“Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.”
—Thomas Paine
Nearly half a century after their destruction, Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler remain the objects of greater attention and hatred than do Stalin and his Soviet Union, although the extent of their crimes were similar and Stalin’s regime was in some ways the more complex and challenging phenomenon. It is possible to view Nazism as a merely Central European phenomenon, so petty, provincial, and intellectually limited as to excite limited admiration; with its open repudiation of most of the civilized values, it did not pose any genuine or lasting moral dilemma to the rest of the world. Stalinism, by contrast, was widely deemed a “progressive” movement, had wide appeal, and gained many adherents and sympathizers throughout the world, including some of the most eminent intellectuals of the age. The “Thousand Year Reich” lasted just 12 years, and ended with Hitler killing himself in the ruins of Berlin as the city was taken by the Red Army. Stalin died in bed, still widely respected, still in control of an intact empire that included half of Europe and that has only recently come apart, nearly forty years later. That the Soviet Union, unlike the Nazi regime, never started a world war (although it came close at least twice) undoubtedly accounts for some of the historical disproportion. The leftist political bias of our century, from which Stalin profited so handsomely, accounts for much of the rest of it.
But there are other factors, too. As even vigorous opponents of both Nazism and Communism have noted, the Nazis may have been more simpleminded, but they were a great deal more colorful than their Stalinist rivals. While Hitler was a charismatic public figure and one of the great demagogues of history, Stalin was a cold-blooded, antisocial intriguer, reluctant to appear in public. He was so colorless that his mortal enemy Trotsky could recall him only as a “gray blur.” As Walter Laqueur notes, his physique and personality do not appear in keeping with one of history’s supreme villains.
The long-awaited second volume of Robert Tucker’s superb biography concentrates wholly, and Laqueur’s book on the “glasnost” revelations largely, on just 12 years of Stalin’s extraordinary career: a span equal to the entire life of Hitler’s regime. The period 1929-1941 was probably the time of Stalin’s most concentrated villainy, which included forced collectivization and “dekulakization,” the beginning of forced-draft industrialization, and the artificial famine of 1933. These horrors were succeeded by a calculated and false “moderation,” the policy of the Popular Front and “antifascism,” which disguised Stalin’s true policy of seeking rapprochement with Nazism and bringing about a world war. The breathing space of the mid-1930’s was merely the period in which Stalin laid the groundwork for history’s biggest frame-up, as well as one of its biggest massacres—the Great Purges.
These were hardly completed when Stalin concluded the long-desired alliance with Hitler, an alliance that in the end backfired, disastrously. Stalin had miscalculated twice. First, in common with most of the world, he had assumed, in 1939-1940, that the British and the French would hold back the Germans, and that the war in the West would be a mutually exhausting stalemate. Second, in 1941 he fecklessly ignored the clearest possible warnings that the Nazis would attack. Just how complete those warnings were is only now fully clear; it has recently been disclosed that Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, betrayed Hitler’s plans to Molotov in May 1941, explaining that his master intended to attack on June 22. In dealing with the era 1929-1941, Tucker has produced a masterpiece that offers a coherent explanation for many things that previously have seemed unfathomable. His interpretation is formidable even when it is difficult to agree with it, and it is noteworthy that Stalin emerges looking even worse than in previous biographies.
Tucker makes the strongest case yet for the view that Stalin’s policy in later Weimar Germany was not a criminal blunder but a deliberate maneuver to help the Nazis to power and bring about an eventual world war. The policy that led to the Nazi-Soviet Pact was thus not merely a product of circumstances following Hitler’s seizure of power (much less a last-minute improvisation after Munich) but had been fixed and consistently pursued since 1925.
Nor was the horrible course of farm collectivization just a solution—albeit the worst possible solution—to the genuine problem of collecting sufficient grain to feed the urban populace, as many historians have argued. Lenin’s New Economic Policy was not at a dead end, doomed by an objective difficulty. Rather, Tucker stresses, the crisis was the planned result of deliberate policy. Stalin lowered prices for grain and raised those of manufactured goods as part of a scheme to provoke a showdown, impose collectivization, terrorize the peasantry, and gain forced labor for the industrialization drive. In the last few decades, it has been rather fashionable to discount the impact of planning and calculation by political leaders on the course of events, and to explain those events according to bureaucratic politics or to snap reactions made by individuals in situations that were suddenly forced on them. Whatever the validity of this view, it has no applicability to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin did not always get what he wanted, but what he wanted he planned for.
Tucker touches on two related critical issues. Was Stalin Lenin’s heir, Stalinism being only a minor modification of Bolshevism, or did he break sharply with Lenin’s ideas? And what was the relationship of the system Stalin created to that of earlier epochs of Russian history?
It has often been noted that Stalin’s purges recall those of Ivan the Terrible, that farm collectivization was in some ways a revival of the serfdom imposed in the 17th century, and that Stalin’s industrialization program recalls the forced modernization initiated by Peter the Great. These similarities, it is said, establish true “continuity” between the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras of Russian history. The Russian social system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whatever its other faults, had left these earlier horrors (which themselves belonged to widely separated epochs) far behind. By 1914, Russia seemed well on its way to “convergence” with Western Europe and North America. Arguments assuming that some sort of Russian archetype was unconsciously resurrected after 1917 have never been very convincing. But Tucker argues that there is a relationship between Stalinism and earlier events, and that the key to this relationship is discoverable in the mind of Joseph Stalin.
Tucker makes a strong case—much stronger than this reviewer would have believed—for a definite breach between Stalin’s ideas and program and those of the majority of the Old Bolsheviks. The difference was not simply Stalin’s greater ruthlessness and willingness to import into intra-party conflicts methods that Lenin and others had deemed acceptable against non-Communists. That Lenin and most of his colleagues envisaged a gradual transformation from small-scale peasant ownership and the NEP to collectivization and a “socialist economy”—not the overnight “second revolution” that Stalin imposed—has been generally accepted. But Tucker goes further. Stalin’s need to become a hero of the revolution equal to or greater than Lenin could only be satisfied by a “second revolution.” That, plus a strong tendency to paranoia and a devotion to an idealized self-image that prevented him from admitting that he could be in any way fallible, explains much of the history of the Stalinist era. After his wife killed herself (or he killed her in a rage), Stalin wished to dispose of blame for all that had gone wrong and to eliminate those who had known him when he was a minor figure and who knew very well that he was not an infallible genius. He also wished to pave the way for a pact with Hitler, which many Old Bolsheviks sensed would end in disaster. These considerations, and the aim of creating a new elite dependent on him and analogous to the “service nobility” created by Ivan IV, largely determined the targets and the extent of the Great Purges.
The social system created in the second revolution was in part a result of Stalin’s understanding of Russian history. Tucker argues ingeniously, and on much evidence, that Stalin, unlike Lenin and the rest of the Old Bolsheviks, was a strong Russian chauvinist with a real, if peculiarly slanted, interest in Russian history. Stalin’s powerful “transferred nationalism” (to borrow a useful phrase invented by Orwell) led him consciously to see Ivan IV’s destruction of the old nobility, the bondage of peasantry, and Peter the Great’s modernization program as efforts “prefiguring” a means to build a “socialist” system in Russia that did not occur to other Communist leaders. Later, it led him to revive elements of Russian traditionalism, to impose ranks, titles, and pay differentials, and to develop a “National Bolshevism of the right” similar in many respects to Nazism. Hence the great paradox that while no real continuity existed—nor could exist—his rule did recall the very worst aspects of earlier Russian history. The argument is an impressive one, although perhaps Tucker does exaggerate the differences between Lenin and Stalin. While the latter felt compelled to destroy his old colleagues, the fact is that he had reached the summit of power without incurring massive opposition or causing any sense of unease among most Communists, in or outside of the Soviet Union. Walter Laqueur’s more conventional assumption, that Lenin’s rule and the attitudes it fostered were likely to lead to something like Stalinism, is on this point more convincing.
It is notable that Robert Tucker declares that his interpretation was not basically affected by the revelations of glasnost; they have, he says, merely reinforced his views. Those revelations are the main subject of Walter Laqueur’s book, which is, unfortunately, not quite up to Mr. Laqueur’s usual high standards, and which shows some signs of hasty writing. Still, it contains a good deal of new information that Laqueur handles with characteristic clarity and common sense, although without arriving at any drastic departures from earlier interpretations. New data on the Great Purges, the uncovering of the NKVD’s mass graves, the recalculation of the number of Stalin’s victims—now calculated at up to 40 million by Roy Medvedev—and Stalin’s attempt to make peace with the Nazis through Bulgaria in 1941 are all treated here. Laqueur also discusses (as in his previous book, The Long Road to Freedom) the bizarre alliance that has developed between the so-called conservatives within the Communist Party and groups on the extreme Russian nationalist right like Pamyat. The position of the neo-Stalinist bureaucrats needs no explanation, but the rightist groups, which perhaps have more popular support, present an intriguing problem. Their hatred of Lenin and Trotsky and their hostility to non-Russians, especially to Jews, has led to a peculiar sort of anti-anti-Stalinism. In the minds of these people, Stalin was not all that bad: he merely killed Communists (many of them Jewish) who had destroyed many good Russians, and his view of Russian patriotic traditions was essentially, a sympathetic one. Their special devils are Trotsky and Lazar Kaganovich—the latter the sole important Jew in Stalin’s entourage and the only one of his cronies still alive—rather than the monster from Tiflis.
Anti-Semitism apart, their argument that the prominent victims of the purges do not deserve much sympathy has substance. Still, “non-party” victims outnumbered Communist Party members, high and low, by nine or ten to one; while even before the purges, Stalin had far surpassed Lenin and Trotsky in his destruction of the muzhiks. Pamyat and similar groups have succeeded in the difficult task of adding some new thing to the history of political perversity in the 20th century; with any luck, however, it will remain no more than a footnote to that history. Occasionally, Laqueur fails to come to grips with the issues. He rightly criticizes those Russian patriots who argue that there was nothing particularly Russian about Stalinism, which was just a local and severe case of a global phenomenon, “from Madrid to Shanghai.” The trouble with this argument, of course, is that Stalin came to power in Russia; to ignore the fact is similar to insisting that the Germans bore no particular responsibility for Nazism because there were fascist groups in other countries, too. But, rather than point this out, Laqueur merely grumbles that “such theories lack conviction. If some Western intellectuals had voiced support for Stalin even in the late 1930’s, it was because they knew little about contemporary Russia. Their support stemmed primarily from the assumption that Nazism was the main enemy and that Stalin’s help was essential.”
But an old hand like Walter Laqueur surely knows this is going too easy on Communist supporters in the West, who numbered far more than “some intellectuals” and whose motives can hardly be ascribed simply to anti-fascism. Many of the names Laqueur himself cites in this context (e.g., Henri Barbusse) had become outright Communists long before Hitler took power, and some remained so during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The defense of civilized values hardly necessitated joining another totalitarian enemy—even had that enemy’s opposition to fascism been genuine. It is surprising to see this tired old whitewash of Communists and their sympathizers laid on once again. Even as a reproach to feverish Russian nationalism, it is simply inappropriate.
[Stalin in Power, by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton) 707 pp., $29.95]
[Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations, by Walter Laqueur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons) 382 pp., $24.95]
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