Stalinism

For decades now, there has been discussion over the factors that created Stalin—was his personality shaped by his ruthless father, his years in the political underground, or the trials of Russian civil war? Stephen Kotkin, the author of a monumental biography on the Soviet ruler, examined hundreds of documents and came up with the most compelling interpretation: the dictator was driven by Marxist ideology and the challenges of ruling the great superpower he built.² This opinion is less mundane than it may initially seem—Stalin’s behavior, often rife with both cynicism and sadism, inclines us to draw from psychology and psychiatry more than from political science.

And yet one aim inspired his actions—to stamp out every remnant of capitalism in the USSR and to export the revolution to the rest of the world. Considering himself more an avatar of an idea than a man, he told his son: “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me.”³

In 1929, after sealing his lead over the competitors to replace Lenin, Stalin began accelerating the collectivization of the countryside. This cost at least 280,000 thousand “kulaks” their lives. The years that followed saw the Great Famine, which claimed 6-8,000,000 people, 3-5,000,000 of whom lived in Ukraine.⁴ At the same time, “During this period about 1.7 million tons (1.5 million metric tons) of grain was exported, enough to have provided about a kilogram a head per day to 15 million people over three months.”⁵

In 1937–38, almost 700,000 people were shot in the Great Purge. During this time, over 100,000 executions were carried out as part of the NKVD’s “Polish operation,” wiping out the “espionage scum,” as Stalin put it; in other words, ordinary citizens, some of whom did not even see themselves as Polish.⁶

“I feel sick to my stomach when I hear them indifferently repeat: ‘This one got shot, that one got shot, the other one got shot, oh and him, too.’ The word hovers and echoes in the air,” noted a Leningrad artist in 1937.⁷

Stalin’s regime was a source of fascination for Western intellectuals, not all of them Marxists—the efficiency and success of the Soviets was praised by Simon and Beatrice Webb, H. G. Wells, and Harold Laski. The latter said of Stalin’s prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, that he was “doing what an ideal minister of justice would do.”⁸

Nor was Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, spare in his praise, though he was dismayed at the introduction of the death penalty for children over twelve years old.⁹ This remote communist country seemed a place where all things were possible, a place that contrasted with Europe and its economic crisis.¹⁰ The triumphant industrialization of what had until recently been a rural country obscured all the dark sides, even those that were visible from London and Paris.