Stalin may have been aware of the historical evolution of the titles assumed by Russian rulers. Initially, a ruler was a kniaz’ (prince), which was not particularly prestigious since there were numerous princes. Visilii III then adopted the term gosudar’ (sovereign), but that was still too close to the title of other contemporary rulers. The title ‘Tsar’ – the Russian equivalent of the German Kaiser and the Latin Caesar – taken by Ivan the Terrible was more imposing; adopted by someone like him, it even sounded ominous. Finally, Peter the Great opted for Imperator as the most prestigious of all. His successors would retain the whole list of titles, beginning with Imperator. Stalin wanted to find his place on this ascending list. Given that there was nothing above ‘emperor’, however, he had to settle for ‘generalissimo’ – a title no Tsar had ever carried.
We would not be spending time on such ironies were it not for the fact that a taste for bombastic titles was not exclusive to Stalin; it was shared by other general-secretaries. The syndrome is indicative of the political vacuity that prevails when rulers do not know what to do with their power.
At the same time, the political and psychological calculations behind these borrowings from the past must not lead us to forget the main thing: the ‘generalissimo’ was now going nowhere. Asserting an affinity with the empire and especially its tsars, ruthless state-builders, allowed him to shed the liabilities entailed by the original promises to build socialism, which were impossible to fulfil. It thereby allowed him to close once and for all the chapter of Bolshevism, whose founders had turned against him. Lenin had characterized Stalin as a ‘Russian bully’ (a Georgian replica of the same), and requested that he be removed from the post of party general-secretary, which he was not fit to occupy. Stalin was precisely set on becoming an authentic ‘Russian bully’ and, as such, endearing himself to the core Russian nationality – something that demanded a switch of ideological identity. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than the adoption of a new chauvinist anthem to the glory of a mythical ‘Great Russia’, offensive to all the empire’s non-Russian nationalities, and of the worst kind of Russian nationalism, which was unleashed in the postwar campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’. These were constituent parts of Stalin’s design to renounce the revolutionary past in favour of a different past. Eliminating Bolshevik cadres was insufficient. And the issue was not whether phase 1, 2, or 2.5 of some ‘ism’ had been reached (or was about to be): that was so much empty talk. Stalin’s major success was the super-state he had created, unencumbered by promises to anyone – an agrarian despotism that may be counted as among the century’s most amazing historical twists. The Stalinist system restored an old historical model (more like that of a Xerxes than Nicholas I or Alexander III), and actually reinvigorated it by means of a breakneck industrialization neither Xerxes nor Nicholas was capable of.
The term ‘Oriental despotism’ proposed by the Orientalist Karl Wittfogel comes to mind. It refers to a bureaucratic system with a central role for a priestly caste (the equivalent of the party?). At its head is a monarch with enormous powers, endowed ex officio with supernatural origins. The economic and social base of the system consists in a vast rural proletariat. The similarities are striking, especially in view of the despotic ‘right’ that Stalin arrogated to himself to determine policy as his frenzies dictated, as well as the need for enemies whom he ‘nominated’ before unleashing a completely depraved secret police against them.
Yet ‘Oriental despotism’ is in fact the wrong term. The old despotisms only changed their rural societies very slowly. In the case of the Stalinist system, ‘agrarian despotism’ is more appropriate. Even if it issued from, and remained rooted in, a rural past – the peasantry still accounted for 80 per cent of the population under the NEP – the regime’s motor-force was industrialization, which induced enormous changes in society and ushered it into a new age. Initially, this marriage of two authoritarian systems – the old statist model and the industrial model – helped accentuate the regime’s despotic and repressive character, for they compounded one another in a state-run, state-owned economy.
It is this amalgam of forms that allows us to reconstruct the institution of a personal despotism, focused on the cult of a supreme leader, with roots stretching back into a very remote past, which was temporarily strengthened by the injection of a novel feature: industrialization. In fact, a similar pattern, albeit on a much smaller scale, can be observed in Peter the Great’s modernizing venture. Against this background and in this framework, we can make sense of the forced labour (the Gulag), a despotism that allowed free range to one individual’s delirium (purges, forced labour, mass deportations), and a huge repressive apparatus.
It is appropriate here to recall that the great purges and show trials were personally prepared and supervised by Stalin (with the help of Vyshinsky and his ilk). Writing and directing a play requires great skill of a playwright. But someone who runs an empire in the twentieth century in the manner of a puppeteer is simply a primitive ruler.
The super-state Stalin had created was – and was bound to be – bureaucratic: it was a character trait genetically inscribed in a state that owned all the country’s assets. This explains the enormous power acquired by the bureaucracy, but also prompts the question of whether Stalin could coexist with a power complex that eluded him. The response he hit on was as irrational as it was pathetic: mass purges to halt, or at least delay, developments that were ineluctable.
For Stalin, purges became his quintessential modus operandi and remained so until the very end. He regarded them as the most effective strategy. They acted like a drug, for they always seemed to succeed. Had Stalin been unearthing real enemies, the system, whilst still dictatorial, would have been very different. In 1953 new purges were still being planned; and it is likely that death alone prevented Stalin from having his closest acolytes – Beria, Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and several others – executed.
In a sense, the victory of 1945 ‘rehabilitated’ Stalinism – even, to a large extent, on the global stage – at the very moment when the system and Stalin personally had begun a phase of marked decline. In fact, he had lost the capacity to rule the country effectively. He seemed to have achieved all his objectives, and yet the road ahead, quite independently of his state of health, led in only one direction: backwards! It will suffice simply to mention Zhdanovism to indicate where he was headed – and that he had nothing else to offer.
We can now turn to the last point in our inquiry: why was the cult of Stalin so successful? For notwithstanding all his aberrations, his cult, his legend, his aura and his personality were widely accepted in Russia and throughout the world as those of a vozhd’ (guide) without historical parallel. And this cult persisted among many Russians even after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and his atrocities. The reaction of the masses in Russia to the news of his death is well documented: an outpouring of grief and a sense of irreplaceable loss and despair in the face of the unthinkable – the death of an immortal.