Stalin: A Biography

But at the same time there has occurred a breaking away from the capitalist system by China and other popular-democratic countries in Europe, which together with the Soviet Union have created a single, powerful socialist camp confronting the camp of capitalism. The economic result of the existence of two opposed camps has been that the single, all-embracing world market has fallen apart with the consequence that we now have two parallel world markets also opposing each other.

Stalin asserted that the world had been changed by the numerical increase in communist states. The territorial contraction of the global capitalist market would not end but instead would intensify the rivalries among capitalist economies.³⁷ Although Germany and Japan had been militarily humbled, they would recover industrially and commercially to compete fiercely with the USA, the United Kingdom and France. The victors themselves had conflicting interests. The USA aimed to be the globe’s dominant capitalist power and sought an end to the empires of its Western allies. A Third World War was to be expected. Stalin put it dogmatically: ‘In order to eliminate the inevitability of war it is necessary to annihilate imperialism.’³⁸ In old age he cleaved to the credo that capitalism was doomed. He also continued to believe that socialism had an inherent capacity to nurture technological advance. This was an old Marxist idea. For Marx and Lenin it was axiomatic that capitalist development would eventually enter a cul-de-sac and would actively prevent the development of industrial products of general human benefit.³⁹

The aspect of Stalin’s thought that has captured the greatest attention, however, is his attitude to Jews. No irrefutable evidence of anti-semitism is available in his published works. His denial before the First World War that the Jews were a nation was made on technical grounds; it cannot be proved that he defined nationhood specifically in order to exclude Jews.⁴⁰ He did not refuse to allow Jewish people the right to cultural self-expression after the October Revolution; indeed his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs gave money and facilities to groups promoting the interests of Jews.⁴¹ Yet the charges against him also included the accusation that his supporters highlighted anti-semitic themes in the struggle against Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev in the 1920s.⁴² Within his family he had opposed his daughter’s dalliance with the Jewish film-maker Alexei Kapler.⁴³ Yet the fact that his followers exploited anti-Jewish feelings in internal party disputes does not make him personally an anti-semite. As a father, moreover, he had much reason to discourage Svetlana from having anything to do with the middle-aged, womanising Kapler.

His campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ cannot be automatically attributed to hatred of Jews as Jews. He moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states. The Greeks, Poles and Koreans had suffered at his hands before the Second World War for this reason.⁴⁴ Campaigns against cosmopolitanism started up when relations between the Soviet Union and the USA drastically worsened in 1947.⁴⁵ At first Jews were not the outstanding target. But this did not remain true for long. A warm reception was accorded by twenty thousand Jews to Golda Meir at a Moscow synagogue in September 1948 after the foundation of Israel as a state.⁴⁶ This infuriated Stalin, who started to regard Jewish people as subversive elements. Yet his motives were of Realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice even though in these last years some of his private statements and public actions were undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews.

Yet Beria and Kaganovich, who was Jewish, absolved their master of anti-semitism.⁴⁷ (Not that they were moral arbiters on anything.) Certainly Kaganovich felt uncomfortable at times. Stalin’s entourage were crude in their humour. One day Stalin asked: ‘But why do you pull so very gloomy a face when we’re laughing at the Jews? Look at Mikoyan: when we’re laughing at the Armenians, Mikoyan laughs along with us at the Armenians.’ Kaganovich replied:⁴⁸