Alan Brien on three faces of Stalin

[In America] Men make money by looking after themselves, not by looking after the public. If you take that line in Russia you will soon get rich. But when this fact comes to the notice of the income tax authorities, they will ask the Gay Pay Oo, the celebrated secret police which acts as an Inquisition, to inquire into your methods. An agent will tap you on the shoulder and conduct you to the officesof that famous force ... You will not be reproached, nor bullied, nor argued with, nor inconvenienced in any way. All that will happen to you is that when you have made yourself clear, you will suddenly find yourself in the next world, if there be a next world. If not, you will have simply ceased to exist, and your relatives will be politely informed that they need have no anxiety over you, as you will not be coming home any more.

I am proud to have been the first to advocate this most necessary reform. A well-kept garden must be weeded. So you must be careful.

I have extracted these quotations from the forgotten sermons of George Bernard Shaw, delivered in 1931, and not much quoted by Shavians these days. to show that it was not only in the Soviet Union, flattened by the killing weight of a universal, leaden dictatorship, that clever, generous, noble minds could be made to utter such splendidly simple-minded, dangerous nonsense.

Stalin, by then, was, in all but name the absolute ruler of a nation created out of revolution, dedicated to the most hopeful, honorable ideals. And yet, in the name of that very revolution, suppressing all opposition, all debate, all individual thought, all deviation from the will of the party as expressed and personified in Joseph Stalin. He would have certified, and passed for publication, almost all Shaw's defiant, jocular arguments for his system. Even the metaphors have a Stalinistic ring. He liked to pose as a horticulturist of humanity. When Stalin said — "We should cherish human beings as carefully and attentively as a gardener cherishes his favourite fruit trees" — his listeners knew that he carried the pruning knife in his other hand.

Several biographies of Stalin have appeared recently*, making use of the sudden rush, as suddenly quenched, of de-Stalinising works after Krushchev's speech, and the later, publication abroad by Soviet historians of works, steering between the obviously tendentious magnifications of the twenty five year Stalin cult, and the sometimes equally tendentious belittlements of the briefer counter-attack on Stalin. But even these do

not always seem to appreciate how far it was possible for admirers of Stalin's actions to approve his intentions without blinding themselves to the cost in human suffering.

There are two problems posed by Stalin which the many hundred studies of him have never quite solved. How and Why. How did he manage to come to power over the minds and bodies of the old Bolsheviks, a toughened elite, hardened in prison and exile, innured to

*Joseph Stalin: Man and Legend Ronald Hingley (Hutchinson £5.85) Stalin as Revolutionary: 1979-1929 Robert C. Tucker (Chatto £4.75) Stalin: The Man and His Era Adam B. Ulam (Allen Lane £6.50)

threats of torture and death, trained to a level of intellectual agility and natural shrewdness far above their bourgeois equivalents in the West? And why did he need to destroy and destroy again friends and enemies, careerists and idealists, workers and artists, soldiers and scientists, until he not only ought to have sawn off the branch he sat upon, but cut down the tree, and dug up the roots to make his own grave?

Those who have, denied themselves the nightmare pleasure of following Stalin's career through work after work have an easy answer to the first. He was root-and-branch a revolutionist, the extremist to end all extremists, as Churchill said "a blood-stained monster on a throne of skulls," who carried all before, after and with him, as the new Ghenghis Khan. But all the evidence shows that for most of his political life this picture would have been as incredible as that of Sir Alec Douglas Home as leader of the Provisional IRA.

Trotsky, and to some extent the dissident Marxist biographers who followed him, tended to regard Stalin as a creature of his own bureaucracy — as Mr Hingley puts it, "the biggest wheel in the might machine." It is one of the most valuable insights of Joseph Stalin: Man and Legend that it painstakingly chips away both the whitewash and the blood stains to show how the great empiricist, the one Bolshevik other than Lenin who learned from his own mistakes as well from those of others, managed stage by stage to crush his rivals.

The Bolsheviks had no other revolution to act as their historical guide, except the French Revolution. And their great fear was the eruption of a new Bonaparte, a charismatic military genius who would exploit the Revolution for his own ends. Nobody fitted this pattern better than Trotsky. Nobody seemed less like the man of destiny than Stalin. And Stalin alone appreciated the power of this paradox. He crushed the United Opposition (so long disunited, and mutually suspicious) of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Lamenev and then paused only to gather his forces, and crushed the Rightist Opposition of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. He knew each one's weaknesses, and outmanoeuvred them all the more spectacularly because they thought him weaker than any one, certainly than any three, of them.

He was the original self-made man, never ceasing to renovate and rebuild, add new wings and new storeys to both man and legend, until from inauspicious foundations he had built up the most powerful ruler the world has ever known. After this achievement, Mr Hingley admits, there is no reason to deny him the title of genius so often conferred on him by himself.

As to why Stalin became the prodigious monster he was to become, until the very end still clearing away as far as the horizon the small shrubs that might grow to shade him — none of the three studies, in more than 1,700 pages, gives an absolutely convincing answer. Mr Hingley proposes "a change of mentality"

around 1929 when the undercover vein -of recklessness broke the surface, and the P1c4 ding Georgian began to stride a sixth of WI world in colossal boots, imposing Ma.„ss; collectivisation of agriculture and mass dustrialisation on a starving, chaotic arl'• panic-stricken empire. Mr Tucker inclines more to see the seeds growing from his infancy. The analYnis ,I5 convincing, but then all such retroactive .11.1',.1 tifications of the man by the child can clan n: superficial plausibility. But they never tell IPel how it is only this individual should hav developed as he did when thousands of others.1 with similar backgrounds, racial inheritances' parental relationships, youthful obsessiansi remained normal, ordinary, undistingaisPie characters, forces for neither good nor eV Perhaps the best we can say is that his gla0"p ego had at sometime, somehow, b1 agonisingly dwarfed, and his life was sPeti't pushing it to the clouds, and beyond, with°;11 even being satisfied that it had reached its ilt,0 stature. Nukharin's portrait, confessed tcf friends abroad in his last terror-hatolleil moments of freedom before the hammer '" is the most vivid. Stalin, he said suffers because he can't persuade everyone, '11-116dI JAI ing himself, that he is greater than everybody', s.'„0, this suffering is probably the most human thi,Lli„ about him; perhaps it is his only human trait. there is something diabolical and inhuman abouWer" compulsion to take vengeance for this same 'oe! ing on everybody, especially those who are ill ss'ale way higher or better than he If anybody sPe„,pen better than Stalin, his doom is sealed ... Such (Tot is a constant reminder to him that he is not the "et not the best. If anybody writes better, so much tt! worse for him, he, Stalin, and only he, should op: first Russian writer. ... This is a small, vicious ". no, not a man but a devil.

h It is unlikely after these three ,0 apie: biogr (two volumes of Tucker to come), that will be written until the time, if ever, vi''rio the Soviet archives are opened up to vi°87 scholars. Still, few mysteries remainIt 0 pears certain that Stalin was never; to Solzhenitsyn and others have wanten believe, a spy for the Czarist secret palic based on a forgery. The question of his.tA0 shedw„ the only evidence has now been establitie S. emitism remains open, though relativiP irrelevant — whatever he believed, he neily like an anti-Semite. Rather more import.31100 did he ever convince himself t„rel Tukachevsky was an agent of the Nazi SeVII services, on the basis of false docuttl„enseTi obligingly supplied by them for the Pl-,r,jori•V'l Was the assassination of Kirov part of l II by then consistent policy of eliminati0g,0 popular and talented subordinates, or watIvip a crime of passion with no political 110;tjiii,ll, The three authors never quite agree, all"„ora■ questions will continue to be asked. You.r your biographer and you takes your choicellt Mr Ulam putting himself far out on litOr with his surprising clearing of Stalin ill 24

Kirov case. 071

If the reader can afford (or perhaps be3',,j' ctl the psychic toll of reading aboOt relentless savagery is heavy) — orilY,1‘41:14.: biography of Stalin, which should it Tucker's three volumes will eventuallY of the major works on any Sovietolotirtli shelf, but hardly for the rest of us. IVIrmilit4 concentrates less on Stalin as a pers°,::,40,•:,‘I than on the point at which Russian r and revolutionary politics meet in hirfl,,ftef Hingley is the better story teller, but .takes for granted that we know so.,triejj1k1, already about the other characters. nar„r gives a valuable introductory chaP'Lfo1 Lenin, and the socialist movement Will • .ko tkl• 10 11.11 Stalin, without some knowledge o re Stalin must be an enigma. Myself, stil lPoe Isaac Deutscher (though all three 01: c have told a great deal I never Itti di, previously understood) supplemented '-'te, in E. H. Carr's massive, seven-volume l' of the Soviet Union, now in Pelican