The Legacy of Uncle Joe
Ulam, Adam B.
"The Legacy of Uncle Joe" The Legacy of Uncle Joe Stalin is both the source of strength for the regime and its...
...But they realized that with him gone, what was already a military disaster might turn into an irretrievable national catastrophe...
...Foreign Communists worshipped him as blindly as did the most fanatical member of the Communist Youth in Russia...
...in Cuba, when in an awful but prescient poem Yevtushenko sought to warn him of an unpleasant surprise which might be in store for the cunning leader right there in Moscow: "I beseech our government, oh, double, triple the guard at the grave so that Stalin may not rise again...
...Consider the Communist Party...
...Khrushchev tried intermittently and inconsistently to bring the system back to its Leninist prototype...
...Though medically he's been dead as of 9:50 p.m., March 5, 1953, politically Joseph Stalin remains very much alive, certainly not a man who can be trifled with by any Soviet politician...
...If nationalism helped the Soviet regime to survive, then terror in conjunction with nationalism enabled Stalin to retain absolute power, even at the end when he was a sick and apparently unbalanced man...
...The average Soviet citizen has little use for the official ideology, yet can he entirely escape the stirrings of pride at the thought that his country has millions of followers and admirers all over the world...
...But this was precisely the lesson Stalin was trying to inculcate: Only he was above suspicion, the rock and foundation upon which the whole system, the nation's unity and security, reposed...
...But this is far from having been the only instance of Stalin's posthumous intervention in Soviet politics...
...Perhaps the term "naivetd" has been overused in this connection...
...THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER TEN / AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1977 Adam B. U/am The Legacy of Uncle Joe Stalin is both the source of strength for the regime and its mostperplexing dilemma, the teaoher of the present rulers and their severe critic and rival...
...But things went hard for those who to his suspicious eye appeared to denigrate Russia's past and culture...
...Once he recovered from the nervous breakdown brought by the news of the German invasion, Stalin, at first in a radio speech on July 3, tried the human touch combined with an ideological motif: "Brothers, sisters, I speak to you my friends" urging them to "unite around the Party of Lenin and Stalin...
...At the height of forced collectivization, which brought the country to the verge of economic and social chaos, Stalin sought to convince his countrymen that his inhuman and senseless policies were necessary for national salvation: "The history of Old Russia shows that because of her backwardness she was being constantly defeated...
...Some of them were "rootless cosmopolites," often Jewish in origin, who admired the false gods of the West...
...Any other nation would have made short shrift of the leaders who allowed such disasters to happen...
...He has seen the future and it works, wrote Lincoln Steffens after his visit to the Soviet Union in the 1930s...
...Nationalism was the primary justification of the deal with Hitler...
...It took some four hundred thousand soldiers to bring the errant Czechoslovak comrades to their senses, whereas in Stalin's time one telephone call would have been enough...
...But would not any thoroughgoing liberalization of the Soviet regime lead inevitably to the claims for independence or at least genuine autonomy for the Ukraine, Georgia, etc...
...You did not have the undignified spectacle of the Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs slandering with impunity (certainly by comparison with what be would have done to them) the socialist fatherland, of its leaders having to plead with the Italian comrades about their policies and criticisms, and to haggle with the Americans over how many Jews should be rewarded for their anti-Soviet sentiments by being allowed to emigrate...
...Wells in 1934...
...It cannot be claimed that during the few years which remained to him, his Russian subjects were as a group treated better then those of other ethnic groups...
...The regime can no longer afford to be monstrously inhuman the way it was before 1953, but neither can it afford to dispense with the essentially Stalinist style of repression and control of society...
...If you don't behave you'll end up with another Stalin" has been the unspoken message of every set of rulers since 1953 to their subordinates and the people at large...
...others the Ukrainian and Armenian, etc., writers and historians who failed to acknowledge that the annexation of their countries, even under the tsars, was "objectively" a progressive step, and that the achievements of their own nations had been possible only because of the unselfish fraternal help of the Russian nation...
...A patriotic Russian may have a fairly realistic estimate of the system under which he lives and of his rulers...
...Party congresses held annually still heard criticisms of Lenin and his closest collaborators, major political issues were still vigorously debated, even though by hook or by crook, the ruling group would always in the end get its way...
...Stalin was for the writer "a blind and (personally) unimportant instrument" of forces created by the Communist system...
...The Stalin period and his shattered legend are thus not only of historical interest...
...His memory remains a powerful incentive to the average Soviet citizen to count his present blessings and be modest in his aspirations: What is an occasional food shortage or an arrest of a dissident compared with what went on under Stalin...
...A lifelong student of Russia and a Fabian Socialist, Sir John Maynard wrote at the height of the purges: "[Stalin's] constitution of 1936 with the accompanying hints of a desire to construct a true democracy show that he has no successor in whom he is able to repose full confidence and that he seeks to protect his people against the consequences of a less able rule than his own...
...Officially, and with apparent conviction when the occasion warranted it, he was the leader and chief ideologue of a movement which transcended national boundaries and feelings, in fact considered them as anachronistic...
...So there is Stalin, both the source of strength for the regime and at the same time its most perplexing dilemma, the teacher of the present rulers, and at the same time their severe critic and rival...
...It would take a whole treatise to explore the question of why so many Western intellectuals can express disagreement with their own society mainly by embracing false and tyrannous idols...
...Political pluralism was not entirely dead in Soviet society, certainly the Trade Unions retained considerable autonomy...
...Where will it all end...
...I have never met a man more candid, fair, and honest" wrote H.G...
...While the average citizen already lived in fear, rank-and-file Communists, short of committing a crime, enjoyed immunity from the ministrations of the secret police...
...What would then happen to Russia...
...But if nationalism was such a crucial element in the Stalin cult, and terror its indispensable element, how can one explain his reputation abroad...
...6 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...
...Consider the Soviet youth and its growing fascination with the forbidden fruits of Western decadence...
...Consider October 1962...
...Nationalism, Soviet in its external form, Russian in its actual content, was thus psychologically the strongest prop of Stalin's tyranny, and of course it remains the chief support of the Soviet system today...
...How quickly did those modest areas of personal and collective autonomy disappear under Stalin...
...Nikita Khrushchev was just putting the finishing touches on the little surprise he was preparing for the U.S...
...And the deal enabled the Soviet Union to recover the territories which in the past, and of right, had belonged to the Russian state...
...You let a Solzhenitsyn tell even part of the truth about the past, others will follow in his footsteps, and soon millions will be filled not only with revulsion but with passionate anger against the system which allowed such horrors...
...Many, even among the dissidents, are unable to face forthrightly this question...
...Even more farsighted were the following lines: "I dream that a telephone has been placed in the coffin...no Stalin has not given up...
...And many Soviet people, including some in the forced labor camps, cried on that March day in 1953 when they heard that Stalin was no more...
...And many in the West still have not learned the lesson which Stalin's story epitomizes: Politics when turned into a religion spells tyranny...
...Perhaps things are not as clear-cut in this respect as they were before Maoism raised its ugly head...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 5 Much of Stalin's success in achieving and especially in retaining such enormous power can be traced to the ability of this Georgian, who to the end spoke his adopted language with an accent, to exploit and identify himself with Russian nationalism...
...Stalin's very crimes and errors rendered him indispensable...
...The national interest was, of course, also invoked as the rationale for terror...
...If on occasion his ghost rises wrathfully and smites a live politician, then in some ways he is a source of strength and comfort to his successors...
...Unless they directly challenged the ruling dogma, writers and artists enjoyed a degree of freedom...
...If the ghost retains so much influence on Soviet society, and remains in many ways its number one problem, what then of the live Stalin...
...Still millions of Frenchmen, Italians, and others apparently and somewhat incomprehensibly envy his lot...
...Gratitude to Stalin took peculiar forms...
...And it is better not even to speak about China...
...But when they did not and defeat followed upon defeat, he found a more convincing theme...
...We must make up this distance in ten years...or we go under...
...And they certainly have not been recovered after the tyrant s death...
...But the most explicit appeal to Russian nationalism came during the war...
...Even more amazingly, people with no political or emotional links to Communism purported to see in him a wise father of his people, devoted to their welfare and devoid of personal ambition...
...On other occasions, and equally convincingly, he was the spokesman for Soviet patriotism...
...And of course the discarding of mass terror made it all the more imperative that the judiciary remain an obedient servant of the political leadership...
...In November 1941, he evoked the memory of the heroes of Russia's past, going back to the Middle Ages, "May you be inspired.., by the gallantry of our great ancestors...
...Why should Russia--the Soviet Union--fight a war to save foreign capitalists, or for that matter, even foreign Communists...
...But at first in moments of national emergency, and then quite constantly, it was Mother Russia rather than the pallid image of the Socialist Fatherland which was invoked both to preserve the regime and his own power...
...And to be sure almost exactly two years later a call must have been put through on this phone to the offices of the Politburo, and Nikita Khrushchev was out on his ear...
...Well, be convinced quite a few, especially among the young, that the country's salvation and greatness excused the deaths and deportations of millions of peasants...
...His legacy still weighs heavily on Soviet society...
...The Soviet government, said Stalin in a very rare (for him) moment of candor, had made some mistakes before and during the first phase of the war...
...Flis closest subordinates must have been sorely tempted to get rid of the tyrant when he was unable to function during the first week of the German invasion...
...The Communist system as shaped by Lenin, and Soviet Russia's political condition in the early twenties made Stalin possible, but certainly not inevitable...
...All those Trotskys, Zinovievs, Bukharins, etc., were not being punished or denounced because they displeased Comrade Stalin or begrudged his power, but because they were traitors in the employ of Hitler, the Japanese, etc...
...This man who accumulated personal power to an extent unprecedented in modern history must have had a genius for tyranny...
...He did it with an amazing cleverness and subtlety...
...Allow the gatherings of the Communist Party to resume some of their original deliberative functions, and before long the fifteen million or so party members might not be content to leave decisions concerning their and the whole country's future in the hands of the self-perpetuating group of fifteen to twenty men...
...Communism condemned and destroyed the jingoistic tradition of Imperial Russia, it urged loyalty and love of the Socialist Fatherland because, apart from serving social justice, this entirely new type of state enabled some one hundred twenty nationalities to live in perfect equality and to develop their distinctive cultures...
...True, there is another and embarrassing side to such comparisons...
...But not the Russians...
...Life was hard before 1953, but at least you had order, feels not an insignificant number of Soviet officials...
...And for all the official protestations to the contrary, today's Soviet reality owes more to Stalin than to Lenin...
...Solzhenitsyn begrudges him greatness even as a force for evil...
...One of Khrushchev's main sins in the eyes of his colleagues was his garrulity about his predecessor, his tendency whenever in trouble to come out with yet another installment of Stalin's Unbelievable Yet True Crimes, and dark hints that some of his accomplices were still around resisting his, Khrushchev's, Leninist policies...
...We are behind the leading countries by fifty or one hundred years...
...On Lenin's illness and withdrawal from active politics in 1922, it was far from being a mere instrument in the hands of whoever was at the top, be it a single dictator or, as at present, a handful of Politburo leaders...
...But of course he could not succeed...
...His colleagues felt, probably justifiably from their point of view, that to discard even one basic feature of the Stalinist model meant to imperil the whole totalitarian structure...
...But it is unlikely that history will endorse this verdict...
...It is often argued that the purges were irrational for they could not but convince the Soviet common man that his whole government, the highest officials included, was shot through with treason...
...At the end of the war he paid a special tribute to the Russian nation...
...One does not stop when seized by patriotic elation to ask such questions as how Old Russia, which was being "constantly defeated," yet managed to stretch over one-sixth of the earth...
...Perhaps it is especially a man of ideas, one with a highly developed critical faculty, who tends to become impressed by a man of action whose very personality appears to radiate self-assurance and power, tt is instructive how with Stalin gone and his myth exposed, so many wanderers after Utopia professed to find it in Communist China with Mao as the new semi-god...
Vol. 10 • August 1977 • No. 10
