Stalin

MASS VIOLENCE RECRUITED legions ready to battle implacable enemies who stood on the wrong side of history.³⁰ The purported science of Marxism-Leninism and the real-world construction of socialism, on the way toward Communism, offered ostensible answers to the biggest questions: why the world had so many problems (class) and how it could be made better (class warfare), with a role for all. People’s otherwise insignificant lives became linked to building an entirely new world.³¹ To collect grain forcibly or operate a lathe was to strike a hammer blow at world imperialism. It did not hurt that those who took part stood to gain personally: idealism and opportunism are always reinforcing.³² Accumulated resentments, too, fueled the aspiration to become significant. People under the age of twenty-nine made up nearly half of the Soviet population, giving the country one of the younger demographic profiles in the world, and youth proved especially attracted to a vision that put them at the center of a struggle to build tomorrow today, to serve a higher truth.³³ The use of capitalism as antiworld also helps explain why, despite the improvisation, the socialism that would be built under Stalin coalesced into a “system” that could be readily explained within the framework of the October Revolution.

Stalin personified Communism’s lofty vision. A cult would be built around him, singling him out as “vozhd,” an ancient word that denoted someone who had earned the leadership of a group of men through a demonstrated ability to acquire and dispense rewards, but had become tantamount to “supreme leader,” the Russian equivalent of duce or Führer.³⁴ By acclaiming Stalin, people could acclaim the cause and themselves as devotees. He resisted the cult.³⁵ Stalin would call himself shit compared with Lenin.³⁶ In draft reportage for Pravda of his meeting with a collective farm delegation from Odessa province in November 1933, he inserted the names Mikhail Kalinin, Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, simulating collective leadership.³⁷ Similarly, according to Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin rebuked Kaganovich, saying, “What is this? Why do you praise me alone, as if one man decides everything?”³⁸ Whether Stalin’s objections reflected false modesty, genuine embarrassment, or just his inscrutable self remains hard to say, but he indulged the prolonged ovations.³⁹ Molotov would recall that “at first he resisted the cult of personality, but then he came to like it a bit.”⁴⁰

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STALIN ALSO PERSONIFIED the multinational Union. The USSR, like imperial Russia, was a uniquely Eurasian sprawl across two continents, at home in neither. Stalin was skeptical that nationality would eventually wither, unlike many leftists who worshipped class.⁴¹ Nation, for him, was both stubborn fact and opportunity, a device for overcoming perceived backwardness.⁴² Implanting loyal party rule in, say, Ukraine or his native Georgia would preoccupy him, but not nearly as much as the history and geopolitics of Russia.⁴³ Russia had come to see itself as a providential power ordained by God, with a special mission in the world. Its court splendor surpassed any other monarchy, but for all its industrialization it had remained an agrarian empire resting on the backs of peasants. Resources never stretched as far as ambitions, a discrepancy compounded by the circumstance that Russia lacked natural boundaries. This had spurred conquest of neighboring lands, before they could be used as presumed springboards of invasion, thereby creating a dynamic of “defensive” expansionism. Such was the Russia that the Georgian inherited and wholly devoted himself to as the socialist motherland.