Dictators and Autocrats

Securing Power across Global Politics

Klaus Larres, Klaus Larres

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467604
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: World History

In order to truly understand the emergence, endurance, and legacy of autocracy, this volume of engaging essays explores how autocratic power is acquired, exercised, and transferred or abruptly ended through the careers and politics of influential figures in more than 20 countries and six regions.

The book looks at both traditional "hard" dictators, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and more modern "soft" or populist autocrats, who are in the process of transforming once fully democratic countries into autocratic states, including Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Turkey, Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The authors touch on a wide range of autocratic and dictatorial figures in the past and present, including present-day autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, military leaders, and democratic leaders with authoritarian aspirations. They analyze the transition of selected autocrats from democratic or benign semi-democratic systems to harsher forms of autocracy, with either quite disastrous or more successful outcomes.

An ideal reader for students and scholars, as well as the general public, interested in international affairs, leadership studies, contemporary history and politics, global studies, security studies, economics, psychology, and behavioral studies.

Part I The notorious three

1Joseph Stalin Autocrat par excellence (1878–1953)

Hiroaki Kuromiya

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100508-2

Iosif V. Stalin (1878–1953), the Soviet dictator who ruled the Soviet Union for three decades from 1924 to 1953, was a man with no close friends or confidants. He trusted no one. He was a consummate politician who literally lived by politics alone. Politics, he would say, is dirty business, and those who do not wish to dirty their hands should not get involved in politics. It was power that drove him, and power, in his view, had no ethical dimensions. It is not that he was ignorant of human relations; in fact, he demonstrated a savvy knowledge of human behavior. Rather, he simply subordinated everything, including human relations, to his political ends.

Stalin was a believer in Marxism and its Law of History. As a Bolshevik, he deemed counterrevolutionary anyone and anything that impeded the Marxist progress of history. The Soviet Union, the result of the first successful Communist revolution, was ipso facto revolutionary, and its leader and guardian, Stalin himself, was the embodiment of the revolution. Therefore, anyone and anything that stood against him was counterrevolutionary by default and had to be destroyed. To that end, Stalin was unrestrained in his use of political terror. Yet what guided his followers and disarmed his opponents was precisely his resolute and unwavering adherence to the revolutionary cause, profoundly influencing his followers in the twentieth century and beyond.

Stalin’s “Charm”

On the surface, Stalin does not look like a sure candidate for top leadership. Unlike his rivals such as Lev D. Trotskii (1879–1940) and Nikolai I. Bukharin (1888–1938), he neither was a good orator nor had the flair of a brilliant intellectual. Born as Iosif Dzugashvili in Georgia in Imperial Russia, he initially followed his mother’s wishes and studied in an Orthodox seminary, where he learned Russian, the lingua franca of the empire, as a foreign language and always spoke Russian with a heavy accent. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, he did not seek exile abroad and never quite mastered the language of Marxism, German. Instead, he grounded his life and work in the empire itself. He was never a cosmopolitan Marxist but a Marxist deeply rooted in the Russian revolutionary movement: he was keenly aware of his need to be connected to the narod (people). Even after the Bolsheviks emerged from underground and took power in 1917, Stalin consciously styled himself not as a man of power aloof from the common people but as a militant leader arisen from among them, appearing in military tunics (not a suit and tie) and leather boots (not dress shoes) and using plain (often vulgar) Russian (instead of “proper” and refined speech). In this respect, Stalin outdid his mentor Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924), the initial leader of the dictatorship of the proletariat, who was almost always dressed like a Western gentleman in a suit and tie.

Stalin grew up in an autocratic Russian Empire in which the feudal system of estates (sosloviia) survived until its last days in 1917. In other words, new, modern class differences were complicated and accentuated by old juridical estate differences. The Bolshevik Revolution reflected the violent resentment of the workers (legally still belonging to the peasant estate) and peasants toward the strata enjoying not merely wealth but legal privileges as well. Therefore, when the old regime collapsed, mass violence against these latter groups of people (branded burzhui, a pejorative word for “bourgeois”) was extraordinarily harsh and extensive.¹ Stalin skillfully used such violent popular energy for his political ends. When it came to charisma, the brilliant Trotskii may have had an advantage over Stalin, but when it came to practical politics, Stalin appealed to the masses far more than did Trotskii. The cult of Stalin did not emerge spontaneously, however. It was created from above only after Stalin’s rivals were politically defeated during the five years that followed Lenin’s death in 1924.

Popular support was not necessary to gain political power, something Stalin took advantage of from the beginning. By 1924 all illegitimate political sentiments had been driven underground. Moreover, there was no freedom of press, no free elections, and no free opinion polls, making it difficult even for the secret police to gauge the minds of the people. The slightest indication of discontent was dealt with by terror (as will be discussed later). Therefore, Stalin’s proletarian posture was more of an appeal to the rank-and-file members of the ruling Communist Party than to the masses of people. Indeed, the party decided everything. It was in the closed, narrow circles of the party that Stalin ultimately emerged victorious after the bitter power struggle following Lenin’s death in 1924.

Stalin’s victory in the party was evidently in part a result of his single-minded devotion to politics, a trait that would define his path to success as an autocrat. Of course, he did have personal interests in matters other than politics, including women and sex.² After his second wife’s suicide, however, he had no family life to speak of. According to his daughter Svetlana, who defected to the West after his death, Stalin “hadn’t a soul he could talk to.”³ Stalin may have begun his political life as a romantic Georgian nationalist,⁴ but he soon turned to Marxism. As a Marxist revolutionary, Stalin adopted the code name of “Stalin,” meaning “man of steel,” signifying his steely nerve and will. Indeed, one of his prison cellmates in the prerevolutionary Caucasus remembered Stalin’s composure long after the event: while nocturnal executions and the accompanying screams and moans of the condemned strained the nerves of every prisoner, Stalin “slept peacefully or quietly studied Esperanto.”⁵ With that steely nerve, Stalin carried out his brutal “revolution from above” in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, which diverted enormous resources from consumption to capital accumulation and resulted in the 1932–1933 famine that left millions dead. Karl B. Radek, a repentant Trotskyite-turned-Stalinist, brushed aside any criticism of Stalin in this regard and instead bragged that Stalin’s nerves were “like wire ropes.”⁶

The Bolsheviks were not put off by Stalin’s ruthlessness. They believed in a strong leader. It is likely that Lenin preferred Stalin to Trotskii, who, although ruthless as well, did not lose his sense of humanity. In 1921, Lenin said, “Trotsky is a temperamental man with military experience … as for politics, he hasn’t got a clue.”⁷ The following year, Lenin placed Stalin in the position of the general secretary of the Communist Party. Although Stalin insulted Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda K. Krupskaia (1869–1939), Lenin nevertheless appears to have trusted Stalin in politics, even praising him as “firm, steel-like [stal’noi], and free of any sentimentality.”⁸ Many believe that toward the end of his life in his final “testament,” Lenin changed his mind and called for the removal of Stalin from his position as general secretary on the grounds that he was too rude to be a party leader. Lenin’s final “testament,” however, is in dispute as a possible forgery.⁹ If so, and if Stalin knew that the testament was a forgery in which Krupskaia and Trotskii had played a part, he did not dispute it publicly. He appears to have used it instead to intimidate and manipulate Lenin’s widow with the threat of exposure, a tactic he perfected over the years. This would explain why Krupskaia never spoke up when Stalin executed Lenin’s closest colleagues in the late 1930s. Krupskaia died in 1939, and Trotskii was assassinated by Stalin’s order in 1940. From the start Stalin felt no compunction in eliminating his rivals. As Stalin told Zygmunt Berling, a Polish general, during World War II, “In politics there is, was, and will be no sentimentality.”¹⁰

Perhaps owing to his undeviating obsession with politics, Stalin, unlike his rivals, seems to have been free of intellectual vanity. While they were steeped in Marxist and other relevant literature and yearned for intellectual recognition, Stalin despised such ambitions. A formidable intellect himself, with a self-imposed quota of some several hundred pages of reading a day, he deemed intellectual endeavors inessential to the political struggle.

What Stalin valued was political astuteness. He was a master at knowing when to bide his time and when to strike. He was also an excellent listener, a quality that deeply impressed both his colleagues and interlocutors. While not eloquent, he spoke carefully and clearly after much thought. Unlike his rivals, Stalin did not seem remote to the rank and file. Although people may have admired his rivals for their intellect and elocution, when it came to politics, they looked to Stalin for leadership.

Even when it came to revenge (which Stalin certainly enjoyed, particularly political revenge), there is no evidence that Stalin subordinated politics to his personal feelings. In a conversation with British prime minister Winston Churchill, who insisted that Bulgaria be punished for siding with the Axis powers during World War II, Stalin responded to him:

“I do not,” he [Stalin] said, “wish to give my colleagues a lesson on policy” (Pause). “But if I may say so I do not think policy should be based on considerations of revenge.” (Pause, during which we [the British side] wondered what he would say it should be based on; justice, the interests of the masses, the preservation of peace?) “In my opinion,” he went on, “policy should be based on the calculation of forces.”¹¹

Revenge was a valued tool for Stalin, but his focus was always political.

Stalin’s calculations extended to his relations with people in general. As his daughter Svetlana noted:

My father had a very negative view of human beings in general. He would see them as what they are good for, what he could make them do…. He was rough and tough: when he saw potential, he would go out of his way to attract it. He could be very charming when he wanted to attract and impress people; he would give them all that they needed so long as they worked for him…. He had a staggering capacity to inspire love, tremendous charisma.¹²

Stalin mercilessly discarded those whom he had used when they were no longer useful. Sensing Stalin’s proclivity, his secret police often secretly disposed of them on his behalf. Once, however, Stalin cautioned against hastiness: “There is no need to put such people in jail. They carry out the dirty work [for us].”¹³

Indeed, Stalin said repeatedly that politics is a dirty, filthy business. He told Romain Rolland in 1935, for instance, that it was

better to be out of politics and keep one’s hands clean, but we don’t have the right to stay out of politics if we want to liberate enslaved people. When you agree to engage in politics, then you do everything not for yourself but only for the state. The state demands that ...