The Great Terror

In the political struggle, Stalin’s great characteristic was precisely “nerve.” He had complete determination and considerable patience, together with an extraordinary ability to apply and to relax pressure at the right moment, which carried him through a series of critical situations, until his final victory.

At the center of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called “moral fortitude” higher in a general than genius or experience. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav–Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilovid was “a shrewd man,” Stalin commented, as though to himself, “Yes, there are politicians who think shrewdness is the main thing in politics….”⁴⁵ His was a will power taken to a logical extreme. There is something nonhuman about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.

He is said to have been a constant reader of Machiavelli, as indeed is reasonable enough. In Chapter 15 of The Prince

, he would find the simple advice that rulers should in no case practice villainies which might lose them the State, but must nevertheless, if it comes to the worst, “not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the State,” making whatever effort is feasible to “escape the evil reputation” involved. Or, again, in Chapter 18, Machiavelli recommends the appearance of mercy, faithfulness, and so forth, while noting that the Prince “and especially a new Prince, must often act in a fashion contrary to those virtues.”

When the great film director Eisenstein produced his film on Ivan the Terrible, Stalin objected to his attitude. He had been inclined to treat Ivan, in the way most people have, as a ruthless and paranoid terrorist. Stalin told Eisenstein and the actor N. K. Cherkasov that, on the contrary, Ivan had been a great and wise ruler who had protected the country from the infiltration of foreign influence and had tried to bring about the unification of Russia. “J. V. Stalin also remarked on the progressive role played by the Oprichnina [Ivan’s Secret Police]”; Stalin’s criticism of Ivan was limited to his having “failed to liquidate the five remaining great feudal families.” On that point, Stalin added humorously, “There God stood in Ivan’s way”—since Ivan, after liquidating one family, would repent for a year “when he should have been acting with increasing decisiveness.”fn2

Stalin also understood how to destroy his enemies’ political reputations. He could have learned in certain respects from another totalitarian leader whom he to some extent admired. Hitler gives a recipe for the whole tenor of the Purges:

The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary…. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies…. Where there are various enemies … it will be necessary to block them all together as forming one solid front, so that the mass of followers in a popular movement may see only one common enemy against whom they have to fight. Such uniformity intensifies their belief in their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.⁴⁶

But Stalin was deeper and more complex than Hitler. His view of humanity was cynical, and if he, too, turned to anti-Semitism, it was as a matter of policy rather than dogma. We can see traces of this later anti-Semitism, or rather anti-Semitic demagogy, as early as 1907, when he was remarking, in the small underground paper he then controlled at Baku, “Somebody among the Bolsheviks remarked jokingly that since the Mensheviks were the faction of the Jews and the Bolsheviks that of the native Russians, it would be a good thing to have a pogrom in the Party.”⁴⁷