Quest for Power Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations

History 104--Quest for Power Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations

I. Stalin: Breaker of Nations a. the risk that all biographers run is that of developing a personal affinity for their subject; it is for this reason that biographies often become little more than poorly camou- flaged justifications and apologies for their subjects; that is most assuredly not the case with Robert Conquest, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; he has made a career targeting the figure of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin; in 1968's The Great Terror (on the purges) and 1986's Harvest of Sorrow (on collectivization), and now in Sta- lin: Breaker of Nations (a single-volume biography, 1991), Conquest demolishes the myths that had grown up around Stalin, both those generated at the time (of his genius, or of his success in industrializing Russia) and those that arose later, largely among western academics (that there was actually widespread popular support, even enthusiasm, for Stalin's regime); Conquest will have none of it; in the 1980's, liberal western scholars often accused him of being one-sided towards Stalin; no historical figure could have been that bad, they said; certainly, Conquest is an unapologetic conservative; and then came the unthinkable: the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s; suddenly, Russian scholars were confirming Conquest's views chapter and verse; it was a rare case of scholarly vindication in one's own lifetime;

b. we learn early where Conquest stands; it starts with the dedication (Better if he hadn't been born, ix), and quickly picks up momentum; the first page of the Introduction, eg, offers us the following evaluation (remember, this was written during the collapse of the USSR):

Few men in history have had such long and devastating effects--and not only on their own countries but on the world as a whole. For two generations, Sta- lin's heritage has lain heavy on the chests of a dozen nations, and the threat of it has loomed over all the others, in the fearful possibility of nuclear war. Stalin, to whom the aura of death clings so strongly, is himself only now ceas- ing to live on in the system he created. When he died in 1953 he left a mon- ster whose own death throes are not yet over, more than a generation later (xiii).

Indeed, it is only now, Conquest writes, that Soviet writers had started to come to grips with, to exorcise Stalin (xiii); he was a vast, dark figure, looming over the century, and he built a system completely based on falsehood and delusion (xv); he was something in- human, a large and crude clay-like figure, a golem (xvii); beyond the sheer number of people he killed--numbering in the millions--there was the massive deception (xvi) he perpe- trated, about himself as well as the society he had created; it is perhaps fitting that no less an authority than Adolf Hitler called him a beast, although he added admiringly that he's a beast on a grand scale; on another occasion, he declared his unconditional respect for Sta- lin: In his own way, Hitler chuckled, he is a hell of a fellow (xvi); interestingly enough, Stalin returned the compliment (Hitler, what a lad!, 176);

1 c. while the point of view is expressed strongly, this is also a carefully drawn portrait by a master historian; Conquest deals carefully with the evidence, especially in the early pe- riod of Stalin's life when the facts are exceedingly hard to pin down; while it is customary to paint Stalin as an outsider, a Georgian instead of a Russian, Conquest goes deeper; his Stalin, in fact, is neither fully Georgian nor fully Russian (2), and thus a man without home, iden- tity or allegiance; Papa used to be a Georgian once, his son once said, 1; as with his nation- ality, so with the virtually every aspect of his early life: even the simplest facts are contested (see the account of his birth in1879, or was it 1880 or 1881?, 2-3); some say young Iosif Vis- sarionovich Dzugashvili he hated his hard-drinking father and loved his mother; others just the opposite (10, 11); there is not much to say about little Soso (the Georgian diminutive for Josef); he wasn't a great student (11-12), although he enjoyed reading adventure stories; tales of the daring Georgian outlaw Koba thrilled him, and he would take the name as his revolutionary alias; the name Stalin ("Steel,") would be a still-later adoption (51-52), in keeping with the Bolshevik preference for macho monikers, like Kamenev (Stone) and Molotov (Hammer); certainly Conquest does attribute importance to the most striking feature of Sta- lin's youth: the future mass murderer attended an Orthodox Seminary, studying for the priesthood--which might be even weirder than the thought of Adolf Hitler as an artist; here he encountered an atmosphere of constant petty espionage (19), as the fathers checked up constantly on what the boys were reading; this may well have had an impact on Stalin, although Conquest will not tolerate it as any sort of excuse (19-20);

d. Conquest also spends a great deal of time on Marxism; this is not simply a life story, but the story of the interface of a life and its governing ideology; for the failed semi- narian, it became not just an idea, but the central faith of his life (xiv-xv, 22), one that seemed to offer hope for modernizing backwards Russia, something that was new, fresh, and exciting (24); it certainly grabbed Stalin, and we can say that he was a professional Marxist revolutionary by the age of 20 (27-28); these were his years in which underground activity alternated with repeated stays in prison (or exile) and escapes; this was the price one paid for the new faith:

--arrest in Apr 1902 (29), and eighteen months in prison; --arrest in July 1903 (29), and three years' exile in Irkutsk, escape in 1904 (30); --arrest in March 1908, imprisoned in Baku (44), exiled to Vologda (45), escaped; --arrest in June 1910, six months in prison (46), released --arrest in Dec 1911, re-exiled for three years to Vologda (47), escapes (50); --arrest in May 1912 (51), exiled to Siberia, escapes; --arrest in March 1913 (54);

His rise in the Bolsheviks party was not rapid; he was stolid, unremarkable; he effected the blunt tone of a worker, not the fancy airs of an intellectual or theoretician (letter to Lenin, 46- 47); even then, he was not regarded as completely trustworthy, and there were those who thought he might have been working for the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, although Conquest denies it (see the police raid on the Avalbar printing press, 38-39); Lenin seems to have put him on the party's Central Committee largely for his ruthlessness (48); but he played almost no role at all in the central drama of the time: the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in1917 (69, 70); he was not, Conquest argues, at his best in a crisis, as the rest of

2 his career would prove; his appointment to a peripheral post, Commissar of Nationalities, was largely due to his non-Russian background (71); he did participate in the civil War, but hardly to the degree that the later falsified histories would allege; essentially his role con- sisted of discovering "plots" and executing large masses of people (Death solves all prob- lems, he once said, no man, no problem, 79, 85); here we also find the roots of his later ri- valry with Trotsky, the genuine hero of the Red side; Stalin's egotism was monstrous, and he was frequently insubordinate, but he did get a reputation as someone who got things done ruthlessly (88, 89-90, 91), a man whose massive will power (John Reed, 96) made up for his intellectual shortcomings;

e. it was Lenin's early and untimely death that propelled Stalin into the center of the Soviet system; before his incapacitating strokes, Lenin had recognized Stalin's flaws: his rudeness, crudity, disloyalty, capriciousness, bullying; in his so-called Testament, Lenin actually urged that Stalin be removed from his post of General Secretary (100, 101)--and then he died; Stlina was able to squash the Testament, preventing it from becoming public, but he knew what a close shave it had been (He shat on me and he shat on himself, 111); he then presided over Lenin's funeral, a moment of high drama, in which his oration, with its liturgi- cal invocation and repetition, betrayed his seminary background (109-110); in general, however, Conquest refrains from too much detail about the succession struggle, save to remark that it was not conducted among politicians in the ordinary sense (112); rather, these were ideologues and true believers, interested not in the interest of the country, but their dogma; in this atmosphere, Stalin was able to benefit from an increasingly unsophisticated new party cadre often drawn from uneducated proletarians and owing him their careers (113), a solid, hard, unsubtle, half-educated bunch (125); in a sense, his more sophisticated, theoretically smart opponents didn't stand a chance; already there was the start of the cult of personality (seethe marvelous passage on town names, 130); still, Stalin's bureaucratic triumph went to unnecessarily brutal lengths: of the seven man Politburo elected in June 1924, six would be killed by the lone survivor (133);

f. Conquest is at his best in describing the horrors of collectivization and the purges, subjects on which he is the scholarly world's recognized expert; eschewing complicated theo- retical approaches, Conquest sees it as nothing less than a new civil war (145), this one waged by Stalin against a despised portion of the population, one which did not really fit into Marxist dogma: the peasantry, the dark people who were a drag on the modernization of the country (142-143); first, an entire class structure of poor peasants, middle peasants and kulaks, with the last named supposedly exploiting the first two, a structure labeled by Con- quest as totally fallacious (143-144); this was the excuse for liquidating the kulaks (158) and collectivizing agriculture, slogans that hid one of the greatest holocausts of the century (158-159, 159-160), in which millions of people would be deliberately starved to death by their own government (163-64, a murder famine, 164); but it might as well have happened on the moon for all the west noticed--due in no small part to credulous western visitors who arrived, were given carefully guided tours of model collective farms, then went home con- vinced that Stalin's Russia was a new utopia (G. B. Shaw, 183-84; H.G. Wells, 184, Julian Huxley, 185, and many more);

3 g. collectivization merged smoothly into the purges; in fact, Conquest sees both as of a piece, stemming from Stalin's need to heat up the damped down fires of class war in the cities as well as the countryside (152); this was the age of the show trial, in which horrible tortures were used to extract confessions from innocent victims typically accused of plotting with Trotsky, or sabotaging the economy (wrecking), or both; see the account of the Shak- hty trial, 152-54; it was an era of madness, in which the death penalty was extended down to 12 years olds, and communists abroad found themselves justifying it (196), in which Stalin once signed 3,000 death warrants on a single day (Dec 12th, 1937, p. 203)--and then went to the movies; in which an all-powerful Stalin could actually threaten Lenin's widow that if she did not conform, the party could nominate another widow for Lenin (196); in which Sta- lin could pose with a little girl one day, a tableau turned into a stature, then have her father shot (204); in which Stalin could order the murder of Sergei Kirov (179), then arrest 100,000s of people on charge of complicity in Kirov's murder (181); in which children who informed on their parents could be hailed as heroes (Pavel Morozov, 11, 167); no government has ever done this to its own people (206); and the more killing, the more extreme became the adulation of Stalin (212-13);

h. compared to the 1930s, even World War II seems almost tame; the German inva- sion, which shredded Soviet defenses and inflicted some 4 million casualties on the Red Army in the opening months, was a crisis which was largely his [Stalin's] own fault (236); he had not only helped the Nazis come to power (173), he then signed a pact with Germany that allowed Hitler that to start the war in 1939 by attacking Poland (221), and he supplied Ger- many with a large portion of the raw materials it needed in the war's first two years (224), all the while simultaneously executed murdering the majority of the Red Army's higher officer corps; this incredibly short-sighted policy came home to roost in the disaster of 1941 (236); even he thought the end had come (Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up, 239); the Germans would eventually be halted, no thanks to Stalin, but thanks to the mud, the snow, and the patriotism of the Russian people; Stalin would also benefit from the amateurish foreign policy of the allies, especially what Conquest sees as the idiocy of Pres. Franklin Roosevelt (245), who felt that he could get at Stalin (262), that there was a sympathetic quality in his nature (262): I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return…, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace (245);

i. victory in 1945 saw Stalin at the height of his powers: ruler not just of the Soviet Union, but of a thick belt of buffer states in E. Europe--the breaker of nations; even now, however, the terror never stopped; as Nikita Khrushchev observed, Stalin was now not quite right in the head (269); the horrors, in fact, increased (270):

The labour camps received a flood of new inmates. Those who had served their time and been released were soon to be rearrested. The maximum sentence was increased from ten years to twenty-five. A new category of "strict regime" labour camps came in where the inmates served in chains and without blankets. The exiled nations, but also the mass of individual exiles, were for- bidden to return on pain of as twenty-year sentence. In the secret-police labo- ratories research was to go on into poisons, mind-bending drugs, assassination

4 weapons. Important prisoners were to be tortured with red-hot irons in special trains circling Moscow (270).

And now a new hatred made its appearance, as Stalin's regime became more and more openly anti-Semitic (290-91, 304-5); the Doctor's Plot (306-7), the Crimean Affair (307), and the Slansky plotters trial (308-9) all purported to unmask a Jewish conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet Union; all those arrested would have been shot if Stalin had not died when he did;

j. was Stalin insane? perhaps, but he was definitely cruel (318); if there is one thing that angers Conquest, it is the tendency of left-leaning modern academics to explain away Stalin's crimes, or even to excuse and justify them (see his sarcastic explanation of who still remains a Marxist, 23); he lashes out at western professors who speak of "popular enthusiasm" for this bestial regime (165, 167, 196; 324); in fact, Stalin built a regime based entirely on lies (see the politicized argument over something as simple as the Soviet Union's population, 324); Soviet citizens were forced to parrot (and perhaps even believe) these lies--but there were many dupes in the west who did so willingly (the evil of stupidity, 321);