Stalins Russia: An Historical Reconsideration

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^TAL/N'S RUSS/A

A volume in the Historical Reconsiderations Series Herman Ausubel,

General Editor

^TALIN’S Russia AN HISTORICAL RECONSIDERATION

Francis B. Randall

THE FREE PRESS, New York COLLIER-MACMILLAN LIMITED,

London

Copyright © 1965 by The Free Press A DIVISION OF THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo¬ copying, recording, or by ajjy information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Collier-Macmillan Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Ontario

DESIGNED BY FRANK E. COMPARATO

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-18559

Frontispiece: U. S. Army Signal Corps

Geroid Tanquary Robinson

and Frank Tannenbaum

CONTENTS

1. The Problems, 1 2. The Man, 14 3. The Rise, 39 4. The World-View, 64 5'. The Power, 96 6. The Terror, 121 7. The Villages, 144 8. The Cities, 171 9. The Minorities, 203 10. The Culture, 234 11. The War, 259 12. The End, 286 Notes, 295 Bibliography, 311 Index, 319

V

I. THE PROBLEMS

j

Q

TALIN was probably the most important man who ever lived. For thirty years he was master of the

dozens of peoples and millions of human beings who live in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He constructed a system of rule as absolute as any in history and far more total in its scope than any save that of his imitators. He transformed the USSR in one generation from a largely agrarian country into the largest industrial state in the Old World. This was probably his most important achievement, for industrialization is the most fundamental revolution in human affairs since the domestication of plants and animals. Stalin presided personally over most of the crucial stages in the industrialization of a major society. No one else, not even Mao Tse-tung, can make quite that claim. Stalin

was

the first

to industrialize

a

country

by

that

thoroughly statist means which he and most others called “socialism”—thereby setting a pattern for much of the world.

1

2

STALIN'S RUSSIA

He fought and had the chief share in winning what we hope will remain the most horrible war in history, and he emerged with the greatest gains. He conquered half of Europe for Communism, provided the inspiration if not the means for the Communist victory in

China, and directed formidable

Communist movements in dozens of countries. In much of Eurasia he was directly responsible for interrupting the de¬ velopment of the

intellectual and

cultural

life

of modern

Europe and America, and for constructing instead a very dif¬ ferent

“socialist”

culture.

Quite

aside

from

the

wars,

he

killed several million people. Stalin will probably go down in history as one of the two or three worst men wTho ever lived. No one could have predicted such a career. His achieve¬ ments were staggering, even when overshadowed by the super¬ ficially more spectacular career of Hitler. When he died he had for years been officially described as “the genius leader of the peoples of humanity” by all Communists save the Trotskyite and Titoist heretics. From this pedestal he has been literally and figuratively toppled by his successors, notably Khrushchev. In Stalin's last years many Westerners, especially in America, regarded him as an archfiend morally equivalent to Hitler. We say this less often nowadays, probably because we now know that he was not to start World War III, and that parts of his system could be dismantled. In the next fewT decades he may well fall even lower in the official and un¬ official esteem of his countrymen. It is difficult to see how he can rise in the estimation of the West. Among Communists the evaluation of Stalin is at least as partisan and emotional an issue as it was when he lived. The Soviet government expresses a more balanced view of him now than fifteen years ago, but scarcely a more dispassionate one. In the West, however, he really is receding into the past —very slowly, but very surely. As long as there are men alive who

witnessed what

Stalin

did,

his

career will remain a

THE PROBLEMS

3

touchy subject for historians to venture on. But now, more than a dozen years after his death, when a number of his¬ torians have ventured there safely, it is clear that they can remain true at once to their craft and humanity, that they can discuss even Stalin’s Russia dispassionately but not disengagedly, without prejudice but not without judgment. We have reached the time when we can reconsider Stalin’s Russia. Anyone who writes on Stalin’s Russia must tackle a number of knotty historical problems. The first problem must be the justification for yet another book on the subject. Tons of worthless material have been produced but several thousand pounds of good and even excellent books have also appeared. Valuable lives of Stalin and histories of one or another aspect of his Russia have been published in many Western languages since at least 1930. Since the end of World War II the serious presses of the West have given us hundreds of books which in sum tell us more than most of us wish to know about Stalin’s Russia. A generation ago Churchill said that Russia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But now Harry Schwartz of The New York Times can properly correct him by saying that Russia is a land of many secrets but few enigmas.1 We can hardly desire more thoroughly researched, more com¬ prehensive, and more intelligent books than How Russia is Ruled by Professor Merle Fainsod of Harvard University,2 or The Communist Party of the Soviet Union by Professor Leon¬ ard Schapiro of the University of London.'1 “Reconsideration” in the subtitle of this study does not mean the author claims to be opening a new era in Russian studies. It certainly does not mean a “rehabilitation” of Stalin. The author has had no private access to the Kremlin archives, and cannot claim to present a large mass of new and un¬ published material. A relatively short book such as this cannot be a full scale biography of Stalin, or a history of his Russia, or an analysis of his system. It is a discussion, in topical rather

STALIN'S RUSSIA

4

than chronological order, of a number of problems concern¬ ing Stalin and his Russia which the author has found most important and controversial in fifteen years of study, teaching, and writing on the subject. It is not intended to be deliberately provocative, but where

the author holds a

disputed

or a

minority position he wishes to state it strongly. The most important problem, and probably the knottiest, is the question of how much Stalin mattered, personally. The major thesis of this work is that Stalin’s Russia really was Stalin’s Russia. He did not rule all things directly by his will, like Jehovah of old, but it will be maintained here that most of the important events and changes in Russia for thirty years took place because he wanted them to, and in roughly the form that he wanted them. Of course he was limited by out¬ side forces such as Hitler, by his many miscalculations, and by the dead weight of the resistant human material he was manipulating—but less so than any other man in history. To an amazing extent the answer to many historical questions— why was a given army moved? a given factory built? a given novel published?—is that it was the will of Stalin. The real historical question, in surprisingly many cases, is why Stalin came to will it. Readers may wonder who doubts this thesis, since it is sim¬ ple enough and is explicitly or tacitly subscribed to by the bulk of the daily press as well as the man in the street. But that is just the point: This emphasis on Stalin’s efficacious personal dictatorship is disputed by a majority of the his¬ torians and other social scientists of the Western world pre¬ cisely because it seems too simple. During the first twenty years of Stalin’s rule (and to this day in Europe)

the very numerous Marxist and Marxist-

influenced observers were reluctant to think that one man could accomplish so much unless he were the expression of “broader

and

“deeper”

economic “forces.”

Since

World

THE PROBLEMS

5

War II economic interpretations have become less obtrusive, especially in America, but they have been succeeded in some degree by emphases on group politics, lobbies and pressure groups,

choices

leadership,

between limited

and bureaucratic

cellent works

as

The

alternatives,

circumscriptions.

Governmental Process

dilemmas

of

In such

ex¬

by

Professor

David Truman of Columbia University, it has been shown that a Western leader like the American President has only a limited chance to make a number of particular choices be¬ tween alternatives presented and circumscribed by many over¬ lapping pressure groups, and that he cannot really secure the passage of a bill to relieve unemployment, for instance, on his own, much less eliminate that problem. No one claims that Stalin was as limited as an American President. But analogies are drawn. One scholar or another has referred to Stalin as “a prisoner” of his ideology, or of the Communist Party, or of his bureaucracy, or of his system of terror, or of the process of industrialization, or of geo¬ graphical conditions. Some scholars see Stalin as the victim of “dilemmas of power” or of “irreversible processes.”4 In con¬ trast to all this, the comparative freedom and broad scope of Stalin’s decisions will be emphasized here. Many important interpretive questions can be subsumed under this overriding point. Did Stalin do what he did be¬ cause of some paranoid neurosis or psychosis? Clearly he was paranoid to some degree, and it is not unimportant to ask how paranoid he was, even if we cannot tell. Although paranoia is not an outside force like the Russian climate or the Com¬ munist bureaucracy, Stalin’s alleged victimization by it has analogies to his alleged victimization by other things. Was Stalin a prisoner of Marxist-Leninist ideology? Clearly he was a “true believer” if ever there was one. Those who dealt with Stalin under the impression that his Communism was meaningless verbiage or a smokescreen for some kind of

6

STALIN'S RUSSIA

rational interest often suffered disaster. But there was a great difference between the position of a Communist ideologist living within reach of Stalin’s heavy corrective hand, and that of Stalin himself, who claimed and exercised the right to adapt Marx and Lenin to changing circumstances, and who could remember them and interpret their writings as his own psyche required. Was Stalin merely the bureaucrat-in-chief during an age of inevitable

bureaucratization,

which

must

afflict

all

stable

modern states? Was his obsession with Communism merely the delusive ideological covering under which, unrealized by him, a particular party-organized variety of all-encompassing bureaucracy was growing? Was he simply the man who hap¬ pened to preside over an irreversible process of bureaucratic industrialization, through which every “new country” in the world must pass? Stalin found it beyond his powers to make his bureaucracy honest and efficient. But does this mean that he could not have checked its growth? Or that he could not have brought about a very different kind of industrialization? Perhaps the other new countries that try to industrialize on the bureaucratic Russian pattern do so in conscious imitation of Russian success, not out of deterministic repetition. Was Stalin’s entire rule destined to be a bloody terror in consequence of Lenin’s f^tal decision to seize and hold power by force and violence in a country that did not support him? This was a favorite judgment of many of the non-Bolshevik Russian revolutionaries, notably Viktor Chernov and Alexan¬ der Kerensky.'' In most forms this theory preserves a moment of freedom for Lenin, although not for Stalin. It is highly possible that the horrors of the Russian Civil War and the Cheka were the results of Lenin’s decision to seize power, but it seems difficult to insist that, say, the great purges were the inevitable outcome of what Lenin had done twenty years before.

THE PROBLEMS

7

Did Stalin have to do what any ruler of the Russian land mass would have had to do during the same period, when faced with the same “geopolitical realities”? Doubtless any Tsar or democratic Russian leader would have attempted to keep the country unified, and to build up its economy and military strength. But to such an extent? And would every other Russian leader have done what Stalin did to bring Hitler to power, and to help him launch World War II? These are all complex questions, and they are often raised with suitable complexity. The oppositions are never absolute. No serious scholar holds that Stalin was completely the tool of deterministic forces any more than the author holds that Stalin was a totally free agent. It is usually a matter of com¬ parative emphasis, and it is often a matter of semantics. But a serious issue remains between those who make such remarks as, “Stalin had to engage in a rapid program of industrializa¬ tion involving heavy human costs,” or “Stalin was compelled to ally himself with Hitler in 1939,” and those who do not. It is fair and meaningful to ask for the identity of those who would have removed Stalin from office in 1929, had he seri¬ ously wanted to pursue a slow and mild program of indus¬ trialization. And

if Stalin had insisted on killing no one

during the late 1930’s, just who or what would have forced him to murder hundreds of thousands of people? And if Stalin had refused to sign a pact with Hitler, just who would have twisted his arm until he motioned Molotov to take up his pen? And if Stalin had desired to adopt a different mili¬ tary strategy during World War II, or even to make a dis¬ advantageous peace, just what cabal of generals or anyone else would have deposed him and fought precisely the war that happened? Far more rides on these questions than the interpretation of Stalin’s rule over Russia. In some ways they raise the old problem of determinism and free will in human history. When

8

STALIN'S RUSSIA

those who tend to minimize Stalin’s personal role are not determinists, they are often supporters of the view that a multi¬ tude

of

chaotic,

contingent,

mutually

contradictory

petty

chances and human wills defeat large scale, rational, indi¬ vidual human effort. In most of history the latter is certainly the case. But in all of history? It takes only one negative instance to overthrow a general rule. At first glance it seems that Stalin, more than any other man, might have “made his¬ tory.” If scholars can show that he did not, then it will be hard to think that anyone can. In a paradoxical way, the cause of human freedom rides with Stalin: if he was merely a creature of circumstance then in a way it is a defeat for us all. But if Stalin really was the mighty tyrant who murdered millions who might otherwise have survived, and who moved mountains that might otherwise have stood in place, then some day someone else may do as much in a better cause. In this way, at least, Stalin was a triumph of the human spirit. Another whole set of knotty problems derives from a ques¬ tion that antedates Stalin’s Russia: Can socialism work? If one merely asks the question in its original form, then Stalin showed that a government can indeed run an economy and produce goods without grinding to an absolute halt. The more important variation of the question is the one asked in all the new countries of the worl