Conversations with Stalin (20 page)

Every crime was possible to Stalin, for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure, in any event—let us hope for all time to come—to him will fall the glory of being the greatest criminal in history. For in him was joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

I was more interested, and am more interested, in how such a dark, cunning, and cruel individual could ever have led one of the greatest and most powerful states, not just
for a day or a year, but for thirty years! Until precisely this is explained by Stalin's present critics—I mean his successors—they will only confirm that in good part they are only continuing his work and that they contain in their own make-up those same elements—the same ideas, patterns, and methods that propelled him. For in carrying out his undertakings not only did Stalin find it to his advantage to deal with an exhausted and desperate Russian postrevolutionary society, but it is also true that certain strata of that society, to be more exact, the ruling political bureaucracy of the Party, found use for just such a man—one who was reckless in his determination and extremely practical in his fanaticism. The ruling Party followed him doggedly and obediently—and he truly led it from victory to victory, until, carried away by power, he began to sin against it as well. Today this is all it reproaches him for, passing in silence over his many greater and certainly no less brutal crimes against the “class enemy”—the peasantry and the intelligentsia, and also the left and right wings within the Party and outside of it. And as long as that Party fails to break, both in its theory and especially in its practice, with everything that comprised the very originality and essence of Stalin and of Stalinism, namely, with the ideological unitarianism and so-called monolithic structure of the Party, it will be a bad but reliable sign that it has not emerged from under Stalin's shadow. Thus the present joy over the liquidation of the so-called anti-Party group of Molotov, despite all the odiousness of his personality and the depravity of his views, seems to me to be shallow and premature. For the essence of the problem is not whether this group is better than that, but that they should exist at all—and whether, at least as a beginning, the ideological and political monopoly of a single group in the USSR shall be ended. Stalin's dark presence continues to hover and—assuming that there will not be a war—one can fear that it will hover over the Soviet Union for a relatively long time. Despite the curses against his name, Stalin still lives in the social and spiritual foundations of the Soviet society.

The references to Lenin in speeches and solemn declarations cannot change the substance. It is much easier to expose this or that crime of Stalin's than to conceal the fact that it was this man who “built socialism,” who gave rise to the foundations of present Soviet society and of the Soviet empire. All this bespeaks the fart that Soviet society, despite its gigantic technical achievements, and perhaps largely because of them, has barely begun to change, that it is still imprisoned in its own, Stalinist, dogmatic framework.

Despite this criticism, the hopes do not seem entirely baseless that in the foreseeable future new ideas and phenomena may appear which, though they may not shake Khrushchev's “monolithism,” will at least cast light on its contradictions and on its essence. At the moment the conditions for more substantial changes do not exist. Those who govern are still themselves too poor to find dogmatism and monopoly of rule a hindrance or superfluous, while the Soviet economy can still exist enclosed in its own empire and can absorb the losses caused by its separation from the world market.

To be sure, much that is human assumes proportions and values according to the corner from which it is viewed.

So it is with Stalin.

If we assume the viewpoint of humanity and freedom, history does not know a despot as brutal and as cynical as Stalin was. He was methodical, all-embracing, and total as a criminal. He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to “make happy” the one tenth.

However, if we wish to determine what Stalin really meant in the history of Communism, then he must for the present be regarded as being, next to Lenin, the most grandiose figure. He did not substantially develop the ideas of Communism, but he championed them and brought them to realization in a society and a state. He did not construct an ideal society—something of the sort is not even possible in the very nature of humans and human society, but he transformed backward Russia into an industrial power and an empire that is ever more resolutely and implacably aspiring to world mastery.

Viewed from the standpoint of success and political adroitness, Stalin is hardly surpassed by any statesman of his time.

I am, of course, far from thinking that success in political struggles is the only value. It especially does not occur to me to identify politics with amorality, though I do not deny that, by the very fact that politics involve a struggle for the survival of given human communities, they are thereby marked by a disregard for moral norms. For me great politicians and great statesmen are those who can join ideas and realities, those who can go forward steadfastly toward their aims while at the same time adhering to the basic moral values.

All in all, Stalin was a monster who, while adhering to abstract, absolute, and fundamentally utopian ideas, in practice recognized, and could recognize, only success—violence, physical and spiritual extermination.

However, let us not be unjust toward Stalin! What he wished to accomplish, and even that which he did accomplish, could not be accomplished in any other way. The forces that swept him forward and that he led, with their absolute ideals, could have no other kind of leader but him, given that level of Russian and world relations, nor could they have been served by different methods. The creator of a closed social system, he was at the same time its instrument and, in changed circumstances and all too late, he became its victim. Unsurpassed in violence and crime, Stalin was no less the leader and organizer of a certain social system. Today he rates very low, pilloried for his “errors,” through which the leaders of that same system intend to redeem both the system and themselves.

And yet, despite the fact that it was carried out in an inappropriate operetta style, Stalin's dethronement proves that the truth will out even if only after those who fought for it have perished. The human conscience is implacable and indestructible.

Unfortunately, even now, after the so-called de-Stalinization, the same conclusion can be reached as before: Those who wish to live and to survive in a world different from the one Stalin created and which in essence and in full force still exists must fight.

(
Prepared by the Publisher
)

 

GEORGI FEDOROVICH ALEKSANDROV (1908– )

Leading Soviet philosopher and Communist Party member since 1928. He worked in the Agitation and Propaganda Section (Agitprop) of the Central Committee from 1934 and was its head from 1939 to 1947. His book
History of Western European Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
, published in 1944, was officially attacked by Zhdanov for presenting Marxism as a part of the Western philosophical tradition. In 1950 he was official commentator on the philosophical implications of Stalin's articles on linguistics. He served as Minister of Culture in 1954–1955, after which he joined the Institute of Philosophy of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences in Minsk.

 

VLADIMIR BAKARIĆ (1912– )

Croatian who joined the Communist underground in 1933 as a student and was sentenced in 1934 to three years in prison. In 1941 he joined the Partisans. After the war he became Premier of Croatia. In 1946 he was a member of the Yugoslav delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris. He is the ranking Communist leader in Croatia.

 

LAVRENTY PAVLOVICH BERIA (1899–1953)

Georgian Communist who made a career in the Soviet Secret Police—the Cheka, GPU, and NKVD. As Commissar for Internal Affairs from 1938 to 1948 and Deputy Prime Minister in charge of security from 1941 to 1953, he ended the Great Purge by liquidating his predecessor, N. I. Yezhov, and many other officials and also directed the reign of terror, not only in the Soviet Union but in the satellite states, that marked Stalin's last years. He was purged in the power struggle following Stalin's death.

 

SEMËN MIKHAILOVICH BUDËNNY (1883– )

Marshal of the Soviet Union, from 1935. He was active in the Revolution of 1917. From 1939 he has been a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and in 1940 was First Vice-Commissar of Defense.

 

NIKOLAI IVANOVICH BUKHARIN (1888–1938)

Leading Bolshevik theorist and member of the Politburo from 1918 to 1929 who supported Stalin against Trotsky but was himself stripped of power by Stalin as leader of the Right Opposition and executed during the Great Purge. Many of his ideas have found expression in post-Stalin revisionism, especially in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.

 

NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH BULGANIN (1895– )

Soviet politician. He joined the Communist Party in 1917, and was a member of the Supreme Soviet from 1937 to 1958. From 1941 to 1944 he was a member of the Military Council, and the following year served on the State Defense Committee. Other posts he has held have been: Deputy People's Commissar of Defense (1944–1947), Minister of Defense (1947–1949 and 1953–1955), Chairman of the Council of Ministers (1955–1958), member of the Politburo (1948–1952), member of the Presidium (1952–1958), and Prime Minister (1955–1958).

 

VLKO ČHERVENKOV (1900– )

Bulgarian Communist leader who joined the Party in 1919. He was forced to flee Bulgaria for the USSR in 1915 with his wife, Dimitrov's sister, for his complicity in the infamous bombing in the Sofia Cathedral. He completed his studies at the Lenin Party School in the USSR and joined the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Communist International. In 1937, during the Great Purge, he was made director of the Lenin School, which post he held until the school was closed in 1941. During the Second World War he managed the Soviet radio station Khristo Botev, which broadcast to Bulgaria. On September 9, 1944, he returned to Bulgaria to take over the Secretariat of the Communist Party. In January 1950 he succeeded Kolarov as Premier. In November of the same year he became Secretary General of the Party but gave up the post after Stalin's death. He served as Minister of Culture and was eventually reinstated in the Politburo.

 

BOGDAN CRNOBRNJA (1916– )

Yugoslav teacher who joined the Partisans during the Second World War. After the liberation, he served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and of Foreign Affairs. Since 1955 he has been Yugoslav Ambassador to India.

 

PEKO DAPČEVIĆ (1913– )

Communist Yugoslav general. He joined the Party in 1933 as a student at the University of Belgrade. His first military experience came in 1936 as a company commander in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. With the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, he led the Partisan uprising in his native Montenegro and thereafter rose rapidly to the Supreme Headquarters of the Army of People's Liberation. In 1945 he was awarded the medal of People's Hero. The following year he commanded the Yugoslav Fourth Army in the Yugoslav zone of Veneria-Guilia, the hinterland of Trieste, and was then assigned to direct the guerrilla action in Northern Greece. From 1953 he served as Chief of the Yugoslav General Staff, but was demoted as a result of being indirectly implicated in the Djilas affair; it was his actress wife, Milena Vrajak, whom Djilas defended against the “New Class.”

 

GEORGI DIMITROV (1882–1949)

Bulgarian Communist leader who was one of the organizers of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1909. After a career as underground activist and union organizer in Bulgaria, he was released from prison through Russian intervention in 1921 and for the next two decades served in the Comintern. He was General Secretary of the Communist International in Moscow for nine years, and was the author of the Popular Front policy of the thirties. He gained world-wide prominence as a result of his trial, and acquittal, in Berlin in 1933 for complicity in the Reichstag fire. After the Second World War he gave up his Soviet citizenship and returned to Bulgaria to assume leadership of the Communists there and to carry out the Communization of that country. He became Premier in 1946.

 

MAXIM GORKY (1868–1936)

Russia's leading revolutionary novelist. His works—notably
Mother, The Artamonov Business
, and
Klim Samgin
—were a condemnation of capitalist society. Though he gave considerable financial support to the Bolsheviks, he opposed their seizure of power and lived in exile from 1921 to 1928. Upon his return, he headed the Writers' Union and was declared founder of the school of Socialist Realism. A close friend of Stalin's, he became a leading apologist for the Soviet regime. He died in allegedly mysterious circumstances in 1936. Official blame for his death was placed on the “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists” and the Trotskyites during the Bukharin show trial of 1938. Since then, Stalin himself has been accused of complicity in his death.

 

ANDRIJA HEBRANG (1899–1948)

Yugoslav Communist leader from Croatia. He spent twelve years in prison before the Second World War for his activities in the trade-union movement. Upon his release he became Secretary of the Croatian Communist Party. He was a leader of the National Liberation Movement from the start, in 1941, and held high offices after the war, among them Minister of Industry, member of the Presidium of both the Yugoslav and Croatian Constituent Assemblies, and Chairman of the Federal Planning Commission. In 1946 the Party's Central Committee investigated his past and found him guilty of cowardice during the war and of collaboration with the Croatian Fascist UstaÅ¡i. He was also declared a “fractionist” and relieved of his posts. In 1948 he was arrested, allegedly while trying to escape to Rumania. He committed suicide while awaiting trial. Some sources claim he was murdered in jail.