ROBERT V. DANIELS (Burlington, VT, U.S.A.) WAS STALIN REALLY A COMMUNIST? Was Stalin really a Communist? At first glance the question may seem absurd. Yet if one asks whether the Grand Inquisitor was really a Christian, the issue is immediately apparent. As with the Grand Inquisitor, the matter is not just semantic hair- splitting over the degree of difference that may have distinguished Stalin from the progenitors of the Bolshevik movement with which he identified himself. Rather, it is the question whether the evil of Stalin and Stalinism flowed inexorably out of the essence of that movement, or whether it was a abetted intractable injected by megalomanic personality who, by ' circumstances, usurped the movement and turned it in an essentially different direction, albeit still dressed out in the language of its original nature. The problem of the man or the system has long lain at the heart of Western historiography of Stalin and Stalinism. With the revolution against Stalinism that culminated in 1991, the question has now acquired direct practical significance. What was the real nature of the regime that the Russians and the other nations under Communist Party rule were . actually rebelling against ? And what options and guidelines does the answer to this question leave the new successor governments as they try to work out an alternative destiny? Anti-Communists of the Left, and like them the proponents of nerestroika in the Soviet Union, have always seen Stalinism as a criminal betrayal of the Revolution and of Marxist ideals, already compromised by the excesses of Leninism. In this view, Stalin was able to seize the levers of power that had been set up by the Bolshevik Revolution and use them to alter the whole natural course of history in his own cruel and menda- cious image. His attachment to Marxism and even to socialism then only served to camouflage the establishment of a new oriental despotism. The contrary argument, that Stalin was basically a product of the Communist movement, can take either of two distinct approaches. One approach-the theory most favored now in Russia as well as outside-. is that Stalinism was inherent in the evils of Leninism, or Marxism, or of the Enlightenment-stop where you will. This interpretation actually implies a sort of philosophical determinism, contending that Stalin and Stalinism stemmed logically from utopian theories based on the con- 170 scious reconstruction of the world. In the words of the Russian political scientist Alexander Tsipko, "Socialism is precisely that historically unique society that is consciously built, on the basis of a theoretical plan .... The defects in the structure are not just due to Stalin's departure from the original blueprint for socialism ..., they also represent departures of theoretical thinking from life."' The lesson drawn by the adherents of this view is that any attempt to tinker with the status quo, any heretical notion of social engineering, will inevitably lead down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. The other approach linking Stalinism and the Bolshevik movement is less subjectivist than either the .evil genius theory or the ideological theory. In this view, Stalinism emerged from the natural working out of the process of revolution, against the background of Russian backward- ness, whether or not that outcome bore any relationship to the conscious intentions of the people who labored to set the process in motion. Stalin was thus a sort of Bonaparte or Hitler d la r-usse, a despot ready, willing and able to exploit the possibilities that the waning of real revolutionary spirit offered him. A realistic assessment of Stalin's place in history demands a combi- nation of these diverse approaches. The revolutionary process, leading from the collapse of the old regime through ineffective liberalism to radical fanaticism, and then to retrenchment and the despotic synthesis of the new with the old, has a certain objective character. It represents the pressure of probability in social dynamics, beyond the control of any individual and usually beyond the ken of those who think they are steering the process. Napoleon himself said, "A revolution can neither be made nor stopped."2 But individual leaders, their passions and ideas, their tactical judgments, can have a great impact on the actual shape of the revolutionary process in a given country. Lenin and Leninism certainly contributed to the harshness of the revolution in Russia. Even more distinctively, they contributed to the ability of the Communist Party organization and Communist ideology, steeled in the extremist phase of the revolution, to hold sway through the succeeding phases of Thermidorean reaction and postrevolutionary or "Bonapartist" dictator- ship. Stalin entered this picture as a decisive personality after Lenin's demise by taking command of the key instrument of pow£r, the Gommu- nist Party apparatus (like Bonaparte with the revolutionary army) and thereby put himself in the position of a postrevolutionary dictator. This 1. A(cksandr Tsipko,"Korni stalinizma," Naukai zhizn', no. 1 1 (1988). , 2. J.Christopher Herold, ed., The Mind of Napoleon: ASe!ectio>i fromhis Writtenand Spoken Words(New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press. 1956),p. 64. .