In power, socialism swelled the state and destroyed not just the “bourgeoisie” but the small-business owner, the family farmer, the artisan.3 All of this shocked non-Leninist socialists who hoped to end exploitation and alienation and break through to social democracy while still insisting on their class approach. These Marxists repudiated the Soviet Union as not socialism but a deformation, because of Russia, or Lenin, or Stalin. After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder, but freedom. Nowhere did he say there should be collective farms formed by secret police coercion, mass deportations to frozen wastes, terrible famine.4 Of course, Marx had insisted that wage labor was “wage slavery,” private capital “exploitation” and “alienation,” the market “chaos,” and therefore that, to achieve lasting abundance and freedom, capitalism had to be “transcended.” The tragedy began unfolding with the very invention of “capitalism.”5 Once markets and private property were named and blamed as the source of evil, statization would be the consequence. A few socialists began, painfully, to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property, but they were denounced as apostates. Compounding the tragedy of the left, traditional conservatives committed the gross error of inviting the fascists and Nazis to power in no small part because of the leftist threat and the hard-nosed view that differences between anticapitalist democratic socialists and Leninists were delusion. To top it all off, Social Democrats and Communists fought a bitter civil war over workers’ allegiance.
When Hegel famously referred to history as a “slaughter bench,” he had no idea what he was talking about, and yet he was right. Partly that was because of the influence of Hegel’s hazardous ideas on the Marxists: the sophistry known as the dialectic, the idolatry of the state, the supposed historical “progress” through the “necessary” actions of great men.6
It was no accident, as Hegelian-inspired Marxists might say (and as Trotsky had predicted already in 1904), that a single leader had emerged atop a single-party system that, on the basis of class analysis, denied legitimacy to political opposition.7 It was also no accident that this single leader was Stalin, at once a militant Communist and an unprincipled intriguer, an ideologue and an opportunist—the Leninist fusion—who, like his mentor, possessed extreme willpower, which was the prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could: the elimination of capitalism.8 Stalin could not boast the effortless success of those to the manor born. He had to be, and was, a relentless striver. He also happened to carry a gargantuan chip on his shoulder, for although he had benefited immeasurably from Lenin’s patronage, he then suffered the unending humiliation of Lenin’s supposed call for his removal, which was thrown at him by his rivals and whispered across the entire party. Stalin emerged as a leader of acute political intelligence and bottomless personal resentment. The collectivization that he forced through to the end, famine notwithstanding, provoked criticism in the party—Syrtsov on the fiction of the politburo; Ryutin on his amoral dictatorship—magnifying Stalin’s righteousness and resentment. To an extent, power reveals who a person is. But the effects on Stalin of accruing and exercising power unconstrained by law or constitutional limits—the power of life and death over hundreds of millions—were immense. Alongside the nature of Bolshevism, the setting of his regime—Russia, with its fraught history and geopolitics, its sense of historic mission and grievance, which were given new impetus and form by socialism’s fixation on capitalist encirclement—also indelibly shaped who he became.
Without Stalin there would have been no socialism, and without socialism, no Stalin.9 That said, his demonic disposition, which the experience of this kind of rule in this place heightened, never overwhelmed his ability to function at the highest level. Physically, he continued to suffer from frequent bouts of flu and fever, stomach ailments, dental problems, and severe pain in his joints, but he proved hearty enough to be a hands-on ruler of one sixth of the earth’s surface. His capacity for work was prodigious, his zeal for detail unquenchable.10 He received 100 or even 200 documents a day, some of substantial length, and he read many of them, often to the end, scribbling comments or instructions on them.11 He initiated or approved untold personnel appointments, goaded minions in relentless campaigns, attended myriad congresses and ceremonies bearing the burden of instruction, assiduously followed the public and private statements of cultural figures, edited novels and plays, and prescreened films. He pored over a voluminous flow of intelligence reports and lengthy interrogation protocols of accused spies, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, traitors. He wrote and rewrote the texts of decrees, newspaper editorials, and his own speeches, confident in his abilities. Very occasionally he made grammatical mistakes in Russian, his second language, but he wrote accessibly, using rhetorical questions, catchphrases, enumeration.12 The fools were the ones who took him for a fool.
Pravda taught Soviet inhabitants indebtedness to the state and to Stalin personally, depicting everything they had—food, clothing, education, joy—as gifts (“Thank you, comrade Stalin!”).13 In newsreels he came across as the epitome of wise leadership, photogenic in his signature tunic. “In his speeches Stalin was categorical, but simple,” recalled the loyalist writer Konstantin Simonov (b. 1915). “With people—this we sometimes saw in the newsreels—he conducted himself simply. He dressed simply, identically. There was nothing showy about him, no external pretensions to greatness or a sense of being chosen. This corresponded to our impressions of how a person standing at the head of the party should be. Altogether this was Stalin: all these feelings, all these positive traits, real and drawn by us, of the leader of the party and state.”14 Stalin’s leader cult was manufactured—acquiring the character of an arms race, as proponents strove to outdo one another—but not artificial.15 If Hitler, despite the forelock that fell into his face, the near ridiculous mustache, and the constant chewing of his fingernails, could hold his country in thrall, the reason lay at least as much in the German people as in the Führer’s gifts. Stalin, too, possessed a weird magnetism, derived from his ability to personify socialist modernity and Soviet might, to inspire and validate people’s aspirations. The cult’s power was that it was not just about Stalin; it was about them.16
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LOOKED AT SOBERLY, Stalin’s anticapitalist experiment resembled a vast camp of deliberately deprived workers, indentured farmers, and slave laborers toiling for the benefit of an unacknowledged elite.17 But the Soviet Union was a fairy tale. Unrelenting optimism spread alongside famine, arrests, deportations, executions, camps, censorship, sealed borders.18 Newsreels that showed Stalin also featured belching smokestacks—Soviet inhabitants came to know factories by name and sight—tanks and bombers, giant icebreakers, fecund farms, the friendship of peoples, and vigorous, marching, smiling masses, a tableau of modernity, progress, socialism. Many Soviet inhabitants—especially, but not only, the young—craved a transcendent purpose, and in the swirl of ambition, fanaticism, and opportunism they willingly endured hardships, finding personal fulfillment, even liberation, in submission to the state-led struggle in the name of social justice, abundance, and peace. The relentless demands for public professions of loyalty risked eliciting playacting and sullen obedience. But the cause offered the possibility of belonging. Many embraced violence and cruelty as unavoidable in bringing about a new world, and they keenly soaked up the propaganda. To manage contradictions and conscience, they had the transcendent truth of Marxism-Leninism, and the personal example of “comrade Stalin.” People of this era who were looking for a brighter future, a chance to be part of something larger than themselves, found it.19 “The tiniest little fish,” one woman would enthuse in her diary, “can stir the depths of the ocean.”20