The Great Terror

When the Revolution came, Stalin appeared to be outshone by many glittering contemporaries. The time since had been spent in ceaseless political maneuver. As a result, he had defeated in turn every rival, and had now been for five years the undisputed head of State and Party; he had lately had his methods put to the severest test in the collectivization campaign and, against all prediction, had won through. This had not proved enough for him. Contrary to all that Marx had thought, we shall find in the Soviet Union of the Stalin epoch a situation in which the economic and social forces were not creating the method of rule. On the contrary, the central factor was ideas in the mind of the ruler impelling him to action very often against the natural trend of such forces. An idealist conception of history was for once correct. For Stalin created a machine capable of taking on the social forces and defeating them, and infused it with his will. Society was reconstructed according to his formulas. It failed to reconstruct him.

As the physicist Alexander Weissberg, himself a victim of the Great Purges, points out, a Marxist view of history—and, one might say, any sociological interpretation of politics—has its validity restricted “to systems which allow of the application of the statistical conception,”¹ just as with the other true sciences. When a society is so organized that the will of one man, or.a small group, is the most powerful of the political and social forces, such explanations must give way, at least to a very considerable degree, to a more psychological style.

And so we are driven to an examination of the individual Joseph Stalin. But, as Arthur Koestler remarks:

What went on in No. I’s brain? … What went on in the inflated grey whorls? One knew everything about the far-away spiral nebulae, but about them nothing. That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: ‘Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process’. And, pointing with his ruler to a grey foggy landscape between the second and third lobes of No. 1’s brain: ‘Now here you see the subjective reflection of these factors. It was this which in the second quarter of the twentieth century led to the triumph of the totalitarian principle in the East of Europe’. Until this stage was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, mere superstition and black magic…²

Stalin’s head “had a solid peasant look about it,”³

but his face was pockmarked and his teeth were uneven. His eyes were dark brown with a tinge of hazel. He had a stiff left arm and shoulder, the result of an accident when he was about ten. His torso was short and narrow, and his arms were too long.fn1 Like many ambition-driven men he was very short, only about five feet, three inches. He raised himself an inch or so by specially built shoes, and at the May Day and 7 November parades stood on a wooden slab which gave him another inch or two. Bukharin said:

It even makes him miserable that he cannot convince everyone, including himself, that he is a taller man than anybody else. That is his misfortune; it may be his most human trait and perhaps his only human trait; his reaction to his ‘misfortune’ is not human—it is almost devilish; he cannot help taking revenge for it on others, but especially those who are in some way better or more gifted than he is….⁴

Such psychological science as we have would turn also to Stalin’s childhood. W. H. Auden wrote of the origins of another dictatorship:

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence…

and not only in the history of a country, but in the early life of a dictator:

Find what occured at Linz …

But it seems doubtful if it will ever be possible really to trace what occurred at Gori, where Stalin was born and grew up, in anything like the detail implied. In any case, the necessary type of research, the free questioning of relatives and contemporaries and others in the area, has not been possible; even if it were soon to become so, it is by now presumably too late. Not that any definitive and generally accepted psychological study of the formation even of Hitler has emerged either; a fortiori, on the little and dubious evidence before us in Stalin’s case, it would seem best not to venture even the sketchiest reconstruction.