STALIN
By WALTER ELLIOT, M.P.
THE strange thing about Stalin is that so little, really, is known about him. This is the conclusion forced upon one by the study of the literature. The latest book on the subject* gives no cause to revise such a conclusion. This book starts with a rather embarrassed foreword by .Sir Stafford Cripps, who escapes from the room murmuring a quotation from Mr. Winston Churchill. It proceeds to an Author's Note that "his (Stalin's) life has been so completely absorbed in the Russian Revolution that to write of one without the other would be as absurd as to write of Hamlet and ignore Shakespeare." But, after all, Hamlet is simply a figment of Shakespeare's brain. Stalin is certainly not a figment of anybody's brain. He is one of the three rulers of the world today, of whom the other two are President Truman and Mr. Churchill. Indeed, within the present year, if the electors so choose, the trio may be President Truman, Mr. Attlee and Marshal Stalin. The British public may well be excused a desire to know more personally about one who will be so closely bound up with their affairs.
It may be said, in the first place, that the legend-mongers are making a poor hand- of their job. The figure of a burly, smiling giant, now being presented for the approval of the world, is start- lingly unlike the real man. Physically, Stalin is not burly, nor a giant. He is rather like a small, smouldering Lord Beaverbrook, less jerky and less bony. It is no accident that Lord Beaverbrook gave the only picture of him which has conveyed anything to the ordinary public over here. As to his personality, this is the man whom Lenin described in his last document as "too rude." "There- fore," says Lenin, "I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position (that of Secretary-General) and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority—namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc." This aspect is indeed described in the book, but the whole emphasis is laid elsewhere. Yet Lenin had devoted a good deal of attention to the subject.
• To explain about Stalin that "his dark brown eyes look straight at you perpetually threatening to smile," or, to quote Mr. Joseph Davies, the former American Ambassador, that "a child would like to sit on his knee and a dog would sidle up to him," is to over- simplify the facts. Hypotheses about the views of dogs are all very well ; but this is the man who alarmed the Bolsheviks. The fact is that Stalin is an extremely formidable individual. That must be the starting-point of any appreciation of his life and work. Whence * Stalin. By J. T. Murphy. (John Lane. 15s.) does he derive his strength? It is probable that he derives it from his simplicity.
Stalin is certainly an inscrutable figure. But he has the one great necessity of statesmanship—a firm grasp of the obvious. His in- scrutability arises from the fact that he frequently acts on it. He finds that the kulak peasants are an obstacle to Soviet aims ; he liquidates them. He sees that Soviet industry is on the frontier ; he removes it to the interior. He resolves to base his strategy on the centre of the Russian line ; he leaves the two wings to take their chance, though in the north is Leningrad itself, and in the south, Rostov, and the dil of the Caucasus, which is, in addition, his native land. These acts do not bear the mark of cunning. They bear the mark of selection.
His simplicity is the simplicity of a disciple, and this is the only thing that has ever led him wrong ; Russia is too great to be governed by a ghost, even the ghost of Lenin. The ghost led Stalin most fearfully wrong when it led him to believe that in all wars lay the opportunity which "the workers" could, and would, seize to raise a civil war and overthrow their own governments. Stalin signed a pact with the Nazis, and dissociated himself from the war in the West. "Rightly or wrongly," says his biographer, "he was convinced that he had averted, at least for a time, a war with Nazi Germany in which the Chamberlain and Daladier Governments of Britain and France would have become first Hitler's arms mer- chants and finally his co-belligerents?: What the Soviet leaders had done was to ensure the destruction of scores upon scores of Allied Divisions in the West, and the extinguishing, in 1940, of the Second Front, which was afterwards to be awaited with such anguish and such eagerness by the Soviet Union during three years of slaughter. Great mistakes—giant mistakes—have been made by all the nations engaged in the present struggle. The statesmen of the U.S.S.R. cannot claim immunity.
What of the future? The future hangs precisely on that sim- plicity, that grasp of the obvious which Stalin has shown time and again. The simple, the obvious, fact is that the bankers of Great Britain and America are not combining to attack the U.S.S.R., that capital, as Mr. Lloyd George declared, is not aggressive, but timid, and that the Soviet Union, like the others of the Big Three, has much more to fear from isolationism than from imperialism. Will the scales turn this way? The answer can be made "Yes." Such an answer will not be helped by suffocating argument under bales of roses. To write about Stalin that "it must be recognised that he has transformed the primitive struggle of man against man for the basic means of livelihood into a mighty war of science versus ignorance, superstition and all unsocial conduct," or 'that "patriot- ism, once the distorted minor of the propertied classes, has been transformed into the expression of love for the country of Social- ism," is to make claims for Marshal Stalin which cast doubt upon the historical powers of the author. Such claims would certainly bring up from his subject that sardonic comment for which Stalin is famous. Similarly, the comparison between Stalin! and Churchill, to explain, patronisingly, that Churchill, "born of a class which confuses its own interests with those of the nation . • . cannot encourage industry to produce with a higher motive than that of private acquisition," is not likely to help anyone in Russia to com- prehend, still less to co-operate with, a nation said to be labouring under such remarkable handicaps. These handicaps, moreover, are by no means self-evident in its recent achievements.
In some long, hard-drinking Russian evening, in some long hard- hitting day of Russian-British debate, the leaders, and the rank and file, of our two countries are more likely to ,understand each other than from these exercises in the rhetoric of the 1930's. The Soviet Union is moving forward under our eyes. Those who try to photograph it with a fixed camera and a time-exposure, will only get a blur on the plate. We are dealing with a highly national State, in the full flood of an industrial revolution. Stalin has discerned both these trends, and is riding them flat out He is wiser than his critics, or even than his flatterers. The salt of his spilt blood is bitter to his tongue. He is looking for security; and if he can buy security, he will trade peace.
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