Dictatorship, in the wake of the Great War, was widely understood to offer a transcendence of the mundane, a “state of exception,” in the words of the future Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.23 For Soviet theorists, too, dictatorship promised political dynamism and the redemption of humanity. In April 1929, Vladimir Maksimovsky (b. 1887), who had known and once opposed Lenin (over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with imperial Germany) and had supported Trotsky’s right to be heard, delivered a lecture on Niccolò Machiavelli that he published the same year in the USSR’s main Marxist history journal. Maksimovsky turned the Renaissance Florentine into a theorist of “revolutionary bourgeois dictatorship,” which the author deemed progressive in its day, in contrast to the reactionary dictatorship of Mussolini. The assessment rested on the class base. Thus, the working-class Soviet dictatorship was progressive, too. Maksimovsky, following Machiavelli, conceded that dictatorship could descend into tyranny, with a ruler pursuing purely personal interests.24 But Maksimovsky did not explicitly address the question of a given dictator’s personality, or how the process of exercising unlimited power affects a ruler’s character. Subsequent scholars have rightly noted that only a near-permanent state of emergency—made possible by Communist ideology and practice—allowed Stalin to give free rein to his savagery. But what has been missed is that Stalin’s sociopathology was to a degree an outgrowth of the experience of dictatorial rule.
Stalin’s childhood, diseases and all, had been more or less normal; his years as general secretary were anything but.25 He emerged from the 1920s a ruler of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. He could flash burning anger, visible in yellowish eyes; he could glow with a soft, capacious smile. He could be utterly solicitous and charming; he could be unable to forget a perceived slight and compulsively contrive opportunities for revenge. He was single-minded and brooding, soft-spoken and foul-mouthed. He prided himself on his voracious reading and his ability to quote the wisdom of Marx or Lenin; he resented fancy-pants intellectuals who he thought put on airs. He possessed a phenomenal memory and a mind of scope; his intellectual horizons were severely circumscribed by primitive theories of class struggle and imperialism. He developed a feel for the aspirations of the masses and incipient elites; he almost never visited factories or farms, or even state agencies, reading about the country he ruled in secret reports and newspapers. He was a cynic about everyone’s supposed base motives; he lived and breathed ideals. Above all, his core identity was as heir and leading pupil of Lenin, but Lenin’s purported Testament had called for his removal, and from the time it first appeared, in the spring and summer of 1923, the document haunted him, provoking at least six resignations, all of which had been rejected but left him embattled, resentful, vengeful.
Stalin’s painstaking creation of a personal dictatorship within the Leninist dictatorship had combined chance (the unexpected early death of Lenin) and aptitude: he had been the fifth secretary of the party, after Yakov Sverdlov (who also died prematurely), Yelena Stasova, Nikolai Krestinsky, and Vyacheslav Molotov. His self-fashioning as savior of cause and country who was menaced from every direction dovetailed with fears for the socialist revolution and Russia’s revival as a great power menaced from every direction. Lenin’s party, with its seizure of power in the former Russian empire, had enacted upon itself a condition of “capitalist encirclement,” a structural paranoia that fed, and was fed by, Stalin’s personal paranoia. But those feelings on his part, whatever their now untraceable origins, had ballooned in his accumulation and enactment of the power of life and death over hundreds of millions. Such were the paradoxes of power: the closer the country got to achieving socialism, the sharper the class struggle became; the more power Stalin personally wielded, the more he still needed. Triumph shadowed by treachery became the dynamic of both the revolution and Stalin’s life. Beginning in 1929, as the might of the Soviet state and Stalin’s personal dictatorship grew and grew, so, too, did the stakes. His drive to build socialism would prove both successful and shattering, and deeply reinforcing of his hypersuspicious, vindictive disposition.26 “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” an English Catholic historian wrote in a private letter in reference to the Inquisition and the papacy.27 Absolute power also shapes absolutely.
Communism was an idea, a dream palace whose attraction derived from its seeming fusion of science and utopia. In the Marxist conception, capitalism had created great wealth by replacing feudalism, but then it became a “fetter” that promoted only the interests of the exploiter class, at the expense of the rest of humanity. But once capitalism was overcome, the “forces of production” would be unleashed as never before. What is more, exploitation, colonies, and imperialist war would give way to solidarity, emancipation, and peace, as well as abundance. Concretely, socialism had been difficult to imagine.28 But whatever it was, it could not be capitalism. Logically, socialism would be built by eradicating private property, the market, and “bourgeois” parliaments and putting in their place collective property, socialist planning, and people’s power (or soviets). Of course, the capitalists would never allow themselves to be buried. They would fight to the death against socialism, using every means—wrecking, espionage, lies—because this was a war in which only one class could emerge victorious. The most terrible crimes became morally imperative acts in the name of creating paradise on earth.29
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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