Stalin: A Biography

Stalin could not act alone. While leading the NEP’s destruction, he had wide support in the central and local committees of the communist party. The enthusiasm for reinforcing state control was shared in sections of the party, political police, armed forces and Komsomol in the late 1920s. But a set of objectives is not the same as a plan. Stalin had no grand plan and his supporters lacked one too. Yet he operated with basic assumptions which they held in common with him. All the same he did not simply listen to the music of his times and adjust his behaviour to its rhythms. Stalin was not just a bureaucrat. He was a man driven by ambition and ideas. The general assumptions were fashioned by him into policies conforming to his intemperate nature and despotic inclinations.

As his authority increased, the need for support from his original close associates diminished. He could always replace them if they annoyed him. He imposed political, economic and cultural policies with increasing imperturbability. The Great Terror was instigated and supervised by him. The decision to sign a pact with Nazi Germany was his. Stalin’s, too, were the methods chosen to direct the Soviet war machine. His were the choices in external and internal policy after the war. Indeed the whole architecture of the Soviet state, once it had been consolidated at the end of the 1920s, was Stalin’s work based upon Lenin’s design. Even Stalin, though, needed to restrain himself. He had to act within the framework of the communist order. He objected to the patronage networks in politics and general administration. He knew he could not trust the information reaching him from below. He criticised the lack of conscientiousness among workers and peasants. He was annoyed by the weak impact of the regime’s Marxist–Leninist propaganda. But he had to operate with the human material and institutional resources available to him. The Great Terror strengthened and secured his despotism, but it also revealed to him the dangers of campaigning for total personal control. Although his methods remained intrusive, violent and ruthless, his purposes were more realistic after 1938.

That he succeeded to this large extent flowed from his skill in forming a central team of willing, if frightened, subordinates. He also managed to promote millions of young men and women to all levels of public activity who gave him their support in return for the power and comfort they received from him. Moreover, he ruled for so many years that those youths who had been through schooling in his time were affected by the propaganda; and the victory in the Second World War strengthened this tendency. Probably only a minority in society keenly admired him. Nevertheless many silent critics respected him for his policies of welfare and patriotism: Stalin did monstrous things and yet the popular attitude towards him was not wholly negative.

But what is his position in the history of his country and the world? Without Stalin and his rule, the USSR would have remained a brittle state with a fading grip on its society. Stalin modified Leninism and its practices and attitudes just as Lenin had subjected Marxism to his peculiar adaptation. This whole process — from Marx and Engels to Lenin and through to Stalin — involved a combination of reinforcement and emasculation. Lenin had invented a cul-de-sac for communism; Stalin drove the party down it. Under Stalin, no aspect of public and private life was exempt in theory or reality from central state interference. Communists pursued, in an extreme fashion, the objectives of comprehensive modernisation — and Stalin, like all communists, claimed that his party’s version of modernity outmatched all known others. He achieved a lot: urbanisation, military strength, education and Soviet pride. His USSR could claim impressive achievements. It became a model for radical political movements — and not only communist ones — elsewhere in the world. And at a time before the Second World War when liberal-democratic government signally failed to stand effectively up to fascism, Stalin appeared to have established a plausible alternative (at least until the Non-Aggression Treaty of September 1939). If this had not been the case, he would never have gained the support necessary for him to survive and flourish.