Focus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Theodore H. Von Laue
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Extract

“As a writer, I would like to examine what kind of soil the personality cult arose from, what social causes produced it. After all, one cannot explain everything in terms of Stalin's individual peculiarities. The philosophers ought to give an explanation.”

Elizar Maltsev (quoted in Roy Medvedev's Political Diary)

Parading under an innocuous title, this essay intends to disarm some of the extreme tensions that still surround the image of Stalin. The disarming, as Elizar Maltsev suggested, has to take a philosophical turn, reaching from the political and biographical data of the specialists into the larger issues of politics and morality that agitate an age of global interdependence and escalate the nuclear arms race. In times like the present, scholarship and a broad concern for the drift of events should overlap. Put differently, this essay tries to enlist the philosophical and historical faculties necessary to examine — and to do so humanely — the harsh context in which Stalinism operated.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , Fall 1983 , pp. 373 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1983

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References

1. Quoted in Stephen F. Cohen, ed., An End to Silence. Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union from Roy Medvedev's Underground “Political Diary” (New York, 1981), p. 108.

2. Two Soviet critics of Stalin, A. Antonov-Ovseenko and R. Medvedev, are reviewed from the perspectives set forth here in my essay “Stalin Reviewed,” to appear in Soviet Union/Union Soviique (1984). It should be read as a companion piece to the present essay; it furnishes additional documentation.

3. Quoted in A. J. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism (New York, 1965), p. 178.

4. Quoted in R. J. Sontag, Germany and England, Background to Conflict, 1848-1894 (New York, 1938), p. 309.

5. Quoted from Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honorable the Earl of Beaconsfleld, ed. T. E. Kebbel (London, 1889), p. 534.

6. The foregoing characterization of Russian history runs counter to most interpretations by Russian and Western historians writing in the traditional mold of national histories. Critically reexamined in the total context, Russian history — like the history of all other countries — assumes a different shape more readily suited to comparative studies. For the nature of some overlooked aspects of Western power over Russian life, see my articles “Die Revolution von aussen als erste Phase der russischen Revolution von 1917,” Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, July 1956, and “Imperial Russia at the Turn of the Century: The Cultural Slope and the Revolution from Without,“ Comparative Studies in Society and History, July 1961.

7. The term “ uo;the West” (originally a Russian concept denoting indiscriminately all of Europe west of the country) is used here to characterize essentially the “capitalist” democracies, England, and, to a lesser extent in the period under discussion, the United States (which of course is the inevitable experiential reference point for American students of Stalin). Great Britain, it is assumed, served as a universal model to continental Europe (and much of the world) even where it was formally repudiated. Continental states deviated from that model to the degree to which they could not match the voluntarist civic cooperation that characterized the democratic regimes. In order to highlight the theoretical problems of comparison, the present analysis deals with ideal types at opposite poles; it is England and the U.S. versus Russia. France, Germany, Italy occupy intermediary stages on this scale, all “Western” from the Russian perspective and all favored by a higher degree of civic voluntarism. In the years under discussion Japan, of course, did not count.

8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1914), p. 89.

9. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York, 1980), p. 119.1 am much indebted to Hugh Ragsdale for his advice on structuralism and to Jonathan Bordo for his help with Foucault's philosophy.

10. Compare Stalin with Lyndon Johnson as described by his recent biographer Robert A. Caro, who wrote that Johnson had a “hunger for power not to improve the lives of others but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will in a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself — or to anyone else — could stand before it.“ The Path to Power. The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 1982), p. xix.

11. Admittedly, since Rousseau the tyranny of civilization has been a common theme among romantic intellectuals, the more outspoken the further east we look. Germany and Eastern Europe occupied an intermediary position between the English-speaking West and Russia.

12. Cognitive imperialism, of course, is a world-wide phenomenon among high and low alike; all people assess outsiders from their own limited inside perspectives. But it causes greater damage when practiced by the mighty. As this essay tries to prove, it can be counteracted.

13. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin (New York, 1980), p. 255. The term “Asia” has come to denote in Russian and even in German usage the sum total of the cultural traits that run against the grain of the comparatively more subtly structured sensibilities of Western-oriented intellectuals. Yet “Asian” promptings (or values) possess their own subtle structures, “primitive” by Western standards, but as legitimate in their natural settings as those of the West. Any effective intercultural historical analysis must take these invisible promptings as objective given factors.

14. See for instance Raleigh, Donald J.'s article “Revolutionary Politics in Provincial Russia: The Tsaritsyn ‘Republic’ in 1917,” Slavic Review, 40, no. 2 (June 1981): 194–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the forthcoming book by Wade, Rex A.; also Robert Service, The Bobhevik Party in Revolution (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, which, however, does not take into account the larger circumstances shaping party policy and the evolution of leadership.

15 V. I. Lenin, “What is to be Done?” in R. C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York, 1975), p. 83.

16. Aleksandr, Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1973), 1:160Google Scholar. Solzhenitsyn here refers to the Bluecaps but intimates a wider application, citing himself as an example. See also the evidence cited by Valery, Chalidze, Criminal Russia (New York, 1977)Google Scholar, in chapters 1-3 especially.

17. As for factories, Friedrich Engels pointed out (“On Authority“) that “the automatic machinery of a big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers.” Industrial discipline in Russia on the eve of World War I has, to my knowledge, hardly been studied. On the incidence of violence among Russian workers see the recent article by Daniel Brower (Slavic Review, 41, no. 3 [Fall 1982]: 417-31). Yet the larger questions remain: how was industrial discipline affected by the continued influx of raw rural labor? What resources of technical training and mechanical craftsmanship were available? What were the workers’ attitudes toward factories? The crucial evidence, it would seem, comes from the years of liberation between 1917 and 1921. What spontaneous industrial cooperation was left then among the workers? How disciplined were the Factory Committees? Consider also Lenin's assertion that Russian workers lagged behind their German counterparts in the essentials of industrial productivity.

18 As perceptive readers will have noticed by now, the structuralist approach here attempted implies a bias in favor of cultural determinism. It argues that there exists a great variety of crucial but invisible factors determining policy and political behavior. The illusion of free options is understandable when insiders deal with their own affairs within the limits of the possible; they can take the invisible substructures for granted. If, however, we are engaged in intercultural comparisons we have to account for the full range of factors, visible and invisible, at work in a given historical era. If we do so, we find that human beings have their hands and their minds tied right and left. Structuralist attention to the invisible substructures of human action inevitably encourages cultural determinism: it enlarges enormously the complexity of causation. It should be clear, however, that such determinism limits human freedom as little as does the physical law of gravity. In knowingly submitting to the given necessities, we learn to control them and thereby to exercise our freedom. In our present understanding of political systems, of course, we have not yet reached the stage of Newtonian physics, with disastrous results in cross-cultural relations.

In the structuralist perspective, incidentally, the much-discussed differences between Lenin and Stalin, the availability of more humane solutions, or the relevance of the Marxist vision cease to be meaningful topics. Based largely on wishful thinking, they have been disregarded in the present essay.

19 The foregoing considerations may help to bring some intelligibility to hitherto obscure aspects of early Soviet life that have puzzled some distinguished students of Soviet affairs writing in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (New York, 1982). See for instance David Joravsky's comment that there is no rational explanation for the “wild irrationality” of Soviet policy toward science (p. 128); or Moshe Lewin's bafflement over the change of an optimistic Marxist creed into a dark and deeply pessimistic attitude to people and culture (p. 69). It is worth noting in this context that the terms “rational” and “rationality” have no meaning in intercultural comparisons. As there are reasons of the heart that the intellect does not know, so the rationality of one culture appears irrational to another. By this perspective the application of the values of the West to Russia appears irrational, and Stalin's seeming irrationality entirely rational (although deplorably inarticulate). The present essay, obviously, attempts to establish the rationality of Stalinism — in Western terms which only partially do justice to the other side.

20 Stalin's personal merits are discussed in Von Laue, “Stalin Reviewed.

21. The basic domestic and external insecurities persist. In addition we still find Stalinist attitudes in Soviet popular culture, even among stout anti-Stalinists. For evidence see Von Laue, “Stalin Reviewed.“