The Great Terror

Unfortunately, the theories were not correct, and the claim to scientific rigor was, to say the least, premature. Even if their formulations had been closer to the definitiveness claimed for them, it is still perhaps doubtful if such leaders would have prevailed in actual politics: professors of ballistics do not necessarily make good baseball players. As it was, the more intuitive Stalin, less able to analyze and plan his moves in theoretical terms, had a fuller operational grasp of reality.

As his daughter remarks, in spirit Stalin was completely Russianized. He had not learned Russian until he was eight or nine, and always spoke it with an accent. But he spoke it well, and his conversation was often rich and vivid in a coarse way. Although not well educated, he was widely read in the Russian classics—in particular, the satirists Shchedrin and Gogol. He had also read when young a number of foreign authors in Russian translation—in particular, Victor Hugo—and popular works on Darwinism and social and economic matters. Gendarmerie reports on the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the last part of the nineteenth century mention the reading by students of “seditious” literature of this sort, and Stalin’s name appears in the seminary bad-conduct book a number of times for the discovery of such works from the local “Cheap Library,” showing that he was engaged in absorbing this sort of self-education.³¹

His style of writing was unsubtle, and here again his opponents sneered at him. Djilas associates it, and its crudeness, with the backward nature of revolutionary Russia: “it contains simplicities from the writings of the church fathers, not so much the result of his religious youth, as the result of the fact that this was the way of expression under primitive conditions.” Djilas adds elsewhere that “his style was colorless and monotonous, but its oversimplified logic and dogmatism were convincing to the conformists and to common people.”³²

But there is more to it than that. Clear and plain arguments are appealing not only to “common” minds. A Soviet official writes, “It was precisely his lack of brilliance, his plainness, which inclined us to believe what he said.”³³

Stalin is often described as having a curious effect of sullenness, but he could be charming enough, and had “a rough humor, self-assured but not entirely without subtlety and depth.”³⁴ In this he contrasts with the humorlessness of Lenin, and of Trotsky too. It seems doubtful that he would have had the same sort of success in a more experienced political community, but in the political circumstances in which Stalin found himself he proved a master. Tactically, he far outshone his rivals. Bukharin commented of him that he was a master of “dosing”—of giving the right dose at the right time. It is a measure of Bukharin’s own comparative ineptitude that he seems to have thought of this as an insult. In fact, it is a sound compliment to one of Stalin’s greatest strengths.

He won his position by devious maneuver. It is notable that from 1924 to 1934, there were none of the abrupt coups which mark the post-Stalin period. Stalin would attack and discredit a man, then appear to reach a compromise, leaving his opponent weakened but not destroyed. Bit by bit his opponents’ positions were undermined, and they were removed one by one from the leadership.

Lenin saw this side of Stalin’s political methods. When he was working to defeat Stalin on the Georgian issue in the last days of his active life, he told his secretary not to show Kamenev the notes he had prepared for Trotsky, or they would leak to Stalin, in which case “Stalin would make a rotten compromise in order then to deceive.”³⁵ And this indeed Stalin did in the months following Lenin’s death, exhibiting, as Gibbon says of Alaric, “an artful moderation, which contributed to the success of his designs.”

It was because Stalin never committed himself irretrievably until he felt certain of success that his opponents were so often put into a dilemma. They were never sure how far he was intending to go. And they could—and did—frequently delude themselves into thinking that he had submitted to the will of the Politburo majority, and would henceforth be possible to work with. Even when he was pressing forward hard to the terrorist solution of the question of the oppositionists, they were able to feel that this was partly due to the influence of Kaganovich and others, whom Stalin might well be induced to abandon if suitable arguments were produced. It is notable that few of the alternative solutions seriously put forward from 1930 onward envisaged the total removal of Stalin from positions of power, which alone could have saved the situation.