had been rife since the suppression of the Kronstadt Mutiny in 1921. The campaign of arrests during the First Five- Year Plan resuscitated such tendencies. The sense that people had to choose to be either for or against the October Revolution was universal among Bolsheviks; and all of them knew that the Soviet state was beleaguered by the forces of world capitalism. Stalin and his associates were a brutal lot. But a party lacking in gentility had produced them.
His associates were not just ingratiating themselves with Stalin when they used such language. Certainly they strove to please the Boss, and several were careerists. But many of them served and respected him also because they shared many of his ideas. This was especially true of Molotov and Kaganovich. The Great Terror, while being instigated by the single-minded leadership of Joseph Stalin, was also a reflection — however distorted a reflection — of the mind-set of Bolshevism as it had been imposed on the party by the mid-1930s. The group around Stalin had its jargon and attitudes. Its members made proposals within a particular ambience. Stalin gathered further associates who were closely in line with his basic orientation. Yezhov, who started working in the Central Committee Secretariat in 1930, was a noteworthy example. Even careerist newcomers probably came to imbibe several of the basic tenets.
Yet Stalin was the moving spirit in the coterie. He was proud of his position in the USSR; and when he looked abroad, there were few individuals he regarded with admiration. Adolf Hitler was one of the few. The occasion for Stalin to express his esteem came in June 1934 when the Fuhrer ordered the German armed forces — the Wehrmacht — to arrest and kill the members of the SA. This was an act of political mass murder. The SA had been the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party in its rise to power and its leader was Hitler’s associate Ernst Rohm. When Rohm started to criticise Hitler’s collusion with the German political and economic establishment, he signed the death certificate for himself and his organisation. Stalin relished the news of the Night of the Long Knives: ‘What a great fellow! How well he pulled this off!’17 It took one to know one. But he said this in a casual chat with Mikoyan: the significance of Stalin’s remark only seemed sinister to him in retrospect. Perhaps others in the gang talked in a similar fashion. What was characteristic about Stalin is that he meant every word he said about Hitler with passionate intensity, and was willing to act in the same fashion when the opportunity arose.
The psychological and intellectual scaffolding for Stalin’s proclivities was occluded from the public. He greatly admired Lenin. But among the other objects of his admiration was Ivan the Terrible. Most educated people in the USSR would have been horrified by this. Tsar Ivan was associated with arbitrary rule and terror as well as an erratic personality. But Stalin thought differently. For years he brooded over the life and rule of the sixteenth-century tsar.
At a Kremlin reception on 8 November 1937 Stalin accused the leading oppositionists of planning the territorial disintegration of the USSR in league with Germany, Britain, France and Japan. He vowed to destroy all of them. If anyone sought to detach the smallest piece of Soviet territory, he declared, ‘he is an enemy, an accursed enemy of the state and the peoples of the USSR’. Then came the climax:18
And we will annihilate every such enemy, even if he were to be an Old Bolshevik! We will annihilate his entire clan, his family! We will mercilessly annihilate everyone who by his actions and thoughts (yes, thoughts too) assails the unity of the socialist state. For the total annihilation of all enemies, both themselves and their clan!
This was hardly Marxist in style or content. Was it perhaps a residue of Stalin’s extreme attitude to his upbringing in Georgia where, at least in the mountains, the traditions of the blood feud persisted? This cannot be the exclusive explanation. Although Georgian traditions may have encouraged him to seek revenge for any damage, they did not involve the assumption that the destruction of entire extended families was desirable.19 A more plausible influence was Stalin’s reading of early Russian history — he had long been an enthusiastic reader of R. Vipper’s biography of Ivan the Terrible.20 Dedicating himself to exterminating not only individual leaders but also their relatives, Stalin was reproducing the attitudes of Ivan the Terrible.
He continued to ponder the springs of human endeavour. He put one trait of character above all others: ‘Lenin was right to say that a person lacking the courage to act at the crucial moment cannot be a true Bolshevik leader.’21 He wrote this in a letter to Kaganovich in 1932. Two years later a similar sentiment surfaced in one of his brief messages to his mother: ‘The children send their respects to you. Since Nadya’s death, of course, my personal life is heavy. But so be it: a courageous person must always stay courageous.’22 Probably Stalin was expressing himself sincerely. (Perhaps he was also trying to convince himself that he was valorous.) All acquaintances were impressed by his will power. Even the wilful Kaganovich was bendable to his purposes. But this was not enough for Stalin, who wanted to appear not merely strong-minded but also courageous. Such a virtue was to remain a dominant theme in his thinking; he was to emphasise the need for it in the very last speech he improvised to the Central Committee in October 1952, just months before his death.23
His style of thinking can be glimpsed in the jottings he made in the 1939 edition of Lenin’s
NB! If a person is:
1) strong (spiritually),
2) active,
3) intelligent (or capable),
then he is a
1) weakness,
2) laziness,
3) stupidity
are the only thing [
Of all the reactions to Lenin’s
Stalin, communing with himself, used the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice. Human endeavour apparently could be encapsulated only in such terms: evidently Marxism would not fulfil this task by itself. Stalin was reverting to the discourse of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary; his early schooling had left an indelible imprint.
The content of the commentary, though, is deeply unChristian; it is reminiscent more of Niccolo Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche than of the Bible. For Stalin the criterion of goodness was not morality but effectiveness. Individuals were to be judged for their inner strength, assiduity, practicality and cleverness. Any blemishes on the escutcheon of a career were forgivable if accompanied by substantial achievements in the service of the cause. Furthermore, the fact that the characteristics despised by Stalin were weakness, idleness and stupidity is revealing. Stalin the mass killer slept easily at night. Not for him the uneasiness of wearing the crown of state: he adored power. But he was also self-demanding. He wanted action and wished it to be based on sound judgement, and he could not abide sloth and lack of intelligent commitment. He was offering himself the plaudits of history. Judging his own long and bloody career in revolutionary politics, he found nothing to reproach. But like a sixteenth-century Calvinist he felt the need to keep asking himself whether he really met his own exacting standards. Gruff and blunt as he was among his associates, he had episodes of introspection. But he did not torment himself. The very process of laying out the criteria of judgement apparently allayed such doubts as he had about himself. He grew into his own myth.
The fact that he jotted down his remarks in a copy of a work by Lenin may not have been an accident: Stalin measured himself by Lenin’s standard.27 The influence was not merely ideological. Stalin had seen Lenin at close quarters and abidingly respected and even revered his memory. But the language used in the jottings was not especially Leninist. Possibly Stalin’s style of amoralism came not from Marxism– Leninism but from a much
