Stalin remains one of the most divisive and controversial figures of modern history among both scholars and the general public in today’s Russia and throughout the rest of the world. By a majority in the Western world he is condemned as a brutal dictator responsible for the enslavement and death of millions of people. But there are others who celebrate his role as the great modernizer of Russia and as the triumphal leader in the Soviet victory over fascism in the Second World War.1 The central argument of this book attributes this divergence of opinion to the deep contradictions between Stalin’s creative and destructive impulses, which combined to produce a paradox of power.2
In this he resembled two of his tsarist predecessors whom he most admired, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. In portraying Peter, the great pre-revolutionary Russian historian Vasily Kliuchevsky compared the tsar to the captain of a ship-of-state who sought to rebuild it entirely even as he sailed it into the storm. Moshe Lewin put it more succinctly when he wrote that Stalin engaged in pulling down the old edifice of the state while simultaneously erecting a new one. The focus of this book is the period when the paradoxical character of his state-building met its greatest challenge during the years of preparing for war, fighting it and winning the peace.
The contradictions that helped shape Stalin’s dualist worldview as creator and destroyer owed much to his experiences in the revolutionary underground of Georgia under tsarist rule and his active participation in the revolution of 1917, the civil war and creation of the Soviet state. He built his reputation as a youthful revolutionary on his skills as an organizer, propagandist and agitator within a disciplined party committed to a rational transformation of the world guided by Marxist theory. At the same time, his daily immersion in a secretive, conspiratorial world, his suffering in prisons and many years in lonely exile under harsh conditions turned a lively and convivial youth into a suspicious, devious, deceptive and tough-minded man.3 These contradictory elements showed up in his paradoxical style of governance, which set irrational distrust against rational decision-making, leading to the purges of comrades also committed to building socialism. In his revolutionary years, Stalin had also developed a dual cultural identity between his native Georgia and his adopted Russia, which again gave him an appreciation – unlike his fellow Bolsheviks – of the importance of maintaining a creative tension in a multi-national state under Russian political hegemony. As the following chapters show, once in power, he often sacrificed the creative part of the tension – the cultural autonomy of the non-Russian nationalities – to the security interests of the state in conducting foreign policy and imposing political and ideological uniformity in domestic policy.4 These were the contradictions that contributed to the paradoxical character of his rule.
From his experiences as a political commissar during the civil war and intervention (1918–21), Stalin became convinced of the close interaction of foreign and domestic policies based on his perception of the links between class enemies at home and hostile capitalist powers encircling the fledgling Soviet state. In his view, war together with the class struggle had become the twin engines of revolution. During the civil war, he already began to express doubts in the abilities of foreign communists to carry out their revolutions without the assistance of the Red Army. With the establishment of the Soviet Union, he declared that world revolution depended upon the building of socialism in Russia, and not the reverse, as had been accepted dogma.5 Classical Marxism had portrayed the revolution as proceeding first in advanced capitalist countries where a skilled and literate working class had become the majority of the population and the social foundation for building socialism. But Russia in the 1920s was still an agrarian society where the proletariat, a small minority even before the revolution, had been further reduced by civil war. Thus, Stalin was forced to mobilize and transform peasants, the most backward social class in the population, to become in one generation the standard-bearers of socialist construction and the commanders of his armies. This paradoxical situation between what was modern and what remained archaic in the economy created many anomalies.6 By standing Marx on his head, Stalin remained largely indifferent to – and often disdainful of – the activities of the Comintern. Paradoxically, as we shall see, he sacrificed foreign communists to Soviet interests in the name of pursuing the triumph of the socialist revolution.
Up to the Second World War, when he assumed the title of marshal and donned a suitable military uniform for his meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt, he represented himself in speech and dress – again uniquely among his Bolshevik colleagues – as a man of the people; he carried a peasant passport before the revolution. Yet he arbitrarily and ruthlessly imposed collectivization on the peasantry, dooming hundreds of thousands to deportation or death.7 Collectivization was designed to secure state control over the production of grain and other agricultural products for the purposes of feeding the growing urban population of workers and providing a surplus for export. But the hasty and badly prepared implementation contributed to the famine of 1931–33 and the loss of the most enterprising and productive elements in the countryside.8
As the underlying theme of Part I, ‘Preparing for War’, I stress the paradoxical character of Stalin’s actions in building and dismantling the basic components of a new state order. Once he had achieved his consolidation of power, Stalin’s main goal was to launch the Soviet Union on the path of industrialization through planning, which in his hands was beset by chaos. The first two five-year plans (1929–32 and 1933–37) concentrated on building a heavy industrial base necessary to develop a modern armaments industry in anticipation of war. The third five-year plan (1938–41) began the completion of the shift but was interrupted by the war.9 The rational allocation of resources, setting of production targets, fixing prices and wages were, however, from the beginning overly centralized and bureaucratized.10 It was further undercut by Stalin’s arbitrary interference in demanding accelerated tempos that were responsible for shoddy products, mistakes leading to serious damages and accidents which were then blamed on sabotage. The model for subsequent show trials was first applied in 1928 in the Shakhty mining region of the Donbas, where accusations of ‘wrecking’ were levelled against the internal class enemy, the ‘bourgeois engineers’, and the external enemy of the capitalist world, in this case German intelligence.11 A similar case was fabricated to blame the engineers for failures on the Turkestan–Siberia Railway project in Central Asia.12
These themes served Stalin as the leitmotif of the Great Terror which he launched in 1934, following the assassination of Sergei Kirov, his close associate and member of the Politburo. Even as he assumed the pose of an intellectual with aspirations and claims as a Marxist theorist, he expressed contempt for intellectuals and inflicted severe punishments up to and including executions for the expression of opinions contrary to what he euphemistically called the ‘Bolshevik spirit’ (meaning, of course, his own). The victims of the purges included leading members of the Communist Party intelligentsia, who like him had been devoted disciples of Lenin, committed to the same goals of building socialism.13 At the same time that he was constructing the foundations of socialism and a great power capable of fighting the war he assumed must come, Stalin paradoxically weakened the forces necessary to fight it to the point where enormous sacrifices and terrible losses – a tragic-heroic effort – were necessary to expel the aggressor, drive him back to his lair and destroy him.
The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 by Nazi Germany and its allies posed the most serious challenge to Stalin’s policies of state-building and exposed the flaws in his system engendered by their deep contradictions. Although he had long anticipated war, he was taken by surprise by the timing of the attack. A series of disasters followed. By the late autumn of 1941, Kiev had fallen, Leningrad was invested and Moscow under attack. The magnitude of these disasters was unprecedented. Of the standing army that numbered on the eve of the war 5 million men, almost 4 million were killed, missing or in German captivity by the end of the year.14 Russia had never before lost so many men and surrendered so much territory in one year during the course of any war it had fought in the previous 300 years.
Yet these disasters did not lead to a complete collapse and surrender. Under Stalin’s leadership the Soviet Union overcame the initial surprise, confusion and losses. Four years after the terrible defeats of 1941, a wholly new Red Army, completely re-equipped under an almost entirely different military command, destroyed the last elements of the German army, seized Hitler’s capital and forced the Führer’s suicide. The battle of Berlin dwarfed any other land battle ever fought, except for Stalingrad. Two months later, the Far Eastern Front of the Red Army cut through the Imperial Japanese Kwantung Army like butter, swiftly occupying all of Manchuria. The Soviet Union emerged from the long ordeal as the only great power on the Eurasian continent. Germany and Japan, its longtime rivals for control over its European and Asian borderlands, were utterly defeated. Tempered by four years of continuous fighting, the Red Army had developed into the world’s largest army, equipped with the most numerous artillery and tank forces. Its victorious banners fluttered over Berlin, Vienna, Tehran and Port Arthur. Soviet international prestige had soared to its greatest heights. The communist parties of Europe and East Asia had grown from isolated, often illegal and demoralized sects into major contenders for political power not only in the territories occupied by the Red Army but in France, Italy, China and Southeast Asia as well. To all appearances it was a great, almost miraculous recovery. How can it be explained?
Most accounts fasten on Stalin as the key. Glorified in the postwar decade, his reputation suffered an eclipse under Khrushchev and then enjoyed a partial revival under Brezhnev, plummeted to new depths in the era of perestroika only to enjoy another resurrection under Vladimir Putin.15 Stripped of the polemical verbiage, his role as a wartime leader still remains ambiguous and controversial. Much of the problem in evaluating his contribution lies in the contrast between the magnitude of his errors and the steady-ing power of his will, between the role of coercion and the spontaneous upsurge of patriotism in mobilizing the population. Finally, the difficulty remains of separating his accomplishments from those of his subordinates down the long chain of command to the people at the front, in the factories, on the kolkhozes.
The responses of Stalin, his lieutenants and the mass of the population to the many challenges of waging modern warfare were deeply shot through with contradictions. More than anyone else, Stalin personified the paradox of power that characterized Soviet society during the entire wartime experience. His miscalculations were largely to blame for the initial defeats and retreats that required three years to recoup. Among the population exposed to the brunt of the fighting, there were large-scale defections and desertions, especially in the early months of the war, and anti-Soviet movements lasting throughout the conflict and into the postwar era. But Stalin was able, perhaps by a narrow margin, to maintain control over the administrative and military levers of command and gradually to mobilize most of the country behind him.
The following account sheds new light on the contributions of the elements in Soviet society that he had sought to mobilize in the prewar era to build the socialist state and prepare the country for war. The psychology of politics in his new order combined direction and guidance from above with initiatives from below that matched the expectations of the leadership in what one Soviet historian has called the ‘shock-brigade’ response.16 The outbreak of war triggered creative responses in the working class, among the military High Command, the institutes of the Academy of Sciences, the unions of writers, musicians and architects, the church, the Komsomol and the partisan movement in its early stage. Triumphant, Stalin paid a brief tribute to their contribution and then turned against many of those who by their actions had exhibited a measure of independent thinking or who threatened in his mind to overshadow his leadership as supreme warlord. Yet, as the final chapter shows, even during his declining years, when the morbid-pathological impulses appeared to dominate, he retained sufficient insight into the need to retain or recruit individuals with special talents who had proved their worth in the furnace of war to pursue his efforts to rebuild the edifice of the state and defend it against what he believed to be a new set of enemies.
Part II analyzes Stalin’s reaction to the German invasion as he moved swiftly on two levels. At the apex of power, he ordered a drastic centralization while maintaining his full control over decision-making in the military as well as in the civilian sphere. At the same time, he sought to mobilize all elements of the population by orchestrating a mixture of familiar and new themes in Soviet propaganda and expanding the system of material rewards. He welcomed the creative responses to his appeals from the leaders and rank and file of the army, defence industries, the scientific and technical intelligentsia and the world of culture. But he set limits to their freedom of action and was quick to employ the well-honed instruments of repression when he believed these limits had been exceeded or scapegoats had to be found for his own mistakes or those of others. Mass mobilization of people and resources plus draconian measures and self-sacrifice had won the war, but was it a Pyrrhic victory?
Part III portrays Stalin’s renewed mobilization policies in order to resume the march to socialism, rebuild the shattered economy, regain control over the intelligentsia, reorganize the international communist movement and consolidate his claim to be the leader of an emerging world power. It seeks to demonstrate how, once again, Stalin resorted to policies that were deeply paradoxical. Even before the fighting had ended, he began to turn against some of the architects of victory. Constructive and destructive impulses continued to coexist in winning the peace.