Stalin

A Beginner's Guide

Abraham Ascher

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780749143
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Joseph Stalin began life as a frail child, with an abusive father and an inferiority complex. This triggered an early desire for greatness and respect that would eventually turn the young Bolshevik idealist into one of the most ruthless dictators in modern history.Like his contemporary, Adolf Hitler, Stalin was responsible for millions of deaths and inflicted barbaric cruelty on the Soviet people. But while Hitler is readily portrayed as a monster, Stalin has not been subjected to quite the same level of vitriol. In Stalin: A Beginner's Guide, renowned historian Abraham Ascher analyses new and old sources, separating truths from falsehoods to present an unvarnished portrait of the Soviet leader.

1
Stalin’s Early Years, 1879–1899

The upbringing of Joseph Djugashvili (he adopted the name Stalin – ‘man of steel’ – probably in 1910) was rare among leading Russian revolutionaries, most of whom were born into families that belonged either to the middle class, the gentry, and/or the intelligentsia, that is, highly educated people who exercise cultural or political influence. His parents, both of them semi-literate, had been born as serfs in Georgia, a beautiful country in Eurasia that was annexed by Russia in 1801. The poorest people there, the serfs, were laborers forced to work the land owned by a small number of nobles, who saw to it that their workers were not permitted to move elsewhere. The institution of serfdom was abolished in Georgia in 1865, four years later than in other parts of the Russian Empire.

Poverty was not the only hardship that Stalin endured as a youngster. He grew up in a strikingly dysfunctional family, also an important factor in shaping his character and political outlook. He always spoke kindly of his mother, Yekaterina, who was devoted to him, the only one of her four children to survive birth. Deeply religious, she hoped that her son, most probably born on 21 December 1878 in the small town of Gori, Georgia, would join the clergy. Stalin’s father, on the other hand, took little interest in religion or the home. A cobbler, he earned enough to support his family but squandered an increasing amount on liquor; and during his frequent bouts of alcoholism the tremors in his hands reduced his efficiency, and hence his earnings. Prone to irascibility, he sometimes beat his wife, and once even tried to strangle her. He was also given to beating his son, who came to loathe his father. The father often did not show up at home for weeks at a time. To support herself and her son, Yekaterina worked as a seamstress and laundress for middle-class families.

The date of his father’s death remains unclear. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, claimed that he died in a drunken brawl in 1890. Other sources indicate that he died much later, in 1909, of cirrhosis of the liver, which is often caused by excessive drinking. Most biographers of Stalin contend that the violence in his family life left a deep impression on him. When he rose to a prominent position in politics, he displayed few inhibitions about resorting to violence to achieve his goals or to silence his enemies, real or imagined.

Physically, Stalin was not appealing. At five feet four or five inches, he is said to have felt uncomfortable in the presence of taller men. After rising to power, he surrounded himself with shorter functionaries. Apparently, one reason that he liked to have Nikita S. Khrushchev – who became the country’s leader shortly after Stalin’s death – in his inner circle was that he stood at only five feet three inches. Because of an accident or some infection at the age of eight, Stalin developed a stiffness in his right arm that was sufficiently disabling to prevent him from being drafted into the armed services during World War 1. As a child, he was stricken with smallpox, which left his face pockmarked for the rest of his life.

Academically, the young boy was impressive; his analytic abilities were strong and he had an unusually fine memory. He loved reading books and was adept at taking examinations. Until the age of eight or nine he spoke only Georgian, which is completely different from Russian, the required language at local schools. The boy quickly mastered Russian, eventually his preferred language, which he always spoke with a marked Georgian accent. When he had reached the pinnacle of political power, his subordinates were so subservient that they went to great lengths not to correct his mistakes. At the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 the dictator mispronounced the name of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture – he called it Narkomzyom instead of Narkomzem. Whenever later speakers at the Congress referred to that office, they deliberately adopted their leader’s pronunciation – an interesting and amusing example of the fear Stalin inspired.

Stalin’s mother was determined to enroll her son in the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the hope that he would enter the priesthood and rise to the position of bishop, a career that seemed to be within his reach. Not only did he perform outstandingly at school; he was also appropriately devout, rarely missing a mass. The Seminary was a highly regarded institution that could afford to be selective in its admissions, and the young Stalin seemed to be an ideal candidate. It awarded a scholarship to Joseph, enabling him to begin a demanding course of study in August 1894.

GEORGIA

Georgia, where Stalin lived until his early twenties, is a small country of about 4.5 million people located at the intersection of Europe and Asia. Its widely admired terrain is largely mountainous. The country can also boast of a long and rich history. The Georgians adopted Christianity in the fourth century ce, six centuries before Russia, and their language as well as their culture was uniquely their own. By the eleventh century the country had achieved an impressive level of economic and political power. Georgia remained independent until 1801, when it was annexed by Russia, which had conquered several neighboring regions. The invaders replaced local authorities with Russian viceroys, who ruled arbitrarily and sought to impose Russian culture on the Georgians.

But the conquerors’ tasks proved to be more challenging than anticipated. As the eighteenth-century author Prince Vakhushti Bagration pointed out, the Georgians were a proud people who did not easily succumb to invaders: ‘[They are] intelligent, quick-witted, self-centered and lovers of learning... They lend loyal support to one another, will remember and repay a good turn but will extract retribution for an insult. They... are headstrong, ambitious, and apt to flatter and to take offense.’

Stalin abandoned Georgian culture after becoming a political activist, but he never fully shed the personal qualities of the people among whom he was raised. Since the collapse of communism the country has been independent, although relations with the Russian Federation remain tense.

In keeping with the government’s policy of imposing Russian culture on ethnic minorities throughout the Empire, the Seminary followed the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church even though most Georgians practiced Georgian Orthodox Christianity. And classroom instruction was in Russian, seen by most local residents as a disparagement of their language. In addition to theology, students took courses in Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, Russian history, and Russian literature. No modern foreign languages were taught and the sciences were slighted. The authoritarian approach to learning at the Seminary left its mark on Stalin’s style of writing and mode of argument for the rest of his life. He was always dogmatic and presented his thoughts crudely; he would pose a question and then answer it in a way that suggested that no alternative response could possibly be correct, just as the pronouncements of the Church were presented as the ultimate truth.

But as a boy of seventeen, Stalin also demonstrated a flair for poetry. He published several poems in the Georgian literary journal Iveria. They were marked, in the words of Simon Sebag Montefiore, by ‘romantic imagery... [and] delicacy and purity of rhythm and language’. Apparently, his poems were widely read and even ‘became minor Georgian classics’.

As an adult, Stalin claimed that the stifling atmosphere at the Seminary prompted him to take up the revolutionary cause, which may well be the case. In an interview on 13 December 1931, with the German writer Emil Ludwig, Stalin indicated that he became a radical in ‘protest against the outrageous regime and the Jesuitical methods prevalent at the seminary’. He granted that the teaching was ‘systematic’ but insisted that the academic staff was committed to achieving ‘sordid ends... their principal method is spying, prying, worming their way into people’s souls and outraging their feelings. What good can there be in that? For instance, the spying in the hostel. At nine o’clock the bell rings for morning tea, we go to the dining room, and when we return to our rooms we find that meantime a search has been made and all our chests have been ransacked.’

Although students who broke the rules were not subjected to physical punishment, discipline was strict. For one thing, the school’s rules prescribed what kind of books students were permitted to read. Many novels and all political publications critical of the prevailing order were prohibited. But, as had been true for several decades at the Seminary, many students ignored the official censorship, and it did not take long for Stalin to join a secret circle devoted to socialist literature as well as fiction that dealt with social or political issues. Inspector Father Germogen caught the boy with Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, a work that focused on the French counterrevolutionary events of the Vendée revolt and the Chouannerie. The penalty was severe: a long stay in the ‘punishment cell’. Other authors whose works caught the young boy’s fancy were Nikolai Nekrasov, Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Emile Zola, and Charles Darwin, to mention only a few. Georgy Elisabetdashvili, one of his friends at the time, recalled that Stalin ‘didn’t just read books, he ate them’. By the time he was seventeen or eighteen, he had read Kvali, a weekly journal committed to disseminating the doctrines of Marxism. Of course, none of these works deepened his understanding of theological issues, but that did not faze him. On the contrary, during his first year at the Seminary he began to have doubts about the teachings of Christianity and he drifted toward atheism.

Stalin remained at the Seminary for three more years, but he probably spent more time studying social and political issues than theology. No doubt, even more offensive to the teachers than his participation in the secret circle, he, like many of his classmates, would pretend during services to be reading prayers while focusing on writings of socialist leaders placed carefully on their knees. In 1897, he received no fewer than nine warnings for various infractions. On several occasions, he was charged with rude behavior: during prayers, he would talk to other students and laugh out loud, and when he encountered teachers in the halls, he ignored the rule that students must bow to them. It became obvious that the priesthood would not be his calling and in 1899 he left the school under circumstances that are still unclear.

But it is known that at the age of twenty he abandoned his education and became a political activist. His circle of friends regarded him as committed to improving the world but also, despite his sound classical education, as never in doubt about the correctness of his views and unfavorably inclined toward anyone who differed with him. His self-assurance and arrogance served him in good stead in the harsh world of Russian radicalism and eventually in his climb to leadership of the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s move in 1899 from student at the Seminary to political activist made it necessary for him to make some critical decisions. Most important, he had to find work to support himself; his mother was not in a position to cover his expenses for a protracted period and probably would not have wanted to because she did not want to make it easy for him to abandon his religious studies. Stalin earned some income by giving lessons to young students and apparently a few former students at the Seminary provided him with financial help. Late in December 1899, he landed a minor, part-time post at the Tiflis Observatory, but his heart was not in that work. He kept busy by spending several hours a week indoctrinating workers in Marxist ideas.

2
A Young Revolutionary, 1899–1917

In seeking to undermine the existing sociopolitical order in Russia and replace it with one committed to socialism, Stalin and his Marxist colleagues faced a task of monumental proportions. Unlike Western Europe and Britain, Russia was still predominantly agricultural early in the twentieth century, with a tiny proletariat numbering not more than three million out of a total population of roughly 150 million. Industrialization on a large scale took hold in the country only in the 1890s, more than a century later than in Great Britain. Although Russia made impressive progress in modernizing the economy, in 1914 it lagged far behind the major powers in Europe. True, it was now the fifth industrial power in the world, but labor productivity and per capita income there rose much more slowly than in Western Europe. In 1910, per capita income amounted to only a third of the average in the industrial sectors of Europe.

Economic conditions of the peasantry, about eighty percent of the total population, were, if anything, even worse. Serfdom had been abolished in 1861, but the lot of the peasants deteriorated in several important respects. For one thing, the rapid growth of the population between 1887 and 1905 resulted in a decline of over twenty percent in the average landholding of peasant households, from 13.2 to 10.4 desiatinas (one desiatina equals 2.7 acres). Production remained abysmally low, in part because the system of communal landownership, which governed about four fifths of the peasants’ holdings, was not conducive to long-range planning or to the application of modern farming techniques. Many statistics could be cited to demonstrate the wretched conditions in the countryside, but none is more telling than the following: the death rate of Russia was about double that of England.

Politically and socially, modernization had made few inroads in the country’s institutions. The Russian Empire continued to be governed by hereditary monarchs who claimed to possess autocratic power by divine right. Although the rulers stressed that obedience to them was a religious obligation, they did not rely solely on the conscience of the people to follow their commands. The authorities in St. Petersburg also sought to shape public opinion by censoring books, periodicals, and newspapers and, more important, they maintained a system of police surveillance over the citizens and arbitrarily meted out severe punishments (generally exile to distant locations, or imprisonment) to anyone considered ‘seditious’, a term defined very broadly.

Tsar Nicholas II, who ascended the throne in 1894, possessed none of the qualities necessary for effective leadership. He did not understand that even rulers who claim absolute power need to gain the confidence of large sectors of the population. Although moderately intelligent, he lacked the personal drive and vision to take charge of the government, to familiarize himself with the workings of his administration, and to instill a sense of purpose and direction into the ministers and the bureaucracy. He was narrow-minded and prejudiced, incapable of tolerating people who did not fit into his conception of a true Russian, a fatal flaw in a country composed of over a hundred ethnic groups with a wide range of cultures, languages, and religions; the minorities, moreover, constituted more than half the Empire’s population. Nicholas also could not bear the word ‘intelligentsia’, which he considered ‘repulsive’ because many of its members tended to oppose autocratic rule. The Tsar was convinced that except for the intelligentsia most people in the Empire were deeply devoted to him.

Although it is true that many ordinary Russians, especially among the peasantry, still revered their ruler, a growing number were becoming increasingly disaffected. This is not surprising: they were no longer serfs, but they were not free citizens. They could not move from one place to another without official permission, and in many respects the government and the landlords still exercised arbitrary and inhumane control over them. For example, officials could imprison a peasant or exile him to Siberia for alleged violations of the law without a trial. Only in 1903 did the government prohibit corporal punishment of convicted criminals.

It was not until 1906, and much more extensively in 1917, that sizable numbers of peasants engaged in large-scale disturbances that made them a potent political force in the countryside. Russian Marxists expressed sympathy for the plight of the peasants, but their primary incentive in devoting themselves to revolutionary activism was the desire to improve the lot of the industrial working class, who, they believed, would be the savior of the world from the evils of capitalism, as had been predicted by the German philosopher Karl Marx. In Germany and other Western countries Marx’s thesis seemed plausible because the proletariat in the second half of the nineteenth century was already a significant force that had grown rapidly in size and political influence with each advance in industrialization.

In the Russian Empire, however, conditions were radically different. Industrialization on a massive scale took hold only in the 1890s, which meant that early in the twentieth century the country lagged far behind such Western powers as Germany and Great Britain. The proletariat in Russia constituted a much smaller portion of the population, which makes it all the more remarkable that it exerted so powerful an influence in the country’s political evolution in 1917. To a considerable degree, this weight resulted from the structure of industrialization in Russia. Because Russian entrepreneurs tended to adopt the form of production and factory organization of economically more advanced countries, industry was highly concentrated, more so even than in Germany and the United States. The considerable size of many factories was a boon to labor organizers and political activists, who could easily reach large numbers of workers resentful of the harsh conditions in the workplace.

Moreover, government officials and industrialists handled the ‘labor question’ with astonishing insensitivity. Until 1905, they frequently denied that there was such a problem and insisted that relations between employers and their workers were patriarchal in character, comparable to the benevolent relations between landlords and peasants. Consequently, employers asserted that Russian workers would not succumb to the enticements of outside agitators, the alleged fomenters of labor unrest, to demand higher rewards for their labor.

In fact, conditions for factory workers were so grim that they hardly needed to be persuaded to resent their plight. They worked eleven and a half hours a day five days a week and somewhat less on Saturdays. Their wages were exceedingly low, and since many of them returned to their villages for part of the year to till the fields, they were housed in large, unsanitary barracks during their service at the factory. Many owners of industrial plants acted like ‘Tsars in their realm’ and loo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Stalin’s Early Years, 1879–1899
• 2 A Young Revolutionary, 1899–1917
• 3 Stalin under Lenin’s Leadership, 1917–1924
• 4 The Struggle for Power, 1924–1928
• 5 There Are No Fortresses Bolsheviks Cannot Storm’
• 6 The Great Terror, 1936–1938
• 7 Was the Stalinist State Totalitarian?
• 8 World War II, 1939–1945
• 9 Leader of a Great Power, 1945–1953
• Epilogue: Stalin’s Legacy
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright