Perhaps the biggest difference was that the Soviet regime mobilized the masses on its behalf. Machiavelli had suggested that princes aim to restrict or eliminate access to public spaces—amphitheaters and squares, town halls and auditoriums, streets and even parks—but Stalin flooded them. His state’s power was magnified by a host of mass organizations: the party and Youth League, the army and civil defense associations, trade unions that dispensed social welfare, a kind of mass conscription society.360 The dictator coerced and cajoled the artistic intelligentsia into state service as well. His regime actively engaged the new Soviet society at every level, in identities and practices of everyday life, through which people became part of the system.361 The populace absorbed the regime’s language, ways of thinking, and modes of behavior. Aspirations, in turn, emerged from the new Soviet society, and Stalin became attentive to quality of life, consumer goods, entertainment, and pride. By the mid-1930s the revolution and Stalin’s leadership were seen as having enabled a great country to take its rightful place among the powers, with a supposedly morally and economically superior system.362 “In Germany bayonets do not terrorize a people,” Hitler had boasted in spring 1936. “Here a government is supported by the confidence of the entire people. . . . I have not been imposed by anyone upon this people. From the people I have grown up, in the people I have remained, to the people I return. My pride is that I know no statesman in the world who with greater right than I can say that he is representative of his people.”363 Similarly, Stalin had boasted to Roy Howard that same spring of 1936 that the USSR was “a truly popular system, which grew up from within the people.”364
Stalin had improvised his way toward attainment of the modern authoritarian dream: incorporating the masses without empowering them. Europe’s democratic great powers were put on the defensive by the dynamic mass politics and stated aspirations of the authoritarian regimes. France’s dilemma was particularly stark. Fearful of revived German power, it had turned to a pact with the Communist USSR, but its willingness to do so was based precisely upon the pact’s absence of a military convention, alongside a desperately desired deepening of cooperation with Britain, as well as mollification of Italy and the marginalization of the French Communists.365 In the event, Britain had shown itself ready to surrender the continental guarantees that France viewed as bedrock, France’s precarious placation of a prickly Mussolini was failing, and France’s Communist party was growing significantly in strength, winning more than 15 percent of the vote and seventy-two seats in spring 1936 (versus 8 percent and ten seats four years earlier). All of this damaged Paris’s already weak commitment to alliance with Moscow.
Stalin’s dilemma was no less stark. Suspicious that the imperialists Britain and France would galvanize an anti-Soviet front and goad countries on his border into attacking, he had worked to neutralize Poland and recruit Germany, keeping them out of the feared anti-Soviet coalition. On his eastern flank, Japan had seized the Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria and taken other parts of northern China, directly threatening Soviet territory. All of this had spurred his turn toward outright militarization, membership in the League of Nations, an antifascist front in the Comintern, and mutual assistance pacts with France and its ally Czechoslovakia. But Stalin, like the tsarist conservative and Germanophile Pyotr Durnovó, questioned the wisdom of such an orientation. He held to his quest for rapprochement with Nazi Germany, to acquire advanced technology while preventing a broad anti-Soviet coalition. Hitler, however, increasingly named the Soviet Union as his principal target. Stalin’s options were to deter or deflect the penetration in his direction of Germany and Japan, via an alliance with binding military obligations; secure some form of accommodation (nonaggression pacts); or fight Germany and Japan on his own, perhaps simultaneously, a two-front nightmare the tsars had not faced.366
Russia’s perennial quest to build a strong state, to match an ever-superior West, had culminated, yet again, in personal rule. That person was extraordinary, a man of deep Marxist-Leninist convictions and iron will, but dogged by Lenin’s purported Testament calling for his removal and internal opposition over the searing episode of forced collectivization-dekulakization. At least 5,000 “Trotskyites” and “Zinovievites” were arrested in the first half of 1936 (as compared with 631 in all of 1934). Before the year was out, the total would reach 23,279.367 And that would be the beginning. A fixation on former oppositionists, above all Trotsky, would begin to consume the country. None of that was caused by the foreign policy dilemmas, but it would exacerbate them. Could Bolshevism’s avatar Stalin solve the deep challenges of Russian history that, along with anticapitalism and the mass age, had produced him and his epigones?
———PART II——— TERROR AS STATECRAFT
Will future generations understand it all? Will they understand what is happening? It is terrifying living through it.
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, Soviet envoy to Sweden, notes written at a European spa on hotel stationery, March 25, 19381
IN HIS HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Joseph Campbell would indirectly explain the archetype in world mythologies that Soviet regime propagandists much earlier had applied to Stalin: humble origins (a man of the people), a call to greatness on the people’s behalf, a demonstration of separation (slaying of dragons, i.e., of the party opposition), a crushing setback and near defeat (peasant and party resistance to collectivization), a mythic rebound of resilience and fortitude, culminating in triumph (Congress of Victors; a socialist great power).2 With Soviet hagiographers competing to portray Stalin as just such a humble man of the people and their instrument of destiny, Beria, in particular, intuited the dividends from depicting him as the Lenin of the Caucasus. This portrait, for all its blatant falsehoods, captured Stalin’s obsession with menace, something Campbell’s archetype could not do, but also Stalin’s archetypal commitment to a transcendent mission for the supposed greater good. Realizing the dream of socialism had seemed improbable for decades. But after the abdication of the tsar, in 1917, the decision by Russia’s Provisional Government to continue the war—like imperial Germany’s decision to launch the U-boat campaign that provoked U.S. entry and tipped the war’s balance—had changed the course of humanity. Socialism was no longer just libraries full of pamphlets, songs, marches, meetings, and schisms, but a country.