Preface: the last days of Stalin

Josef Stalin, 1st secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, undisputed head of the Soviet Empire, a tyrant who in the minds of many Western scholars and journalists ranks in infamy with Hitler, died an agonizing death in March 1953. As in Hitler's case, his inner circle had grown smaller over the years, as he slaughtered all of his potential opponents.

He had been ailing for some time, and had even given up smoking the previous year on the advice of his physicians. As he found his smokefree regimen unpleasant and his health continued to deteriorate anyway, he ordered the arrest of his physicians.

Stalin did not have time to liquidate them, as he had so many of those who surrounded him in the past. On 1 March he had a stroke, and his household staff found him writhing on his dining room floor, unable to speak, his hands trembling. Lavrenty Beria, his cold and calculating chief of the secret police, was summoned. Beria postponed calling physicians while he rifled Stalin's safe, to which he alone knew the combination. By the time doctors were called the next morning, Stalin's end was near. The doctors applied leeches, while Stalin's son Vasily shouted in a drunken rage that they were murdering his father. It was not a milieu of mutual trust! Stalin died on 5 March. Beria himself was executed a year later. Meanwhile a grateful nation mourned Stalin's passing. In a solemn ceremony, he was placed inside the public mausoleum alongside Lenin, father of the Bolshevik Revolution, where all might view his mortal remains.

Stalin's background

Stalin had always been a secretive man. He was born in Georgia in the Caucasus. As a young man he studied in the seminary for the priesthood, but left to become involved in the activities of the Bolshevik party. He made his way into the party's inner circle during the era of the Russian Revolution. Lenin had come to value him as a tough, indeed ruthless party militant who could be relied on to do unpleasant tasks.

Lenin did not bequeath leadership of the party to Stalin. Stalin was an activist, no intellectual rival for Leon Trotsky, the brilliant party strategist, well-educated son of the landed gentry and commissar of the Red Army during the civil war of 1918-20. But Stalin was cunning and he knew how to use power to get his way. Upon Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin plotted the elimination of all of his rivals, particularly Trotsky.

Whither communism?

Trotsky and Stalin epitomized the two sides of the debate on what the goal of the communist movement should be.

Stalin's legacy

Long after Stalin's terrorism had been repudiated by his successors, American perceptions of Soviet communism continued to be shaped by the memory of Stalin's atrocities. Ronald Reagan in the 1980s would still characterize the USSR as the "evil empire." But among Russians Stalin had, and continues to have, his admirers. He was the head of state who enabled the USSR to fight and win the "great patriotic war" against fascism.

As a counterpoint to Stalin, the man of the hour of 1945, I would mention a Communist party statesman who sought to end the Stalinist legacy within the party and the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev was the man of the hour of 1989. He too had tied his destiny to the communist party, and he too had ascended through its ranks to become communist party first secretary in the mid-1980s. Gorbachev was committed to communism and loyal to the party. But he saw the need to end the aura of secrecy and repression that surrounded it. He called for "glastnost," a new openness, and "peristroika," the restructuring of the Soviet economy.

Gorbachev hoped that the new mood might spread and the new policy succeed without altering the role of the party therein. In seeking to lift repression a little, however, he opened the way to the collapse of the communist system. Gorbachev was turned out of office in the democratic elections that he had inaugurated. The new regime permitted the dissolution of its Soviet empire and as a nation embarked on a course of privatization and democratization that in the 1990s has not worked all that well.

The deep structure of the history of the Soviet Union

Looking at the history of the Russians over the long run, one can see that they had little to build on to permit the emergence of a functional democracy and a free economy. I would mention a few fundamental characteristics that weighed heavy on the fate of Russia both before and after 1989, and help us to understand why change has been so difficult:

1) autocracy. Until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Russia was ruled by absolute monarchs known as tsars. Under their autocratic rule, Russia had a reputation as the most reactionary regime in Europe in the modern age. Serfdom was abolished only in 1863; and even limited parliamentary government was introduced only in 1905. The extreme left turned to terrorist tactics in the late 19th century because there was no legitimate alternative.

The move from extreme reaction to extreme radicalism in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was a wild gyration from one kind of authoritarian regime to another. In other words, Russia emerged precipitously from the traditional into the modern world. It was still largely a nation of landlords and peasants; agriculture the mainstay of its economy. Its middle class was diminutive in comparison with the West; liberalism, the dominant ideology in the West, had little following, and Russia had almost no experience with parliamentary government.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Soviet state in the contemporary world bears many of the traits of the tsarist regime that it had overthrown:

Russia lacked an educated middle-class, the mainstay of liberal democracy in the West. What it did have was an intelligentsia, a circle of intellectuals without class attachments, and hence free to speculate in grandiose terms about Russia's destiny. They divided into two camps over where that destiny lay:

Westernizers <----> Slavophiles

Westernizers argued that Russia, as an economically and culturally backward nation, should emulate the model of modernization developed in the West:

the point is that if Soviet communism was marxist in an official and doctrinaire way, it was also nationalistic in its passions.

3) the Russian communist party. The Communist party consolidated the Russian revolution of 1917. It was not a mass party, as were the socialist parties in the West by that time, but a sect of revolutionary militants, many of whom had spent years in exile. The party had two wings: Mensheviks (majority men) and Bolsheviks (minority men). The Mensheviks wished to expand and democratize the party; the Bolsheviks favored authoritarian direction by a revolutionary elite.

The Bolsheviks succeeded in wresting control of the Revolution and founded the USSR. This meant that the new regime would acquire a more authoritarian character than it might have otherwise. If the Soviet regime was committed to Marxism, it was an authoritarian version that Marx never envisioned.

Here is the model of Soviet politics. Note the parallel structure of party and government:

Politburo Council of Ministers

Central Committee Presidium of the Supreme Soviet

Supreme Soviet

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Soviet of the Union/Soviet of the Nationalities
 
 

party members: in 1977, 16 million in a population of 153 million. Of these some 100,000 had some local power; only a few hundred had power at the national level.

4) the role of agriculture in the Soviet economy. Russia in the 20th century has undergone an extraordinary economic modernization. Stalin and his successors favored rapid industrialization, and the emphasis upon heavy industry and urbanization helped to reshape the Russian economy. But agriculture continued to play a major role. One major project of Soviet leaders was large-scale collectivization of farms, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

5) Soviet industrialization. favored heavy industry (armaments, factories, transport) at the expense of the production of consumer goods. As a consequence, the deficient quality of consumer products was an ongoing complaint of people living in the Soviet Union and its eastern bloc partners. People were obliged to shop in state-run stores, where there was little incentive to please or even serve the public. These stores were notorious for their high prices, short supplies, and indifferent clerks. The Communist Party created a special chain of better provisioned stores to serve party members and their families.

The dearth of consumer goods in the East contrasted dramatically with their abundance in the West, and accounts for the longing among people living under communism for material acquisitions that were commonplace in the West.

6) the nationalities question. The USSR was an ethnically and religiously diverse federation. It included some 21 republics, all of which had their own cultural identity and many of which were non-slav and/or non-Christian. There were more than 100 distinct nationalities in the USSR.

slavic republics included: Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania

others with different ethnic or religious identity included: Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Turkestan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhistan

the population of the USSR was apportioned this way:

Russians (53%); Ukrainians (16%); Uzbeks (3.8%); Byelorussians (3.7%); Tartars (2.5%); Kazakhs (2.2 %)

even within Russia itself, there were many national minorities. The breakup of the USSR incited many of these people to seek independence, among them the Ossetians, and the Czechnyans. Russia's military intervention to quell independence movements in these regions of the trans-Caucasus today reflects fear that the Russian federation may fragment further.

The USSR imposed centralized control over all of these people, who aspired at least to greater autonomy. In a way, it held local nationalist aspirations in check.

The nationalities question helps explain the plight of Russian Jews, who were persecuted under the Soviet regime as they had been under the Tsarist one. They became a tributary of the exodus to Israel.

7) the cult of the Soviet leader. Not only was the communist party elitist, it tended toward idolatry. Soviet communism developed a cult of hero worship. Lenin, of course, was the most revered. Upon his death he was embalmed and entombed in a mausoleum that became communism's most sacred shrine, not to mention its major tourist attraction. Lenin was venerated as a saint of the revolution. Upon his death, Stalin was accorded like status. As "de-Stalinization" progressed during the late 1950s, however, his body was removed and buried in a less conspicuous place. But other Soviet leaders have received imposing monuments. One recent study argues that the size of the monument and its proximity to Lenin's tomb conveyed to pilgrims some idea of their relative status in the pantheon of Soviet heroes.

Particularly amusing was the commemoration of Pavlik Morozov. We might call him the Soviet boy wonder. Indoctrinated by his Soviet teachers to put country above family, he denounced his parents to the secret police in 1932 for having dared to express disillusionment with the Soviet regime under Stalin. Some local people took their revenge by assassinating him. But Soviet leaders built a monument to him in his home town.

The Bolshevik-inspired Communist Party

In the 19th century, Karl Marx had envisioned the coming of a loosely organized society, composed of workers' communities. The Soviets (soldiers and workers councils), the grass-roots organizations that had made the popular revolution of 1917 in St. Petersburg and Moscow, approximated that ideal. That was the party's heroic phase. But opposition and insurrection against tsarist Russia proved to be easier than the construction of a new kind of communist society.

The reality of Communism in the USSR was pervasive presence of the Bolshevik-inspired Communist party, an enormous organization that became a privileged society within a society. By the post World War II years the party was growing old. Many of the most imaginative party leaders had been eliminated in Stalin's ongoing purges. More obedient subalterns took their places.

The problem of the Communist Party in the post-revolutionary era was addressed by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned in the 1920s by Mussolini and his fascists. Gramsci argued that the Communist party as the rearguard of the revolution must be one of intellectual vision as well as one of action.

Gramsci wrote The Modern Prince, his re-thinking of the classic renaissance essay by the Renaissance Florentine diplomat Nicolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli is known for his dictum that "the ends justify the means." The phrase connotes Machiavelli's efforts to explain the nature of political morality, stressing the heavy responsibilities a statesman bears. A simple personal code of ethics, he argued, is useless in the public world of politics. Politics, the uses of power, generates its own code of ethics.

Gramsci was highly critical of Marxist/Leninist orthodoxy. He argued that Marxism was not simply a creed we should accept, but an exhortation to philosophical effort. We need to envision the future in light of present realities, not dogmatic attachment to those of a revolutionary past.

Gramsci posed the question: would the communist party in the 20th century be an instrument of political vision or would it be a bureaucracy trapped in a system given by the past?

Communist Party

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intelligentsia <---> apparat

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intellectuals apparatcheks

Gramsci's vision of the Communist Party as an ongoing means of liberation would never be implemented, though his formulation did showcase the dilemma of Communist leaders in the new society of the USSR:

In the contemporary age, the communist party was burdened by three legacies:

1) its memory - the politics of commemoration - Lenin's tomb as a place of pilgrimage

The Communist Party of the USSR became a self-perpetuating elite with a deep investment in the system.

It included a vast hierarchy of party militants

Stalin, ruled as an autocrat. He liquidated or intimidated all potential rivals. But after his death in 1953, no 1st secretary of the CP of the USSR would ever again play so independent and transcendent a role. Political power from Stalin's death until the revolution of 1989 was held by an oligarchy of some 10 to 15 men in the Politburo.

In this respect, note the dilemma of the 1st secretaries:

3) its ideology

- Party officials considered Marxism to be a science. If Marxism was a true representation of reality, then how could it be modified?

Some of the problems were economic, and more recently technological, particularly those relating to the coming of the electronic revolution. The shortfall of computer-assisted information systems is symptomatic of the way an economy managed by bureaucrats could not respond to new opportunities. As LaFeber points out, there were 30 million computers in the USA, compared with 50,000 in the USSR.

Communist leaders: some issues and some mistakes

The Stalin Era, 1924-53

Stalin was a conservative. His policies were authoritarian and xenophobic. He had been a seminary student as a young man and he brought to his activities as a communist militant religious zeal. Stalin was no theoretician. But something of his fervor was carried over to his dedication to the communist cause. For him, ideology was a faith, not a philosophy for critical analysis.

Stalin committed many blunders, but I would focus on one: his postwar program for ideological "reeducation."

Stalin feared the liberalizing effects of the war years, during which the party had been democratized, pragmatic policies permitted (14 million private gardens), and the wartime alliance required solidarity with liberal allies in the west.

The Program was directed by Andrei Zhdanov, and it stressed the slavophile themes of Russian nationalism, suspicion of foreigners, distrust of the motives of the West. But the heart of reeducation was the enforcement of a discourse about the workers' paradise that the USSR was supposed to be.

One notes especially Roy Medvedev. He was a Marxist, but like his west European counterparts argued for a more humanist version of Marxist philosophy. He drew on the revisionist tradition of Georgy Lukacs, and his philosophy has links with that of Lezek Kolakowski and Adam Schaff in Poland (who later taught in the West) and Ernst Bloch in east Germany.

The Khrushchev era (1953-64)

a comparison of the rise of Stalin and Khrushchev as 1st secretaries - both successful apparacheks

Josef Stalin (1924-53) <---> Nikita Khrushchev (1953-64)

Lavrenti Beria - Giorgi Malenkov - Molotov - Kaganovich - Bulganin - Zhukov - Khrushchev

state party

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Malenkov Khrushchev

Khrushchev's blunders:

The Brezhnev era (1964-82)

Given the misfortunes of Khrushchev's bravado, his successor, Leonid Brezhnev (1906-82) reaffirmed the role of both the party and the state bureaucracy.

He called his approach "real socialism." Real socialism provided for an expanded role for both the party and the state bureaucracy. Under Brezhnev during the 1960s and the 1970s, the party, the state, and the military high command drew closer together, as if it were a Soviet caricature of the American power elite of the "military-industrial complex." The watchword was big organizations.

Brezhnev's biography - Brezhnev's rise to power followed the profile established for Stalin and Khrushchev. He ascended through clever maneuvering within the party ranks and able service to the party. Like Khrushchev, Brezhnev hailed from the Ukraine. Trained as an engineer, he organized his fellow students into a communist party youth movement in the 1930s. From an early age, he built a network of loyal followers who accompanied him in his rise to power. He served as a political commissar during WWII (a political officer, watchful about communist orthodoxy) - after the war, he was named 1st secretary in the Moldavian Republic, formerly a part of Romania. In 1952, he was called by Stalin to serve in the politburo in Moscow. Upon Khrushchev's humiliation, he was named 1st secretary of the CP in 1964, then prime minister in 1969, and finally president of the USSR in 1977, thanks to a constitution whose design he had supervised.

Brezhnev's "real" socialism might be characterized as Stalinism modernized, for Brezhnev's ambitions in the 1970s ran along the lines of Stalin in the 1930s.

Just as Stalin had issued a constitution for the USSR in 1936, Brezhnev would issue another that superseded it in 1977. In keeping with "real" socialism, it affirmed the central role of the state, rather than that of society. That meant that the Soviet people were not simply part of a society but of a State. It suggested that the State mediated all social relations.

Brezhnev also projected his own image ever more conspicuously after 1977, just as Stalin had before him. In the official propaganda, he was proclaimed the "Hero of the Great Patriotic War," ascribing to himself in WW II a heroic role out of proportion to his actual accomplishments. In 1976 he was named field marshall; in 1978, he was awarded the "Order of Victory." Like Stalin, he wanted to be remembered as a creative person. In 1980, he received the Lenin prize for his personal memoirs.

While preaching a policy of detente with the West, Brezhnev launched a massive expansion of the Soviet armed forces during the 1970s. In this he took advantage of American preoccupation with their war in southeast Asia. He diverted funds to North Vietnam, while making overtures to west European nations and even to the US to promote better relations.

But the domestic problems under Brezhnev were much the same as they had been under earlier leaders:

During the 1970s, dissent was more openly expressed than in the 1950s because:

Post-Communist Russia (1991-2000)

Russia in the past decade, far from prospering in its newfound freedom, has experienced a process of de-modernization. The gross national product of the Russian federation today is only half what it was in 1990. Scholars today tend to be critical of the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian federation (1991-2000). In abolishing the USSR, he created a bureaucratic vacuum. While a small elite has become suddenly rich, too many people continue to lead dreary lives.