Tibor Szamuely on

A choice of tyrants

Reviews by Auberon Waugh John Casey and Michael Bentley

In its obituary of Nikita Khrushchev the Times remarked that the late Soviet leader possessed neither "the intellectual capacity of Lenin nor the sly brutality of Stalin." I was struck by the pointed contradistinction made between Khrushchev's two predecessors. It becomes stranger still when compared with the Times's original post-mortems on Lenin and Stalin, Lenin, wrote the Times on January 23, 1924, was " not an original thinker"; he preacl)ed "a wild gospel of universal hate," while as for his intellectual capacity — "that incoherent jumble of theories in his mind was simply the material for his own personal ambition." When Generalissimo Stalin died on March 5, 1953 he got a page long obituary in the Times — about five times as much as Lenin. Though this was the height of the Cold War the Times soberly Pointed out that he had been "successful in piloting the country through" the crisis left by Lenin; that Stalin had created Russian industry and collectivized agriculture, equipped the USSR for war and Ted, it to victory. In the view of the allied statem en who knew him best, he was

approachable, sympathetic and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his suboledinates."

I am no reproaching the Times with inconsistency — its present assessment is fairly typical of a general shift in public 9Pinion. The fact is that we have all been inconsistent. Since Stalin's death an astonishing transformation has taken Place. Lenin is today revered on all sides as a Wise statesman and profound thinker, One of the greatest and most influential figures of -modern times. Stalin, on the Other hand, is now commonly seen as a cunning, vengeful, deceitful, bloodthirsty tyrant, a mass-murderer, and a bungler Into the bargain. Lenin's cause flourishes While Stalin's cruel life-work has been obliterated together with his monuments. Last year UNESCO decreed that the centenary of Lenin's birth be celebrated throughout the world. I rather think that When Stalin's centenary comes around in 1979 the fatuous international bien Pensants will purse their collective lips in Prim disapproval.

Here then we are faced with a most revealing sign of the times. What is one to make of it? The phenomenon can hardly be explained by a general pro-Soviet change in Western public opinion. If anything, the opposite has occurred. Anyway, had this been the case the images of both Soviet leaders would have benefited. Nor could one argue that it was all due to the passage of time enabling us to acquire a

better historical perspective. A long time has passed since Stalin's death too. His misdeeds should have subsided into the distance, the memory of his atrocities replaced with the fresher ones wrought by his successors. Or is there some unwritten convention, some statute of historical limitations according to which at least forty years should pass after a tyrant's death before his crimes are forgotten, even if — or especially if — they were unremarked upon during his lifetime?

There is, I believe, only one possible explanation for this remarkable transmutation of values. Without realising it, Western opinion — pro-communist and anti-communist alike — has been influenced by official Soviet propaganda to a very considerable degree. It is difficult for us in the free West, with every variety of information and shade of opinion to choose from, to appreciate the sheer effectiveness of a mighty propaganda machine, backed by all the resources of a super-state and utilizing every means of persuasion placed at its disposal by modern science and technology, pounding out the same line year in and year out. In the long run no one can remain impervious; in one way or another (sometimes even in ways contrary to its intentions) Agitprop has affected us all. And it is primarily due to Soviet propaganda that the contrast between the public image of Stalin in his lifetime and since his death is just as marked in the West as in Russia.

The genial and far-seeing Uncle Joe, puffing serenely away at his pipe, has become a monster of duplicity and brutality. Instead we are presented with the twinkling eyes and the humane purposefulness of nice, bearded, sage Lenin.

This evolution has an ancanny correspondence with the changing Soviet propaganda line. For thirty years Stalin dominated Russia:He was the Greatest Genius of all Times and all Peoples, the Wisest of the Wise, the Leader of Progressive Mankind.. His pictures were printed in the tens, his writings in the hundreds, of millions. Lenin shrunk to near total obscurity — whenever his portrait appeared it was only to flank Stalin's. The West followed suit. Writers love success stories, and Stalin's was the supreme success-story of the age. So why bother about Lenin's stuffed corpse when the only use for his mausoleum was to serve as Stalin's reviewing stand at parades? H. G. Wells met Lenin in 1920 and found him no more than an ineffectual dreamer, but Stalin he saw, fourteen years later, as a man who was changing the world and who "owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him." And so it went. Any phoney secretary, pseudo-friend or imagin ary nephew of Stalin's was assured of eager publishers and fat cheques — while Valentinov's uniquely valuable reminiscences of Lenin had to wait for an English translation for fifteen years after appearing in Russian under an obscure emigre imprint. The relative scale of importance is best illustrated by the late Isaac Deutscher's plan for his biographical trilogy : first came Stalin, the man who had made it; then Trotsky, the man who nearly made it but got his brains knocked out; Lenin was last in the queue, and Deutscher never had the time to write his Life.

When suddenly, as if by magic, everything changed: Stalin died, was 'exposed,' and had his remains thrown out of the mausoleum. His portraits disappeared, the bronze busts were melted down. The Collected Works stopped publication at volume 13. Stalin became an object of abuse, with his former henchmen yelling loudest of all. Even today, when the epigoni have stopped the steady stream of denunciation, their infrequent references to Stalin are decidedly chilly.

But a nation needs a history and an ideology, a prophet. Lenin was taken out of cold storage and made to serve the Soviet regime once more. He was rapidly inflated to a size larger than life, larger than Stalin had been, larger than anyone in the world had ever been.

And again the West was unable to withstand the Agitprop avalanche. We have re-adjusted our historical thinking. Soviet Russia is Lenin's Russia, and Communism, Lenin's creed. Stalin is just a megalomaniac gangster with a yellow streak, very like the type admirably portrayed by Humphrey Bogart. His only use is as a scapegoat for What Went Wrong. When we want to express disapproval of a Communist but don't wish to be accused of McCarthyism we call him a Stalinist. What it quite means we don't know, because by now we don't really know who or what Stalin was. Even the preposterous figure of Trotsky looms larger in the public consciousness than Stalin. Lenin was a great man, say all the authorities; whenever the word " great " is applied to Stalin it is only as an adjunct to "tyrant " or "intriguer " or "dissembler."

This image — almost conventional by now — is false and misleading. Lenin was undoubtedly a great revolutionary, possibly the greatest revolutionary ever, and a master politician. Without him the Bolshevik Revolution would never have got off the ground. Yet Stalin's achievement is perhaps even more impressive. Lenin led a political revolution and established a new regime ostensibly representing a new class. Similar events have occurred before, and, as has happened with many revolutionary leaders, after Lenin's death his unsettled regime might have developed in any direction or even disappeared altogether. Stalin changed all that. He inherited a backward and impoverished nation, a country weak and isolated from the world, a ruined economy, a disunited leadership, a party that lacked any sense of direction or ideas for the future. He left Russia the second mightiest military and industrial power in the world, occupying one half of Europe and terrifying the other. To achieve this Stalin had carried out a profound social revolution of a scope unprecedented in history: the total metamorphosis of a nation. Stalin had invented totalitarianism, the twentieth century's sole contribution to the art of government.

What makes Stalin's feat even more extraordinary is that his handiwork should have survived practically unchanged since his death. Everything in the USSR, to the smallest detail, is today essentially as Stalin created it: the administrative structure, the system of economic management and planning, the complex fabric of controls over literature and the mass media, the electoral arrangements, the educational system — and so on, down to the methods of writing history or organizing sports competitions. Nothing has been altered. Khrushchev attempted to tinker with the massive edifice — and failed. It is impervious to modification or reform. There it towers over us — monolithic, forbidding, grim, mysterious — moulded in the cast of its stern creator. Of Stalin it can be said more truthfully than of anyone in our century : Si momentum requiris, circumspice.

Stalin exacted a terrible price. Twentyfive million Russians (excluding war casualties) died as a result of his policies. He wielded more power than any man in modern times; absolute, unquestioning power of life and death over every one of his subjects, great or small. And the Russian people of today — cowed, docile, unthinking, eternally grateful for the smallest of mercies — they, too, are a monument to Stalin.

Clearly, whatever the vagaries of Eastern politics or Western fashion may ordain, this was no ordinary man. Montgomery Hyde has performed a service in reminding us of this."' One of the most interesting passages of his book is a long excerpt from a description of Stalin by Lord Chilston, our ambasSador in Moscow in 1935. To appraise the perceptiveness of the Foreign Office insight it should be set against the inane drivel of such 'superior intellects' as Shaw, Wells or the Webbs. A few sentences go to the heart of the matter: "It used to be generally assumed, when M. Stalin first came into prominence, that he was merely a clever political intriguer with a thirst for power. He certainly loves power, and he is certainly a capable intriguer; but it must now be admitted that he is more than that. The 'mere intriguer' generally does, not know what to do with power when he achieves it; but M. Stalin has always known that."

Lord Chilston unwittingly formulated the dilemma facing any biographer of Stalin. On the one hand we have the man's stupendous achievements — victories and crimes on a colossal scale. On the other, the almost complete absence of reliable biographical material. Biography, according to Disraeli, is life without theory. In Stalin's case it is the other way around: we possess any amount of (MarxistLeninist) theory but practically nothing about the life. None of his public or private papers have been published, nor his letters *Stalin: The History of a Dictator H. Montgomery Hyde (Hart-Davis £3.95). or memoranda, nor records of meetings or conversations, nor the drafts of his articles and speeches — even the texts of some of his most important speeches remain unknown. Naturally, none of his .old political associates (except Trotsky) wrote their memoirs: he had almost all of them shot, and the few aged survivors are effectively muzzled. By contrast, we have literally tons of materials on Hitler: every scrap he ever wrote has been published, every living person (and quite a few dead ones) who ever knew the Fiihrer has had his say.

To be sure, there are some facts to go by: we know what Soviet policy was like under Stalin; Khrushchev and Co made a few carefully selected revelations; now, thanks largely to his daughter Svetlana, we know a bit about his personal life. Hardly enough, though, for a balanced, serious political biography. But if one finds this insufficient, and discards (as Montgomery Hyde rightly does) the Byzantine adulation and plain lies coming from Russia during Stalin's lifetime, one is left with the writings of real or fictitious emigres dictated by either political animus or the desire to make a fast buck. Some of these works are obviously more reliable than others, yet even Trotsky is driven by hatred to portraying Stalin as a nonentity.

The only part of Stalin's life that is at all adequately documented is the war period. Dozens of Soviet marshals and generals have published their memoirs. Stalin also had dealings with numerous experienced and shrewd Western political and military leaders, who likewise recorded their impressions. What emerges is a man of the highest intellectual qualities: immensely able, quick-witted, decisive, with a thorough knowledge and understanding of military matters. In fact, an outstandingly gifted strategist. Lord Alanbrooke, for example, wrote: "He had a military brain of the very highest calibre. Never once in any of his statements did he make any strategic error, nor did he ever fail to appreciate all the implications of a situation with a quick and unerring eye. In this respect he stood out compared with [Roosevelt and Churchill]."

High praise indeed, and from an unimpeachable quarter. But this Stalin we meet only in the war years: before 1941 (or after 1945) we see only a drab, crude, shallow, uncouth, ignorant, vicious and rather cowardly mediocrity (and probably a tsarist police-spy as well — I am sorry to see Montgomery Hyde giving credence to that particular piece of fiction).

How do we reconcile these two utterly contrasting figures? The answer is: we do not and we cannot. For all Stalin's complexity and Montgomery Hyde's literary skill, the two into one won't go. There was only one Stalin, and he remains largely unknown. Montgomery Hyde has written a useful book, gathering together every scrap of information (it would have been better still, though sparser, had he ignored some of the more blatant forgeries). But we will never find out what Stalin was really like until the remote day when the Kremlin archives are opened. Perhaps not even then. Not that it matters much. Stalin has become a mythical figure, and facts have little bearing on myths.