was dramatically tightened. The party was said to know best about past, present and future. History was said to march in step to the drumbeat tapped out by Lenin and Stalin.
The continuities between the despotism of Stalin and the earlier Soviet period were cardinal features of the country’s history — and historians who wrote fondly about an essential contrast between Lenin the Humanitarian Idealist and Stalin the Ogre had turned their eyes from the historical record. Stalin was Lenin’s keen pupil. But there were also contrasts between them. Stalin made choices of his own, and some were almost certainly different from those which Lenin would have favoured if he had lived longer. A cautionary note must be attached to this verdict. Lenin was unpredictable in his policies even though his underlying assumptions changed little. Yet even Lenin was unlikely to have opted for the chaotic violence of the First Five-Year Plan and agricultural collectivisation. Not that Lenin would have been permanently patient with peasants, priests, nepmen and nationalists: he had his own moments of volatility. But he had a degree of self-restraint not shared by Stalin. Lenin did not overdo the persecution of internal party dissent. Such was his supremacy in the party that he did not need to remove troublemakers with exterminatory methods. Stalin’s terror campaigns of the 1930s were excessive even by the standards of Bolshevism, and Lenin would surely have given them neither encouragement nor approval.
Yet neither Lenin nor Stalin was a wholly free agent. They were constrained by the nature of the regime which they had created, and Stalin’s actions from the late 1920s were conditioned by the critical problems arising with the NEP. Lenin and Stalin led a party hostile to market economics, political pluralism and cultural, religious and social tolerance. They had established a one-party, one-ideology state beleaguered by capitalist powers; there was a limit to the kinds of policy they would accept.16 Without dictatorship the USSR as a communist order would have fallen apart. With freedom of expression or private entrepreneurship it would have been buffeted by opposition; and had it not built up its industrial and military might it would have risked conquest by a foreign predator. The institutions and practices available to deal with such difficulties were not infinitely malleable. Hierarchical state command would have to be the guiding principle. Administrative surveillance and punitive sanctions would be necessary to enforce compliance; and recurrent recourse to mobilising campaigns, moral invocation and purges — whether peaceful or not — would be unavoidable.17
Stalin could not act alone. While leading the NEP’s destruction, he had wide support in the central and local committees of the communist party. The enthusiasm for reinforcing state control was shared in sections of the party, political police, armed forces and Komsomol in the late 1920s. But a set of objectives is not the same as a plan. Stalin had no grand plan and his supporters lacked one too. Yet he operated with basic assumptions which they held in common with him. All the same he did not simply listen to the music of his times and adjust his behaviour to its rhythms. Stalin was not just a bureaucrat. He was a man driven by ambition and ideas. The general assumptions were fashioned by him into policies conforming to his intemperate nature and despotic inclinations.
As his authority increased, the need for support from his original close associates diminished. He could always replace them if they annoyed him. He imposed political, economic and cultural policies with increasing imperturbability. The Great Terror was instigated and supervised by him. The decision to sign a pact with Nazi Germany was his. Stalin’s, too, were the methods chosen to direct the Soviet war machine. His were the choices in external and internal policy after the war. Indeed the whole architecture of the Soviet state, once it had been consolidated at the end of the 1920s, was Stalin’s work based upon Lenin’s design. Even Stalin, though, needed to restrain himself. He had to act within the framework of the communist order. He objected to the patronage networks in politics and general administration. He knew he could not trust the information reaching him from below. He criticised the lack of conscientiousness among workers and peasants. He was annoyed by the weak impact of the regime’s Marxist–Leninist propaganda. But he had to operate with the human material and institutional resources available to him. The Great Terror strengthened and secured his despotism, but it also revealed to him the dangers of campaigning for total personal control. Although his methods remained intrusive, violent and ruthless, his purposes were more realistic after 1938.
That he succeeded to this large extent flowed from his skill in forming a central team of willing, if frightened, subordinates. He also managed to promote millions of young men and women to all levels of public activity who gave him their support in return for the power and comfort they received from him. Moreover, he ruled for so many years that those youths who had been through schooling in his time were affected by the propaganda; and the victory in the Second World War strengthened this tendency. Probably only a minority in society keenly admired him. Nevertheless many silent critics respected him for his policies of welfare and patriotism: Stalin did monstrous things and yet the popular attitude towards him was not wholly negative.
But what is his position in the history of his country and the world? Without Stalin and his rule, the USSR would have remained a brittle state with a fading grip on its society. Stalin modified Leninism and its practices and attitudes just as Lenin had subjected Marxism to his peculiar adaptation. This whole process — from Marx and Engels to Lenin and through to Stalin — involved a combination of reinforcement and emasculation. Lenin had invented a cul-de-sac for communism; Stalin drove the party down it. Under Stalin, no aspect of public and private life was exempt in theory or reality from central state interference. Communists pursued, in an extreme fashion, the objectives of comprehensive modernisation — and Stalin, like all communists, claimed that his party’s version of modernity outmatched all known others. He achieved a lot: urbanisation, military strength, education and Soviet pride. His USSR could claim impressive achievements. It became a model for radical political movements — and not only communist ones — elsewhere in the world. And at a time before the Second World War when liberal- democratic government signally failed to stand effectively up to fascism, Stalin appeared to have established a plausible alternative (at least until the Non-Aggression Treaty of September 1939). If this had not been the case, he would never have gained the support necessary for him to survive and flourish.
His standing in popular opinion was a complex matter. Countless people found it possible to give approval to several basic professed aims of the regime while withholding it from others. Victory in the war, moreover, turned Stalin into the embodiment of patriotism, world power and a radiant future for the country. And such was his despotic authority that innumerable people lived their lives on the assumption that they had to accept the political structures and the official ideology. Many millions of course hated him in the 1930s and continued to detest him to the end of his days. But supporters of one kind or another certainly existed widely among people in the USSR.
Nevertheless Stalin drove the Soviet order not only down the cul-de-sac but into the wall at its end. His system of command achieved immediate subjugation at the expense of a general consensus. The terror campaigns traumatised whole generations. Most people ignored official policies and intensified engagement in practices of clientelism, localism, fraud and obstructiveness. As he himself recognised, there were limits to his power. Leninism in any case was distinctly ‘unmodern’ in many ways and Stalin magnified this among its features. The USSR in the 1930s and 1940s was governed as if always there was a single correct set of policies. Stalin treated debate from below as a danger to desirable unanimity, and he arrested and killed to secure dominion. Potential as well as overt enemies perished. The result was a maelstrom of murder which left behind fear, distrust and self-withdrawal. The primacy of state interests led to political immobilisation as Stalin’s sprint to industrial and cultural transformation reached a dead end. His regime’s patterns of thought and action ultimately precluded the dynamic, open-ended developments characteristic of liberal-democratic, capitalist countries. He had saved and consolidated the Soviet order at the expense of making it durably competitive with its main rivals.
The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, but this did not mean that it was characterised by perfect central control. Far from it. The more Stalin concentrated in his own hands power over specific areas of politics, the greater the lack of compliance he encountered in others. His USSR was a mixture of exceptional orderliness and exceptional disorderliness. So long as the chief official aims were to build up military and heavy-industrial strength the reality of the situation was disguised from him, his supporters and even his enemies. Stalin had only the dimmest awareness of the problems he had created.
Yet he was also much more complex than is widely supposed. As a politician he knew how to present himself selectively to diverse groups. Most of the world knew that he was determined, ruthless and murderous and that he chased the objective of turning the USSR into a global military and industrial power. It was no secret that he possessed skills as conspirator and bureaucrat. Paradoxically the effect of his official cult was often counter- productive. If Soviet propagandists said he was an exceptional person, critics drew the opposite conclusion and assumed he must have been a nonentity. But exceptional he surely was. He was a real leader. He was also motivated by the lust for power as well as by ideas. He was in his own way an intellectual, and his level of literary and editorial craft was impressive. About his psychological traits there will always be controversy. His policies were a mixture of calculated rationality and wild illogicality, and he reacted to individuals and to whole social categories
