The Stalin Era

Philip Boobbyer

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134739370
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

This book provides a wide-ranging history of every aspect of Stalin's dictatorship over the peoples of the Soviet Union. Drawing upon a huge array of primary and secondary sources, The Stalin Era is a first-hand account of Stalinist thought, policy and and their effects. It places the man and his ideology into context both within pre-Revolutionary Russia, Lenin's Soviet Union and post-Stalinist Russia. The Stalin Era examines:
* collectivisation
* industrialisation
* terror
* government
* the Cult of Stalin
* education and Science
* family
* religion: The Russian Orthodox Church
* art and the state.

Interpreting the Stalin era 1

At Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union was one of the two dominant world powers, and Soviet ideology continued to find adherents across the world. Stalin's political achievements, in spite of all the victims, seemed remarkable. Yet it is testimony to how historical judgments can owe their persuasiveness to political circumstances that almost half a century later Stalin's legacy looks very different. The Soviet empire has collapsed, and socialism as an ideology been in many ways discredited.

Certainly, for some critics, there seemed something to admire in Stalin's rule. After all, under Stalin the Soviet Union had developed a powerful industrial base, educated its people and defeated fascism in a terrible war. A backward society had been hauled into the modern age. In a biography that first appeared in 1949, the socialist historian Isaac Deutscher, although he believed that Stalin had betrayed many of the promises of the Bolshevik revolution, nevertheless credited him with building on positive strands in the Leninist tradition.

Document 1.1 Stalin in Comparative Perspective

Stalin cannot be classed with Hitler, among the tyrants whose record is one of absolute worthlessness and futility. Hitler was the leader of a sterile counterrevolution, while Stalin has been both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution. Like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon, he started as the servant of an insurgent people and made himself its master. Like Cromwell he embodies the continuity of the revolution through all its phases and metamorphoses, although his role was less prominent in the first phase. Like Robespierre he has bled white his own party; and like Napoleon he has built his half-conservative and half-revolutionary empire and carried revolution beyond the frontiers of his country. The better part of Stalin's work is as certain to outlast Stalin himself as the better parts of the work of Cromwell and Napoleon have outlasted them. But in order to save it for the future and give to it its full value, history may yet have to cleanse and reshape Stalin's work as sternly as it once cleansed and reshaped the work of the English revolution after Cromwell and of the French after Napoleon.

Source: Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, 1967, pp. 569–70.

Deutscher's comments illustrate the value of putting Stalin's rule into a wider European perspective; it is undoubtedly possible to find parallels between his dictatorship and the autocratic or ideological leadership of pre-twentieth-century revolutionary leaders. At the same time, in the decades after the Second World War, it was a more common opinion that the dictatorships of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini were something unique. These new regimes were deemed to be qualitatively different from previous dictatorships in that they aspired after and were able to achieve, on the basis of new technologies and means of communication, levels of control previously unthinkable. In this context, political scientists and historians were attracted by the theory of ‘totalitarianism’, an interpretative model designed to highlight the key features of this kind of dictatorship. The American political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, attempting to quantify the key features of ‘totalitarianism’, suggested six characteristics of totalitarian regimes: an ideology to which everyone is supposed to adhere; a mass, hierarchically organised party, led by one man, which is superior to or intertwined with the government apparatus; police control; monopoly of communication; monopoly of weaponry; a command economy (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956: 21–2). The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, writing in 1951 in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1979), suggested that totalitarian regimes aim to break down class loyalties and civil society in order to create lonely, atomised individuals with no private space of their own, who can thus be easily used to serve the state's interests.

Document 1.2 Totalitarianism

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member …

It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power. Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life. In the realm of foreign affairs new neutral territories must constantly be subjugated, while at home ever-new human groups must be mastered in expanding concentration camps, or, when circumstances require, liquidated to make room for others. The question of opposition is unimportant both in foreign and domestic affairs. Any neutrality, indeed any spontaneously given friendship, is from the standpoint of totalitarian domination just as dangerous as open hostility, precisely because spontaneity as such, with its incalculability, is the greatest of all obstacles to total domination over man …

By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them …

Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with the uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.

Source: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1979, p. 323, 456, 466, 475.

Hannah Arendt describes how individuals, cut off from their traditional social networks, can become slavishly subservient to the state. Literary works, such as Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ([1940] 1985) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ([1949] 1984) have also attempted to describe the processes of psychological enslavement in modern dictatorships, and their power has been one of the reasons for the enduring attraction of totalitarian explanations. Robert Conquest's The Great Terror ([1968] 1992) was one of the more influential historical studies which reflected a totalitarian approach.

Another influential scholar who accepted the basic thrust of the totalitarian argument was Leonard Schapiro. He believed that the Stalin regime had its roots in the revolutionary violence and disregard of the law that were distinctive features of Lenin's regime; he suggested that totalitarian regimes are distinguished by their contempt for moral and legal norms.

Document: 1.3 The Lack of Moral and Legal Restraint

There are many examples in the history of the last fifty years alone to show that where a minority seeks to impose its will, in the profound conviction that it alone has possession of the truth, and the historic right to enforce it in defiance of all the legal and moral rights of those over whom it rules, the amount of violence which it employs will steadily and inexorably increase …

[T]he key to a society is its attitude to law … The whole point about a modern, totalitarian society is that it is not just a more elaborate kind of tyranny, with harsher laws, and more of them. It is, on the contrary, a system of arbitrary rule which has discovered a convenient formula in order to ensure that law and the judges can be utilized as instruments for that arbitrary rule; and can never act as a barrier against such rule … If once law … is turned into an instrument of arbitrary rule …, the position of the individual is beyond hope. In this respect…, there was no difference between Lenin and Stalin.

Source: Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 1977, pp. xix-xxi.

The ‘totalitarian’ school set the intellectual agenda for historians of the Stalin era, indeed, for Soviet studies as a whole, in the decades following the Second World War. Sophisticated advocates of the totalitarian school did not argue that the Stalinist polity perfectly fitted the model of a regime of total control. They saw it rather as a tendency than an established fact. Leonard Schapiro suggested that totalitarianism should not be taken as an immutable model of government, but more as an approximation (Schapiro 1972: 124). The American historian, Merle Fainsod, noted the existence of ‘clique rivalries’ amongst Stalinist elites, and observed that reality fell short of totalitarian aspiration (Fainsod 1963: 177). Although many historians are now sceptical of the value of the term, popular judgment still refers to the Stalin regime as ‘totalitarian’, and in post-Soviet Russia the term is widely accepted amongst scholars.

From the late 1950s onwards, many scholars reacted against the totalitarian school. Some claimed that it was a politicised term that had been designed to highlight differences between the Soviet Union and the West. Its relevance as a term would diminish as the Cold War came to an end (Spiro 1968: 108, 112). At an analytical level, it was seen to be a static model, which could not embrace the dynamic, changing nature of Soviet reality or differences between communist regimes (Curtis 1969: 105). Another criticism was that it was too general a term. American historian Robert Tucker argued that ’Stalinism’ should be treated as a phenomenon in its own right and not just as a variant of totalitarianism (Tucker 1977: xiii). Tucker's own analysis of the Stalin regime led him to argue that the Stalin regime employed methods that were reminiscent of certain features of pre-revolutionary Russian political culture. Stalin, like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great before him, sought to create a powerful state to defeat his enemies and transform a backward society (see also Document 9.7).

Document 1.4 Stalinism as Revolution from Above

The basic underlying fact confronting us is that when the Russian revolutionary process resumed in the Stalinist stage, it had a different character from the revolutionary process of destruction of the old order and makeshift creation of the new that had marked the earlier, 1917–1921 stage; and this change of character is to be understood in terms of a reversion to a revolutionary process seen earlier in Russian history. ..

Stalinism as revolution from above was a state-building process, the construction of a powerful, highly centralized bureaucratic, military-industrial Soviet Russian state. Although it was proclaimed ’socialist’ in the mid-1930’s, it differed in various vital ways from what most socialist thinkers – Marx, Engels, and Lenin among them – had understood socialism to mean. Stalinist ’socialism’ was a socialism of mass poverty rather than plenty; sharp social stratification rather than relative equality; of universal, constant fear rather than emancipation of personality; of national chauvinism rather than brotherhood of man; and of a monstrously hypertrophied state power rather than the decreasingly statified commune-state delineated by Marx in The Civil War in France and by Lenin in The State and Revolution.

It was not, however, by mere caprice or accident that this happened. Stalinist revolutionism from above had a prehistory in the political culture of Russian tsarism; it existed as a pattern in the Russian past and hence could be seen by a twentieth-century statesman as both a precedent and legitimation of a political course that would, in essentials, recapitulate the historical pattern …

Confronted in the aftermath of the two-century long Mongol domination with hostile and in some cases more advanced neighbor-states …, the princes – later tsars – of Muscovy undertook the building of a powerful ‘military-national’ state capable of gathering the Russian lands under its aegis. Given the primacy of the concern for external defence and expansion and the country's relative economic backwardness, the government proceeded by remodeling the social structure, at times by forcible means, in such a way that all classes of the population were bound in one or another form of compulsory service to the state …

[Under Peter I] the pattern of revolution from above emerged most distinctly, one of its most prominent aspects being an industrial revolution from above aimed at building a powerful Russian war-industrial base.

Source: Robert Tucker, ’Stalinism as Revolution from Above’, in Stalinism, 1977, pp. 95–9

The term ’Stalinism’, embracing as it does the uniqueness of the Stalin regime, has become a more popular descriptive device than ‘totalitarianism’. However, even that can pose problems. For Stalin was in power for long enough for his system to undergo considerable change. For example, the extent of Stalin's power and his style of decision-making changed throughout his rule. Furthermore, his ideology also changed. Many historians observe that in the 1930s there was a break with revolutionary approaches to education, the family and the arts (and in the 1940s to religion), and a turn to conservative policies; egalitarianism was set aside; Russian nationalism was embraced. Trotsky, using the language of the French Revolution, suggested that there was a ‘Thermidorian reaction’ against revolutionary principles (Trotsky 1972: 86–114). The Russian emigre historian, Nikolai Timasheff, in his The Great Retreat ([1946] 1972) argued that in the 1930s and 1940s in the USSR an amalgamation of pre-revolutionary Russian values with the communist system of beliefs occurred.

Document 1.5 ‘The Great Retreat’

The main pattern of the Great Retreat has been the amalgamation of traits of the historical and national culture of Russia with traits belonging to the Communist cycle of ideas and behavior patterns …

The pattern of amalgamation may be demonstrated in a large number of fields of sociocultural activity. The Russian Orthodox Church is once more a recognized, even partly privileged body; this is in accordance with historical tradition. But the State teaches antireligion in schools; this is in accordance with Communist principles. The kolkhoz is a Communist institution, but individual allotments and cattle-breeding revive parts of the old order. Painting repeats the style of the ‘eighties’ of the nineteenth century, but it is used to produce portraits of the heroes of our day. In literature, Alexis Tolstoy's masterpiece, Peter the Great, is written in the grand style of pre-Revolutionary days, but is conceived in such a way as to show that Stalin is a dignified successor of the greatest of Russian monarchs… .

The old school order, the old-fashioned type of family, the gamut of titles, ranks and orders of merit, even Church discipline all proved to be very helpful in consolidating the dictatorial system.

Source: Nikolai Timasheff, The Great Retreat, 1972, pp. 354, 355, 358.

The idea that a ‘great retreat’ had occurred has retained its popularity since Timasheff proposed it (see Fitzpatrick 1982: 147). However, the nature of this retreat or reaction has been disputed. American historian Martin Malia has argued that ‘there never was a Soviet Thermidor’, that Russian Jacobinism remained in control, and that nationalism was a misleading term to describe the ideology which took over in the mid-l930s (Malia 1994: 235). Another perspective is that this shift was not so much a retreat as a move away from the construction of socialism to its defence against external threats (Kotkin 1995: 357). Whichever approach one takes, it is difficult to maintain that Stalinist ideology was unchanging. It has been persuasively argued, for example, that Stalinism really encompasses ...

Índice

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the text
• Map: Republics, major cities and other towns in the USSR, 1945
• 1 Interpreting the Stalin era
• 2 From Lenin to Stalin
• 3 Collectivisation
• 4 Industrialisation
• 5 Terror
• 6 Government
• 7 Stalin: The man and the cult
• 8 The Second World War
• 9 Education and science
• 10 The family
• 11 Religion: The Russian Orthodox Church
• 12 The artist and the state
• 13 The problem of ends and means
• 14 Overview
• Bibliography
• Index