Stalin and Stalinism

Martin McCauley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429849763
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

One of the most successful dictators of the twentieth century, Stalin transformed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into one of the world's leading political parties. Stalin and Stalinism explores how he ammassed, retained and deployed power to dominate, not only his close associates, but the population of the Soviet Union and Soviet Empire.

Moving from leader to autocrat and finally despot, Stalin played a key role in shaping the first half of the twentieth century with, at one time, around one-third of the planet adopting his system. His influence lives on – despite turning their backs on Stalin's anti-capitalism in the later twentieth century, countries such as China and Vietnam retain his political model – the unbridled power of the Communist Party. First published in 1983, Stalin and Stalinism has established itself as one of the most popular textbooks for those who want to understand the Stalin phenomenon. This updated fourth edition draws on a wealth of new publications, and includes increased discussion on culture, religion and the new society that Stalin fashioned as well as more on spying, Stalin's legacy, and his character as well as his actions.

Supported by a chronology of key events, Who's Who and Guide to Further Reading, this concise assessment of one of the major figures of the twentieth-century world history remains an essential read for students of the subject.

Part 1

The context

1  Introduction: the problem

When the Soviet Union became the dominant power in Europe and second only to the United States in 1945 there was an urgent need in the West to analyse its rise to power and to prevent it expanding its influence throughout the world. How was the USSR ruled? Why had it become so powerful in such a short time? After all, no one gave the country much hope against the German Wehrmacht, in 1941. Then less than four years later the Red Army was raising the Soviet Flag over the Reichstag in Berlin. Even more disconcerting, the Soviet model of government and economy rejected the market, private ownership of land and assets, the rule of law: in other words, the capitalism which had led to the development of the western world in previous centuries. The western concept of democracy, based on a pluralism of opinions, was also ignored. Had a new model of development appeared in the Soviet Union which could challenge the hegemony of capitalism and perhaps replace it in the future? Russia, in western imagination, is often conceived of as a bear, an animal which is strong enough to devour any man or woman. How was western Europe and the United States to protect themselves against this bear that claimed it would one day take over the world?

Out of fear of the Soviet Union emerged the concept of totalitarianism which prevailed among historians from 1945 to the 1960s. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship over which the leader held total sway: in politics, economics, society, culture, indeed in every aspect of daily life. This was enforced by limitless coercion that resulted in fear of the secret police (NKVD) coursing through everyone’s veins. The Communist Party enjoyed a monopoly and no opposition was permitted. Religion was to be eliminated and a secular, socialist culture was to be instilled by a media which was omnipresent. Propaganda (regarded as a positive) was all-pervasive. It was everyone’s duty to inform on other citizens (including wives, husbands and children) who were suspected of harbouring anti-Soviet views. Failure to do so was a crime. Totalitarianism viewed communism as frozen in time and incapable of reform. Control from the top was so pervasive that only war could topple the regime.

It was impossible to carry out academic research in the Soviet Union. Could one believe what was written in the newspapers and journals? A joke circulated that there was no Izvestiya (news – the government newspaper) in Pravda (truth – the party newspaper) and no Pravda in Izvestiya. How could one glean information? One source was a group of Soviet émigrés who had managed to escape the net which had ensnared so many of their colleagues and remain in the West after 1945. The Harvard project [findings summarised in Bauer et al. (1956) and Inkeles and Bauer (1959)] questioned them in depth to discern the hidden mechanisms of the Soviet power structure. The basic approach was totalitarian but there were studies by Barrington Moore Jr (1954) and Black et al. (1975) that adopted a modernisation approach.

Once debriefed the Harvard set ran into the question of bias. Were they so hostile to the Soviet Union that their evidence was too subjective? The Smolensk archives, captured by the Germans and in turn by the Americans, were a major boon. They provided detailed information about the course of Soviet policy in Smolensk oblast. Merle Fainsod produced a classic account entitled How Russia is Ruled (1953). Jerry F. Hough brought out a revised edition How Russia is Governed (1979).

The Soviet Union was compared to national socialist Germany and Kurt Schumacher, leader of the west German social democratic (SPD) party after 1945 referred to communists as ‘red painted Nazis’. The party led by Hitler was the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Referred to as the Nazi (from the German nationalsozialistisch or national socialist) party, many comparisons were drawn. It exercised a monopoly of political power; it regarded world dominance as its goal; the chosen people were ethnic Germans (under communism it was the working class); the Jews were the enemy and were to be exterminated (under communism it was the bourgeoisie); religion was to disappear and be replaced by worship of the leader; the secret police, the Gestapo, ruthlessly combated dissent and opposition (the NKVD played this role in the USSR); both had charismatic leaders who were worshipped as demi-gods.

Since Nazism was held to be evil, so too was communism. They were two of a kind.

America’s unease about communism became almost hysterical during the years 1950–57, when Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the State Department, CIA, military and other institutions of harbouring communists within their ranks. The fear of communism went hand in hand with the fear of World War III breaking out. President Eisenhower revealed that he dreaded that it would start every day of his presidency (1953–61).

The Vietnam War set in train a reassessment of the totalitarian model. The ‘class of 68’ no longer had faith in the US government and the reaction led to the revisionism of the 1970s. Social historians looked again at 1917 and concluded that the Bolsheviks had support, even among workers, and this challenged the prevailing view that the Bolsheviks were led by returning activists from abroad (Lenin and Trotsky) who enjoyed little local support and were able to effect a coup. This cohort of Marxists and left leaning socialists included Ronald Grigor Suny (1972); Alexander Rabinowitch (1976); Diane Koenker (1981) and Steve Smith (1983). They produced solidly researched studies, which even their critics had to admire.

The next step was to adopt a revisionist stance to the 1920s or the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–28). This was a much more complex task as NEP introduced a mixed economy and the return of the market while the commanding heights of the economy (energy, large scale industry, banking, etc.) remained in state hands. It was much more difficult to source research in this period in Soviet archives. The leading light of the revisionists turned out to be Stephen Cohen, a political scientist, who produced a biography of Nikolai Bukharin (1973), the main figure on the right against Stalin. Cohen sought to show that there was a feasible alternative to Stalin’s enforced rapid industrialisation and collectivisation. Bukharin’s gradualist approach offered hope of a successful alliance of workers and peasants which would benefit all. Cohen saw Stalin as veering away from the Bolshevik revolution set in train by Lenin. Hence Stalin highjacked the revolution in his desire for personal power and so Stalinism cannot be viewed as legitimate. Cohen accepted the totalitarian model when applied to Stalinism but rejected it when applied to the October Revolution and NEP.

The revisionists were regarded as soft on communism or, even worse, ignoring the brutality and excesses of the Stalinist period. There were referred to as communists or proto-communists who were apologists for an evil regime. The bitterness and acrimony of the debate between the totalitarians and the revisions can only be understood in a Cold War context.

The 1930s were even more difficult to study from Soviet sources but this did not deter a group of social historians who were interested in researching the level of support from below for the Stalinist regime. The leading light was Sheila Fitzpatrick, who started out studying the violin in Moscow, bur then abandoned her musical studies to delve into the lives of ordinary Soviet people. She was fascinated by the new cultural elite, the commissariat for enlightenment under Anatoly Lunacharsky, and produced ground breaking studies on education and social mobility (1979) and (1992). Lynne Viola studied workers and collectivisation (1987); Hiroaki Kuromiya examined workers and politics (1988); and William J. Chase published on work and life in Moscow (1987). It became clear that mobilisation of workers to achieve government policies had achieved considerable success. Out of this milieu came future leaders of the party and industry.

Trotsky’s view that the revolution had been betrayed (1937) found resonance among some scholars who concluded that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic, deformed state which exploited workers. Prominent representatives of this attitude were Moshe Lewin and Donald Filtzer.

Moshe Lewin, who had worked on a kolkhoz (collective farm) in Kazakhstan, brought hands on expertise to the study of Stalin’s new creation (1975). He roundly condemned the new order as a move away from socialism. The new creation, called the Stalinist system, resulted from the ‘degeneration’ of the Communist Party into a hierarchical, administrative body which felt it could apply unlimited coercion to achieve its goals. However, the more force it used the more confused the situation became. The consequence of forced collectivisation was that the peasants were driven into the cities but once there ‘ruralised’ them. They retained their social values (patriarchal, family networks, a rural attitude) to work (short bursts followed by periods of inactivity) and time (regular timekeeping was alien to them) and thereby overwhelmed the state. Lewin writes of the ‘quicksand society’ and the ‘demonisation’ of the authoritarian political system. The state bureaucratised society but the values of the village predominated and the village exacted its revenge by turning the Soviet Union backwards in its quest for modernisation. The attempt to destroy village values, so prevalent in collectivisation, produced confusion and alienation and led to a sense of permanent crisis. The nervousness of the leadership and its fear of instability led to the cruel, elemental violence of the Great Terror. Lewin was in no doubt about whether the Soviet system was socialist or not. He passionately rejected the new order, from a socialist (anti-capitalist) point of view, and saw it as a bastard who had wreaked havoc in the Soviet Union. Fitzpatrick and Lewin never entered into debate and, indeed, ignored one another’s work in public and print. However, their work does reveal some similar tendencies. Both see the 1930s as a reversal of the revolution. For Lewin, NEP was a false path which then led to forced industrialisation and collectivisation. For Fitzpatrick, the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1932, called a halt to the revolutionary impulse of socialism. A revolutionary mentality gave way to a Soviet mentality.

The Great Purges (1937–38) produced a remarkable book by Robert Conquest (1968; followed by reassessments in 1991, 2002 and 2007). Great ingenuity had to be displayed by the author as he did not have access to Soviet archives in his original study. He amended some of his calculations in the light of archival evidence in later assessments. A fierce debate ensued between totalitarians and revisionists with the former accusing the latter of trying to whitewash Stalin’s crimes. Denying Stalin’s crimes was tantamount to denying the Holocaust in the eyes of some critics. The numbers game was played with the totalitarians suggesting large numbers and the revisionists cutting these numbers down considerably. One of the historians who was quoted was E.H. Carr, who penned a seven-volume history of Soviet Russia over the years 1950–61. Revisionists were favourably disposed towards his work but he was subjected to criticism because of his methodology and his left leaning politics and regarded as only writing about the winners which meant that he paid little attention to the losers in the conflict with Stalin. After the fall of communism, he was asked what approach he would now adopt if writing his history of Soviet Russia. He replied that he would pay much less attention to official documents and statistics. His work can be read as the official Soviet version of the period which archives have revealed to be quite misleading.

Gradually the views of social historians became accepted wisdom in the field of Soviet history. This was especially so as studies revealed that there was considerable resistance to collectivisation (Fitzpatrick 1994; Viola 1996). Sarah Davies examined popular opinion, propaganda and dissent (1997) and Jeffrey Rossman assessed worker resistance (2005). The opening of the archives after 1991 did not mellow Richard Pipes, who maintained that he had been right all along. He does not even include the works of revisionists in his bibliographies. He holds to his view that Russian political culture is authoritarian and favours the emergence of strong leaders. Hence the way to study Russia is to analyse politics from above.

Post-revisionism

Just when revisionism had become the norm it was undermined in the 1990s by a new wave: the return of ideology and theories about cultural and intellectual history. The subjectivity of the Soviet experience took precedence. Inspiration was derived from the social theories of the French Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and the German Jürgen Habermas. Ideology was understood, not as a set of texts but as something which emerged from collective experience. The classic study was by Stephen Kotkin of the evolution of Magnitogorsk (1995), building a new city in the Urals, when he presented Stalinism as a new civilisation. Kotkin follows the twists and turns of changing events and how workers and managers adjusted their behaviour to give the impression they were following the plan. They learnt to speak Bolshevik and exploited the system for their own ends. Management returned to bourgeois values and lived in fine villas while many workers were obliged to live in squalid shacks. Kotkin does not concern himself with the question about whether this new phenomenon was socialist: it was simply everyday Stalinist reality. The regime ensured that no one, even at the top, could feel secure with the threat that their cherished life style could be snatched away at a moment’s notice. Worker anger at poor living conditions could be turned against the bosses. People thought they were building socialism and a better tomorrow, so all the sacrifices were justified.

Cultural studies are imbued with the approach that Stalinist civilisation was not the product of something imposed from above but the emergence of a collective experience and the adoption of new values. Hence everyday discourse, ritual and practices are very relevant. Diaries and oral testimony provide valuable insights. Jochen Hellbek’s discovery of a diary written during the Stalin years (2009) produced a fine book. Alexei Kojevnikov (2004) follows the battles of Soviet physicists and how these conflicts affected the discipline.

Some of the most influential works of the post-Soviet period do not belong to the post-revisionist school. A prime example is Terry Martin’s publication (2001) on Soviet nations and nationalities in the 1920s and 1930s which follows efforts at affirmative action by the authorities. It is worth mentioning that the goal was to produce a new cohort of officials and leaders who would transcend their own ethnic origins and cultures and identify with the new Soviet norms. As experience was to prove, this often had the opposite effect and some of the elites in the non-Slav areas became leaders of a nationalist revival which surfaced under Gorbachev.

Political history has again emerged as the brilliant studies by Oleg Khlevniuk on repression during the 1930s, based on archives, reveal. He believes that the archives, so far closed, when open will reveal many hitherto unsuspected secrets of the Stalin era.

Part 2

Analysis

2 Early years

Ioseb Dzhugashvili, the son of Besarion, was born in Gori, a small town in Georgia, in the south of the Russian Empire, on 6 December 1878. In Russian, he was known as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili but to the world he was Joseph Stalin. The Georgian Orthodox Church used the Julian calendar which means that, according to the Gregorian calendar, he was born on 18 December 1878. His birth certificate, his christening certificate, his seminary school records and his graduation certificate all bear the same date. The documents of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, give 6 December 1878, as his date of birth. In December 1920, Stalin filled in a long questionnaire for the Swedish newspaper, Folkets Dagblad, and, again, gave as his date of birth 6 (18) December 1878. However, in late 1921, the date of his birth was changed to 21 December 1879 (9 December 1879 old style). Subsequently, this latter date was always given as his date of birth. No one has yet explained why Stalin changed his date of birth to render himself one year and three days younger. He once remarked that he had done nothing outstanding, compared to others, before the revolution. Perhaps changing his date of birth was a symbolic way of distancing himself from the years before 1917. He never allowed anyone to write a biography of his activities before October. Indeed, his private secretary, Tovstukha, the keeper of his personal archive until 1935, withdrew as many documents about his activities before 1917 from archives as he could find and they were then passed on to the Stalin, most of them never to be seen again.

His father was a cobbler who sometimes earned enough to sustain his wife and son. He took to drink, became violent at times, and eventually abandoned his family. Ioseb or “Soso”’s mother was devoted to him and he did not need to work, a common fate of local boys. He contracted smallpox which left his face pockmarked for life and damaged his left arm in an accident but poor medical treatment left it disabled. Two toes on his left foot were joined. One can assume that Soso came in for a lot of ribbing because of his physical defects. Despite this, he did not display the cruelty which so marked his character later.

His mother’s dream was that he should become a priest in the Georgian Orthodox Church and she managed to enrol him in the Gori Theological School. Local children taught him Russian, the language of instruction and he proved an able student. He remained there from 1888 to 1894. He did well (except in Greek and arithmetic) and had a fine tenor voice. Soso then entered the Tbilisi Theological Seminary and remained there until May 1899. He devoted less and less time to his studies and more and more time to radical writers, first and f...