The Great Terror

To discuss Stalin’s character and beliefs is not to estimate his abilities. There have been two main views of these. On the first, he was an infallible genius, a “Coryphaeus of science,” an inspired leader of the human race, and so forth. On the second, he was a mediocrity. The first view, taken (during Stalin’s lifetime) by Professor Bernal, Khrushchev, and others, has been submitted to enough destructive criticism, and we need hardly deal with it. The view that he was a nonentity who reached the top by luck and low cunning still has influence. It is true that most of those who hold it would concede that he was also a monster. But they would grant him few other active qualities.

The Menshevik historian Sukhanov, soon to be his victim, described him in 1917 as making no more impression than a gray blur. Trotsky called him “the most outstanding mediocrity in our Party.”²⁷

And Khnishchev later said, in his Secret Speech of 1956, “I shall probably not be sinning against the truth when I say that ninety-nine percent of the persons present here heard and knew very little about Stalin before 1924.” He had, in fact, made little impression on the talkative politicians of the Party at that time. Thus there was some basis for the judgment of Trotsky and his successors. But on the whole it was a shallow one, as later events bore out. The qualities Stalin lacked and Trotsky possessed were not the essentials for political greatness. And Lenin alone among the Bolshevik leaders had recognized Stalin’s ability.

It is early yet to look at his career objectively, with his technique of despotism simply “considered as a fine art.” Nevertheless, we can avoid dismissing with the negative estimate of his unsuccessful rivals and their intellectual heirs the brilliant politician who was able to produce such vast and horrible effects.

Stalin had a good average grasp of Marxism, and though his adaptations of that flexible doctrine to suit his purposes were not so elaborate or so elastic as the similar interpretations of his rivals and predecessors, they were adequate to his career. His lack of the true theoretician’s mind was noted by many, and he seems to have resented it.

Bukharin told Kamenev in July 1928 that Stalin was “eaten up with the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks.” The old Marxist scholar Ryazanov once interrupted Stalin when he was theorizing: “Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows that theory is not exactly your field.” Nevertheless, as Isaac Deutscher rightly comments, his great theoretical departure—“socialism in one country”—however crude and even un-Marxist a notion, was a powerful and appealing idea.²⁸

Deutscher says that “the interest of practitioners of Stalin’s type in matters of philosophy and theory was strictly limited…. The semi-intelligentsia from whom socialism recruited some of its middle cadres enjoyed Marxism as a mental labor-saving device.” But this view exaggerated Stalin’s philosophical clumsiness. Or rather, perhaps, it overrates the more philosophical Bolsheviks, such as Lenin, with whom Deutscher goes on to compare him. Lenin’s only venture into philosophy proper—Materialism and Empirio-Criticism—is

his least impressive work. Stalin’s brief summary of Marxism, which appears in Chapter 4 of the “Short Course” History of the All-Union Communist Party, is, in an unpretentious way, as clear and able an account as there is. Georg Lukacs, the veteran Communist theoretician (who in the 1950s showed some revulsion from Stalinism), commented, “Since we have to do with a popular work written for the masses, no one could find fault with Stalin for reducing the quite subtle and complex arguments of the classics on this theme to a few definitions enumerated in schematic text book form.”²⁹

With the exception of Zinoviev, Stalin was the only non-“intellectual” in Lenin’s leadership. But his knowledge of more truly relevant matters was not small. Djilas tells us that “Stalin had considerable knowledge of political history only, especially Russian, and he had an uncommonly good memory. Stalin really did not need any more than this for his role.”³⁰

In 1863, Bismarck reminded the Prussian Chamber that “politics is not an exact science.” It would have been a truism to every previous generation, and he was perhaps provoked into giving the idea such definite expression by the rise of the new rationalism in historical science, of the claims to rigor of the social and political professors. Among the Russian Communists of the post-Revolutionary period, this tendency had reached its fullest development. They were political scientists; they were using the methods of the political science devised by Marx, the Darwin of society. Everything was discussed in theoretical terms.