Stalin in Black and White
THE publication in English last autumn of M. Souvarine's long and detailed biography of Stalin is now followed by Mr. Eugene Lyons' more impressionistic portrait and by an official " short biography" emanating from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. Of the latter little need be said. It rewrites history by the now familiar method of associating Stalin with everything done by Lenin in the revolutionary period and by attributing to the other Bolshevik leaders of that time either no role at all or a wholly deleterious one. Thus : " It was the Bolshevik party, headed by Lenin and Stalin, that created the Red Army . . . . And it was Stalin who directed, inspired and organised the victories of the Red Army " (italics in original). This book would be all right but for its sub-title. It is not biography, but hagio- graphy.
Mr. Lyons has brought to his task the mordant and disillusioned pen which made Assignment in Utopia a classic. The dis- illusionment has now gone several stages further. There is little left of the revolutionary idealism which Mr. Lyons took with him to the Soviet Union in 1928. But though his prevailing reaction to his subject is now one of fascinated horror, there are points at which the glints of the old faith and hope flash across the screen. The most curious of these is his account of his interview with Stalin in 193o. Intellectually he knows that Stalin was the fount of " all this horror, inhumanity and chicanery," which was even then beginning to descend on Russia. But he cannot wholly escape from the impression of " a pleasant, earnest age- ing man—evidently willing to be friendly to the first foreigner whom he had admitted to his presence for years," or of " a certain shyness in his contact with people, a real simplicity, an almost nerveless deliberateness about his movements."
In documentation and in critical analysis, Mr. Lyons does not pretend to compete with M. Souvarine's far more extensive equipment. But Mr. Lyons has lived in Russia under Stalin, and his story of the later years has the vivid quality which can only be imparted by an eye-witness. Stalin's master stroke was that " he took a social movement, and turned it into a religious sect : he took a collection of living ideas and turned them into fixed sacred texts." He gave the new religion a god, Lenin, and a devil, Trotsky, and cast himself for the role of prophet, destined no doubt himself for eventual deification. And these things hap- pened so swiftly and naturally that one can still ask whether Stalin planned and thought out this magnificentconstruction, or whether he stumbled on it, so to speak, unawares.
The other aspect of Stalin's genius lay in political organisa- tion. It was no accident that a man with " the tawdry talents of the ward politician " should have become the autocrat of the new Russia. When Lenin died, the revolution had passed from its heroic into its bureaucratic phase. Russia, " aching in all its limbs after so many years of foreign and civil war," did not want ideas or oratory or military adventure. It wanted organisa- tion and a strong hand. Stalin, who " never had the slightest respect for ideas and programmes anyhow," provided what was needed. Like every true bureaucrat, he was a pragmatist, ready to adjust not only his conduct, but his creed to the needs-of the moment. Under Stalin, the party line entered on that period of zig-zags and right-about-turns which have been the despair of serious theorists reared in the Marxist school. But for practical
purposes it did not matter. There was always a text from Lenin for every day in the year.
In his last three or four chapters, Mt. Lyons gives an account of the successive purges of the las; fcur years, and concludes with a brief analysis of the, changes in Soviet foreign policy. But all this happened after his departure from Moscow in 1934, and adds nothing to what has already been written on these events. The merit of Mr. Lyons' book is that, by his portrayal of the gradual development of Stalin's absolute and unique power, he
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