The Ghost of Stalin
CAMPBELL, KURT M.
GORBACHEV'S CHALLENGE The Ghost of Stalin By Kurt M. Campbell Mikhail S. Gorbachev's drive to open up Soviet society is stirring the Kremlin dead. TheSoviet leader'sedict that...
...Meanwhile, he promoted a public glorification of his reign...
...Gorbachev turned to thrash his bureaucratic foes, to revive debate and morale, to mobilize the intelligentsia, togivesocialism a human face...
...A State-sanctified nostalgia for his day persists, nourished by the lore of the Great Patriotic War, the resurgent Russian passion for order and discipline, and by a hankering for an idealized past of purer morals and higher ideals...
...Practically every step he has taken, from experimenting with decentralization and economic incentives to allowing artists greater freedom, is a challenge to the political system and the national psychology created by Stalin...
...His story, told through a series of furiously intense flashbacks, begins with his demise and somber funeral...
...Everyone who has spent some time in the Soviet Union sooner or later confronts Stalin's lingering legacy...
...Set in Stalin's home republic of Georgia, the film never mentions him by name or shows his face...
...It should be published at home first...
...Assisted by Nikolai I. Yezhov, who as head of the dreaded NKVD carried out the purges, Stalin in this fashion secured his dictatorship...
...Small photographs of the mustachioed marshal adorn the dashboards of Soviet taxis and trucks...
...It is abundantly clear that Varlam is not only the author of the insane logic of the terror trials, but actually relishes the virulence of his actions...
...The Soviet literary establishment has also published Anna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem," long viewed as the secret anthem of those who suffered at the dictator's hands...
...the line is that "we have to face this period in our history if we are to move forward...
...But where Khrushchev condemned the crimes of his predecessor almost feverishly, Gorbachev has proceeded more methodically...
...The baffled bureaucrats even construct a steel cage around his grave...
...Once he recovered from the shock of the German Army's invasion of the USSR in June 1941, he assumed personal command of the Soviet Armed Forces and led his country to ultimate victory...
...Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1879...
...There were flowers and decorations everywhere...
...Russia's Right-wing conservatives, militarists, pro-Statists, Great Russian chauvinists—in a word, Stalinists of all kinds—rally to uphold the legacy that reformers seek to change...
...Stalin showed no signs of mellowing or backing away from his tyrannical methods with age...
...it strongly hints that Stalin is responsible for the assassin's bullet...
...The ghost of Stalin himself, however, is still a powerful presence in the USSR...
...As a result, there has been a virtual flood of books, poems, movies and plays dealing with the Stalinist curse...
...The noted Soviet economist Anatoli Butenko has publicly criticized the crash industrialization program of the 1930s, and has traced the system's current disarray to the top-heavy bureaucracy created under the dictator's tenure...
...Molotov's real name was Skryabin...
...Large groups of citizens make the pilgrimage to his birthplace in the Caucasian city of Gori every year...
...He took a number of forceful fictitious names, settling ultimately on Stalin, which translates literally as "man of steel...
...He took me to a corner of the room and unlocked a door that led to a candle-lit shrine...
...The main character, Sasha Pankratov, is arrested, interrogated by the NKVD, and sentenced to exile in Siberia...
...Gorbachev is of course not the first to shine a light into the darkest recesses of the Soviet past...
...Many of her relatives and those of his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, disappeared during the purges...
...The Moscow News, one of the newspapers thrivingin the current climate of debate, recently reviewed Lenin's rarely cited "Testament...
...Some organize a protest petition...
...A second anti-Stalinist milestone is Tengiz Abuladze's film Repentance (Pokayaniye in Russian...
...There is strong reason to doubt that the moment is anywhere near at hand—let alone attainable altogether...
...Abuladze, when asked about the revelations of his film and the struggle to show it, quoted Leo Tolstoy: "Silence will not cure a disease...
...Petersburg, Stalin helped set up Pravda, and with Molotov co-directed the new Party newspaper the next year...
...With its appearance the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko declared, "This is a great moment in our literature...
...Many are fiercely opposed to letting it be made the subject of public discussion, books, plays, poems, and films, preferring that the dictator's role in their society be exalted rather than exhumed...
...In the shadow of the ghost of Stalin, it is at the least an open question whether Gorbachev and his followers represent the beginning of a truly new Soviet age or a prelude to another crackdown...
...As he struggles to promote his vision of a Soviet future free from the taint of Stalinism, he acknowledges that "Generations must pass for us to really change...
...He was the only child of four to survive infancy, and smallpox afflicted him with a partially withered left arm...
...No one was safe from his suspicions and wrath, not his closest family or comrades...
...After leaving the Caucasus in 1911 and settling in St...
...That the General Secretary's stated goal is to make the de-Stalinization process "irreversible" is itself a telltale sign of how deeply Stalinism is rooted beneath the surface of Soviet life...
...In addition, the General Secretary has appointed a new director of the Marxism-Leninism Institute, Georgi L. Smirnov, to oversee the completion of a new history of the Soviet Communist Party, due out this year...
...Although few statues or memorials remain outside of his native Georgia, reminders of his 24-year rule are everywhere...
...Stalin also presided over the largest transfer of industrial capacity in history, from European Russia eastward, just in front of advancing German troops...
...The Bolsheviks had adopted harsh measures to fight foreign interventions and put down domestic rivals, and had enacted a conservative program that was a sweeping retreat from the revolutionary rhetoric of the past...
...Stalin returned to what was now called Petrograd in the midst of a profound social and political upheaval...
...The late, gravel-voiced Soviet balladeer Vladimir Vysotsky wrote a popular song about sharing a prison cell with a man who had aprofile of Stalin tattooed on his chest...
...Overshadowed by Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik luminaries, he concentrated his efforts on the more mundane Party work while they engaged in speechmaking...
...And to hold a torch to Stalin's crimes, it should be added...
...The three Georgian brothers who prepared the exquisite cuisine of the Caucasus would often sit with Americans, asking polite questions about the capitalistic West...
...In negotiations with the Allies at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin shrewdly secured total Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe...
...Stalin was an early proponent of Bolshevism, having been attracted by Lenin's conception of a centralized, conspiratorial vanguard party leading the masses...
...After this, it will be impossible to have the same history books in our libraries and schools...
...By 1928 Stalin had achieved a dominant position within the Politburo...
...So it was to the arts Mr...
...Stalin was consciously aware of the uses of power, the abuses of power, how to get power and how to keep power...
...Millions were sent to labor camps in Siberia, virtually the entire elite of the Armed Forces and Party were shot, and at public show trials fantastic allegations were leveled against the accused...
...Yet while the Stalin mystique endures, knowledge of his life has been fragmentary and falsified...
...Generations must pass...
...But on December 1,1934, a lone assassin shot and killed Kirov in the corridor of his Leningrad office...
...Nikolai Shmelyov, a researcher at the influential Institute for the Study of the U.S.A...
...Written about a year before his death, after he had suffered two serious strokes, it urged his comrades to " find a way to remove Stalin...
...My own encounter came as a young consular assistant at the U.S...
...that should keep the old lion in," they assure each other...
...The battle against Stalin and his contemporary supporters is also being waged on the economic front...
...Drawing another link to Lenin, Gorbachev has declined to create a cult of personality around himself, in stark contrast to Stalin...
...Gorbachev is well aware of the profound reluctance to break with the past...
...As the New York Times' former Moscow correspondent, Serge Schmemann has observed, "It was for their power that Russian writers and poets from Pushkin on have been hounded and courted from the State, and that so many of the Soviet Union's finest masters of culture have ended up abroad or in labor camps...
...He demonstrated increasing skill and courage through the course of the War, helping to plan the defenses and counterof fensives for the battles of Moscow and Leningrad, and remaining in Moscow when Hitler's soldiers were close enough to see the stars on the Kremlin spires...
...In certain respects he is merely recommencing a campaign initiated by Nikita S. Khrushchev after Stalin's death in 1953...
...Moscow's most imposing architecture, the seven postwar gothic towers dotting the city that house the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Hotel Ukraine and Moscow State University, are often referred to as the Seven Sisters of Stalin...
...He further enjoys the advantage of having allies in the artistic community—including poets like Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akmadulina—who are products of the brief Khrushchev thaw...
...Another offered that "the trouble was Beria's doing...
...After World War II the repressions continued...
...The Soviets pioneered techniques of photographic airbrushing to remove unwanted individuals from early group portraits of the Bolsheviks...
...If this retreat continues and the moment for a Stalingrad does not come," he warned, "the result will be that the nation's values, and everything that constitutes spiritual pride of the people will be hurled into the abyss.' Robert C. Tucker, the noted Sovietologist, has aptly observed that "proStalin people remain numerous in today's Soviet society, not all of them aged career beneficiaries of Stalin's rule...
...Tears came to the man's eyes as he kneeled...
...At least we will know whether Perestroika has really started or whether it is all just words," he reportedly responded...
...In the course of Repentance we see that Varlam was responsible for creating the labor camps in the countryside and for the trials and executions of imagined enemies (e.g...
...A milestone in the campaign to expose Stalin's evil is Anatoli Rybakov's startling novel, Children oftheArbat...
...TheSoviet leader'sedict that "there should be no blank pages in history and literature" has set in motion the resurrection and reappraisal ol'such comrades of V.l...
...Upon reaching the pinnacle of power he launched a hopelessly ambitious plan of forced industrialization and collectivization designed to reshape backward Russia into a modern state...
...In Cyrillic letters below the ornately framed photo of Stalin was the inscription, Stalin voskresnet, shtobi pravit vnove—"Stalin will rise to rule again...
...And while carefully cultivating a public image of modesty and calm that appealed to a new Soviet elite who shared his humble origins, he installed his cadre of followers—men like Lavrenti P. Beria and Khrushchev— into key bureaucratic and Party posts in preparation for his day...
...Athome, Soviet energies after the War were devoted to recovery from the Nazi destruction...
...Tarasovka is the village ideal of Russia's pastoral past...
...The termination of the initial de-Stalinization drive with Khrushchev's ouster in 1964 was a sobering and discouraging experience for many among the present Communist party chief's generation...
...Stalin well understood the longing for stability many in the USSR felt...
...This pattern of apprehension and reappearance would frequently repeat itself in the coming years...
...All enterprises were nationalized, hundreds of thousands of better-off peasants—the so-called kulaks—were sent off to forced labor camps or executed, and the real and imagined opponents of these ruthless measures were crushed...
...It is also true that Stalin's former cohorts have sunk into anonymity...
...The scene evokes Gorbachev's disdain for the cult of official escapism that prevailed under Brezhnev...
...However, the next morning Varlam is again discovered on the steps of the government building...
...He was a very great man who forged a unity between the people," one brother said...
...Last March, a group of Western reporters was allowed to visit the Kolyma camps in Siberia, reminiscent of those described in Alcksandr Sol/henit syn's epic work The Gulag Archipelago...
...In 1913 Stalin was arrested for the sixth time and sentenced to lifetime exile in Siberia, where he bided his time hunting and fishing until the amnesty following the Tsar's abdication in 1917...
...when she committed suicide in 1932, she left a note condemning him...
...an absurd conspiracy of 3,000 men " to dig a tunnel from Bombay to London...
...By Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin was perfectly positioned to start maneuvering for supreme authority...
...Trotsky and Bukharin are depicted as devoted, though overzealous, associates of Lenin, whereas Stalin is portrayed as manipulative and opportunistic...
...onejoins the NKVD and informs on his comrades...
...Appreciating Stalin's ruthless organizational flair, at least at this stage, Lenin brought him into the inner circle of the Party...
...A different layer of Children oftheArbat focuses on Stalin the man, bringing us face to face with the cold-blooded logic that drove the regime of terror...
...Vladimir Dudintsev's novel, White Robes, is a moving account of Soviet geneticists forced to work under the twisted priorities of Stalinist science during the 1940s...
...Among the lines she wrought from her personal tragedy are these: For seventeen months I've called you To come home, I've pleaded —Oh, my son, my terror— Groveled...
...and Canada (who was once married to Khrushchev's granddaughter), declared at a closed session that no fewer than 17 million Soviet citizens passed through the labor camps as political prisoners between 1937 and Stalin's death in 1953...
...All is confused eternally— So much, I can't say who's Man, who's beast anymore, nor even How long till execution...
...Once obscure literary journals such as Druzhba Narodov and the formerly conservative Ogonyok are now on the cutting edge of glasnost...
...Moreover, Stalin's paranoia and ruthlessness were apparent long before the slaughter that marred the 1936-38 period...
...The Great Terror that began with Kirov's murder lasted until 1939...
...His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, charged that he was "butchering the people...
...But Gorbachev's most potent instrument is the arts...
...Subsequently his rotting corpse turns up every morning in town, and the officials who worked under him scurry to rebury their former boss...
...Mother History chose Rybakov to do this because he was a witness to that time...
...The title refers to a group of young friends who live on old Arbat street in the center of Moscow...
...He took his pseudonym from the Russian word for hammer, molot, and later earned the nickname "the hammer of the peasants" for his Draconian methods of collectivization...
...Russian and Soviet history have both been characterized by brief stints of reform—of glasnost and perestroïka, if you will—followed by long, intense periods of repression...
...Truly the old doesn't surrender without a fight...
...Toward the end of his life he was constantly surrounded by secret police bodyguards, and conferred only with his closest advisers—notably Beria, whom he had put in charge of the security forces...
...In 1899, a year after becoming a member of the Social Democratic Party of Georgia, he was expelled from the seminary for his clandestine associations...
...Nor is it uncommon for angry viewers to stalk out over the blasphemies on the screen...
...On the contrary, it will make it worse.' Repentance has attracted critical acclaim in the West, winning the Cannes Film Festival's Special Jury Prize, and has packed Moscow movie theaters since January...
...In a speech last March, Yuri Bondarev, a prominent conservative in the Russian Republic Writers' Union, issued what amounts to a ringing call for a counterattack...
...Like Churchill in Britain, he invoked images of duty and patriotism in his speeches, calling on his people to rise up and drive the invaders from Mother Russia...
...For them, to repudiate Stalin would be to condemn the entire Soviet experience...
...The notorious army of Glavlit Bureau censors (said to number nearly 10,000) have, at Gorbachev's urging, lowered barriers to publication...
...Less well remembered from this heroic time are Stalin's disastrous decision to enter into a pre-War nonaggression pact with Hitler, his insistence on keeping Soviet defenses down even while the Nazis were mobilizing, and his nervous collapse and complete inaction in the weeks immediately following the invasion...
...There are still powerful forces in the USSR that venerate the memory and works of Stalin...
...The spry 76-year-old, who was a tank commander during World War II, resisted many appeals to publish his magnum opus in the West...
...Khrushchev also tried to ensure that his campaign against Stalin was irreversible...
...Embassy in Moscow during the last dying days of détente...
...Akhmatova lost her husband to an executioner's bullet and saw her son arrested and imprisoned by Stalin's henchmen several times as an incentive for her to produce uplifting verse about the tyrant...
...Although Gorbachev maintains that Stalin's reign was an aberration, others in the USSR see in it a fulfillment of the Revolution's peculiar blend of Marxist ideology and Russian autarchy...
...The young Soviet state had struggled through a revolution and the ravages of a civil war...
...Finally, the eldest brother fixed his eyes on me and said he wanted me to see something very special...
...One evening, after much cognac, the conversation turned to Stalin...
...The "flame of glasnost," he said, has been stolen by "false democrats of justice and truth...
...That is the legacy, so completely woven into the fabric of Soviet history, which Gorbachev is now trying to deal with...
...There are indications, too, that Khrushchev will reappear in approved treatments, and that his remains will finally be moved from Novodevichy Cemetery and entombed in the Kremlin Wall...
...This grotesque "personality cult" included the placement of giant pictures of the Soviet leader in every town and city square in the USSR...
...others prefer to overlook the horror unfolding around them...
...His mother, a domestic servant, nursed him through many illnesses...
...The novel concludes with the gunman shooting Kirov in his Leningrad office...
...In 1919 Stalin was appointed to the newly formed Politburo, the inner sanctum of the Party, and was given the additional post of commissar for state control...
...Rybakov shows the way Pankratov's circle reacts to his fate...
...Stalin led the stunned nation in mourning and ordered his agents to arrest thousands, including Kamenev and Zinoviev, for their alleged complicity in the assassination...
...Where Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich describes the regimen inside the camps, Rybakov tells the harrowing tale of how ordinary people ended up in them...
...Aleksandr Bek's The New Appointments a stark and troubling depiction of moral decay and fear among those working in Stalin's government...
...In the past year the Soviets have also begun to lift the veil on Stalin's labor camps...
...The most difficult aspect of the process has been clearing the way for an examination of the brutal record of the man who purged those Bolshevik founding fathers and ushered in a long reign of madness and misery—Joseph V. Stalin...
...Rybakov's highly autobiographical work ("Sasha is me," he says) was finished 20 years ago, but is only now being issued in the Soviet Union...
...Some of the photos displayed in museums and books today show Lenin standing virtually alone on empty viewing stands...
...Indeed, he was in the midst of planning another purge when he died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage on March 5, 1953...
...But his real power grew, thanks to his unswerving public obedience to Lenin...
...He could have debated with Machiavelli because he would have considered that Machiavelli knew less about power than he did...
...Instead, it is an emotional and often surreal portrayal of the life and crimes of a fictitious provincial Party chief called Variant...
...The death last fall of Vyacheslav M. Molotov, one of the dictator's most loyal lieutenants, received scant attention...
...He then formed an alliance with two other steelytoothed Bolsheviks, Lev B. Kamenev and Zinoviev, to oust Trotsky from the Politburo...
...He distrusted everyone, living in seclusion from the public with his daughter Svetlana in his Kremlin apartment...
...Lenin as Leon Trotsky, Nikolai I. Biikharin and Grigory Y. Zinoviev...
...For the Stalin era, distorted by official legend and heretofore shrouded in State-sanctioned silence, is recalled in the Soviet Union with equal parts of horror and nostalgia...
...Gorbachev has spurred academic explorations, as yet tentative, into the magnitude of the human toll of Stalin's atrocities...
...At the hangman'sfeet...
...As he imposed his system on the expanded Soviet empire, Stalin demanded rigid discipline and went on ruling with an iron fist...
...Kurt M. Campbell, assistant director of Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs, is the author of Soviet Policy Towards South Africa...
...He summoned up an image of Stalin gloriously defending the Motherland against the German enemy...
...Myths about the dictator were passed around the table like treasured belongings...
...Old Guard Bolsheviks who urged restraint and realism, such as Bukharin and Aleksei I. Rykov, were exiled from the Party...
...To exorcise the Stalinist demon without shaking the foundations of the Soviet state, Gorbachev has skillfully deployed the only untarnished Soviet icon —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin...
...It will likely include references to members of the Bolshevik Old Guard, such as Kamenev and Bukharin, who perished under Stalin and disappeared from official histories and from photographs of the Revolution...
...The quaint community has an old Orthodox church with sky-blue onion-shaped domes, and a Georgian restaurant that serves steaming loaves of freshly baked black bread...
...In the hot and humid summer months, I would often flee Moscow for the embassy's diplomatic dacha in Tarasovka, a rural retreat only a few miles outside the capital...
...Already voices are being heard denying there was a collectivization-induced famine and praising Stalin as a great war leader...
...Several later asked the young Yurasov if he was worried about the political consequences of his revelations...
...Adam Ulam, the dean of America's Soviet-watchers, has written: "It is only when the Soviet people are able to look at their recent past and recognize it for what it really was that the spell will be lifted and the Stalin era will finally have ended...
...By 1901 he was a full-time revolutionary...
...Perhaps the film's most important message is the complicity of the generation that came after Varlam in his atrocious deeds...
...Aleksandr Bovin, a leading Soviet commentator in the forefront of the current revolution, remembers that "we watched with bewilderment, pain and a disgusting sense of our own impotence" as the fledgling effort collapsed...
...It is not unusual to hear sobs in the darkened cinema during a poignant scene in which a woman learns of her lover's execution by a bullet to the spine at the neck...
...A Kremlin faction profoundly dissatisfied with Stalin may have secretly plotted to replace him with the popular Leningrad Party leader, Sergei M. Kirov, a former supporter of the dictator turned rival...
...Capitalizing on the country's deep weariness and the tactical errors of his rivals, he moved to exile his adversaries from the ruling collegium one by one...
...His father, a drunken cobbler, died in a bloody brawl when Joseph was a boy...
...Thus in a single stroke he eliminated his chief threat and created a pretext for a savage purging of the Party...
...This book is about power," Rybakov explains...
...It is Stalin's achievements during the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet name for World War II)—both real and fictionalized—that still spark pride and admiration among the Soviet people...
...Joseph won a scholarship to train for the priesthood at the Orthodox theological seminary in Tiflis, where he soon joined a secret group espousing Georgian nationalism...
...Thirty years later, Gorbachev may benefit from being the first Soviet leader unencumbered by personal links to Stalin...
...Arrested and exiled to Siberia in 1903, he escaped and returned to the revolutionary scene several months later...
...At the center of the display was a large picture of Stalin...
...Another play, Fedor A. Abramov's Brothers and Sisters, deals candidly with the harshness of life during Stalin's rule...
...At one point the grandson of the dictator asks his father, who refuses to face the horrifying truth, "How long will you lie...
...He played a largely secondary role in the October Revolution, and received a relatively unimportant position in the new government as commissar for nationalities...
...Millions were deliberately allowed to die from famine...
...In contrast to Trotsky's concept of a permanent revolution without borders, Stalin advanced the notion of "building socialism in one country...
...Amid the viciously anti-Semitic 1948 drive to root out "cosmopolitanism," Stalin tested the loyalty of then Foreign Minister Molotov by having his Jewish wife, Polina, sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp...
...Mikhail Shatrov's 1962 play, The Treaty of Brest Litovsk, issued for the first time this year, considers the bitter 1918 debate of the Bolsheviks over whether to sign a humiliating peace treaty with Germany...
...Soviet officials now acknowledge what happened at the gulags under Stalin...
...In the bureaucracy and the print media Gorbachev's allies are wielding Stalin's horrors as a sword, but his opponents are using Stalin's heroic legacy as a shield to fend off basic alterations of the Soviet system...
...Moviegoers will occasionally clap when Stalin's dark visage flashes across the screen...
...The two first met at a conference in Finland during 1905...
...Andrei Voznesensky, the noted Russian poet, has observed, "Stalin exists today as a symbol, an almost mythical figure from the past, someone of biblical dimensions, and everyone sees in him his own thoughts and ideas...
...My people need this novel, my country needs this novel," he said...
...A demented despot with Hitler's mustache, Mussolini's strut and love of opera, Beria's pincenez, squint and bull neck, and Stalin's egomaniacal and corrupt character, Varlam is an embodiment of all 20th century evils...
...Gorbachev, Bondarev intimated, has "laid siege" to Russian literature and, like the Nazi invaders, has forced the true patriots to retreat and regroup...
...Stalin was innocent of any wrongdoing...
...Like many of the releases in the glasnost era, Repentance sat gathering dust on the shelf for two years while high-level patrons in the Politburo shepherded it through official channels to the Soviet public...
...Last year the Soviet Writers' Union Conference appointed a commission to oversee the release of the works of Osip Mandelstam, the poet who was the most famous literary victim of Stalin's purges...
...Georgi M. Malenkov, an early protege, is in his 90s and lives in a Miiall dacha near Moscow...
...Recently, Dmitrii G. Yurasov, a 22-year-old student connected with the Moscow State Historical Archival Institute, delivered a dramatic exposition on Stalin's purges and Khrushchev's rehabilitations...
...The more senior and established historians in the audience listened in shocked silence...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 16
