The character, the spirit of each of these men was in harmony with one facet or another of Lenin’s character. But not with the facets that proved fundamental, not with the facets that determined the essence of the new world that was coming into being.
Fate willed it that all the aspects of Lenin’s character expressed in the character of Trotsky, who was so nearly a genius—or in the characters of Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev, or Zinoviev—turned out to be seditious. They led these men to the scaffold, to their death.
These character traits, far from expressing Lenin’s essence, were signs of his weakness, his eccentricity, his seditiousness, his capacity for self-delusion. The essence of the new lay elsewhere.
In the Lenin who loved the Appassionata and War and Peace, there was, after all, something of Lunacharsky. But it was not for poor old Lunacharsky to “execute his laws” and “sternly carry on his cause.” Nor did history choose Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev, or Zinoviev to express what was innermost and most essential in Lenin.
Stalin’s hatred for the Old Bolsheviks who opposed him was also a hatred for those aspects of Lenin’s character that contradicted what was most essential in Lenin.
Stalin executed Lenin’s closest friends and comrades-in-arms because they were all, each in his own way, hindering the realization of the main goal—of true Leninism.
Struggling against them, executing them, it was as if he were struggling against Lenin, executing Lenin. But, by doing this, he was also victoriously affirming Lenin and Leninism, raising Lenin’s banner over Russia and securing it there.
24
The name of Stalin is inscribed for all eternity in the history of Russia.
By looking at Stalin, postrevolutionary Russia came to know herself.
The twenty-eight volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works—speeches, reports, programmes, economic and philosophical studies—did not help Russia to know herself and her fate. The result of confusing Western revolution and Russian ways of life was a chaos greater than that of the Tower of Babel.
It was not only the Russian peasants and workers, not only Budyonny’s cavalry and the Red Sailors, who were unable to grasp what was really happening; in this respect, Lenin himself was equally helpless. The roar of the revolutionary storm, the laws of the materialist dialectic, the logic of Das Kapital —these blended with the whoops of accordions, anarchist street songs like “Little Apple” and “The Fried Chicken,” the hum of moonshine distilleries, and the appeals of Bolshevik propagandists to Petrograd sailors and students attending the new workers’ faculties, urging them to resist the poisonous heresies of Kautsky, Cunow, and Hilferding.
The wild violence—the arson and rioting that gripped the entire country—brought to the surface of the Russian cauldron all the grievances that had accumulated over the centuries of serfdom.
From the romanticism of the Revolution, from the craziness of Proletkult , from the headiness of peasant rebellion and Green Armies fueled on moonshine, from the fury of the Bolshevik sailors during the battle for Odessa, there emerged a new police chief—a more powerful police chief than Russia had ever seen.
The peasantry passionately aspired to be the master of the land that it plowed. This desire, which Lenin understood and encouraged, presented a danger to the State that Lenin had founded. Peasant ownership of the land was incompatible with the very existence of this State. The State therefore dealt ruthlessly with this aspiration.
In 1930 the State founded by Lenin would become the sole and indivisible owner of all the lands, forests, and waters of the Soviet Union. No longer would the peasantry have the right to own plowland.
During the years after the Revolution, however, a fog of confusion and contradiction reigned not only in docks and railway junctions, not only on the crowded roofs of trains that were overflowing with people, not only in the aspirations of peasants and the inflamed minds of poets. There was no less confusion in the field of revolutionary theory, in the stupefying contradictions between Lenin’s crystal-clear theses and what was actually happening.
Lenin’s fundamental slogan in 1917 was “All Power to the Soviets!” It is entirely clear, however, that Lenin’s soviets have never possessed any power whatsoever. They have always been of secondary importance to the Party, their function either merely administrative or entirely formal.
The young Lenin devoted all his energies to the struggle against The People’s Will and the Socialist Revolutionaries; the aim of all this zealous theorizing was to prove that Russia could not bypass the capitalist stage of development. But in 1917 Lenin devoted his energies to proving that Russia, bypassing capitalism and its attendant democratic freedoms, could and should take the path of proletarian revolution.
Could Lenin have imagined that by founding the Communist International and by proclaiming at its Second Congress the slogan of world revolution, “Proletarians of the World Unite!” he was preparing the ground for an unprecedented growth of the principle of national sovereignty?
The power of State nationalism and the crazed nationalism of people deprived of freedom and of their human dignity determined the history of the twentieth century. They became the main lever, the thermonuclear warhead of a new order.
Stalin taught Russia to think straight, to put the turmoil of October and Lenin behind her. A reprimand for everyone or—as the saying has it—“earrings for every sister.” Or, if you were deemed unworthy of this, your earrings were torn off—along with your ears, if not your head.
The Bolshevik Party was destined to become the Party of a national State. This fusion of Party and State found its expression in the person of Stalin. In the mind and will of Stalin, the State expressed its own mind and will.
It seemed as if Stalin was constructing the Russian State—the State founded by Lenin—in his own image and likeness. In reality, however, it was the other way around. Stalin’s image was the likeness of the Russian State—which is why he became Tsar.
Although there appear to have been times—and especially toward the end of his life—when Stalin saw the State as his servant.
It was Stalin—who was both a European Marxist and an Asian despot—who gave true expression to the nature of Soviet statehood. What was embodied in Lenin was a Russian national principle; what was embodied in Stalin was a statehood that was both Russian and Soviet.
Russian statehood, engendered by Asia but dressed in European clothes, is a supra-historical phenomenon. Its principles are universal and unshakable, applicable to all the structures that Russia has known during the thousand years of her history. With Stalin’s help, all the revolutionary categories that Lenin had seen as a temporary, necessary expedient—dictatorship, terror, the suppression of bourgeois freedoms—were transformed into the essence, into the very foundation of Soviet life. Fusing with Russia’s thousand-year-old tradition of non-freedom, these categories became the essential content of the Soviet State. The remaining vestiges of Social Democracy, in the meantime, were relegated to the realm of stage decor, of mere external form.
Stalin united within him all the most ruthless traits of slave Russia.
In Stalin’s improbable cruelty and perfidy, in his capacity for pretense and hypocrisy, in his resentfulness and vindictiveness, in his coarseness, in his humor—we see a lordly Asiatic.
In Stalin’s knowledge of revolutionary doctrines, in his use of the terminology of the progressive West, in his familiarity with the works of literature and theater dear to the Russian democratic intelligentsia, in his quotations from Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, in his mastery of the subtlest and most complex conspiratorial tricks, in his amorality—we see a revolutionary in the model of Nechaev, one for whom any means are justified by the future end. But Nechaev himself would, of course, have shuddered if he had known to what extremes Iosif Stalin would take the principles of Nechaevism.
In Stalin’s faith in official documents and the supremacy of police power, in his passion for medals and uniforms, in his unparalleled contempt for h
uman dignity, in his deification of order and a rigid bureaucracy, in his readiness to kill those who have infringed some holy letter of the law and then to flout this same law as he himself carried out some act of monstrous violence—we see a police boss, a top gendarme.
Stalin was a fusion of these three figures.
And it was these three Stalins who created the Stalinist State—a State bordering both cruel, treacherous, vengeful, hypocritical Asia and enlightened, democratic, mercantile, mercenary Europe; a State in which law is simply a weapon of tyranny and in which tyranny is the law; a State whose roots reach far back into the centuries of Russian serfdom, which made slaves of the peasants, and into the centuries of the Tatar yoke, which made slaves even of those who lorded it over the peasants.
This Asiatic in kid boots, quoting Saltykov-Shchedrin, skillfully employing the vocabulary of revolution while he lived by the laws of tribal vengeance, brought clarity into the postrevolutionary chaos. And he expressed himself—he realized his own character—through the character of the State.
The most important principle of the State he constructed is that it is a State without freedom.
In this country, huge factories, artificial seas, canals, and hydroelectric power stations do not serve people; they serve a State without freedom.
In this State a man cannot sow what he wants to sow. A man is not the master of the field on which he works; he is not the owner of the apple trees he grows or of the milk he produces. Whatever the earth bears, it bears according to the instructions of the State without freedom.
In this State not only are the national minorities deprived of their freedom but so is the Russian nation itself. Where there is no individual freedom, there can be no national freedom—since national freedom is, above all, the freedom of the individual human being.
In this State there is no such thing as society. Society is founded on people’s free intimacy and free antagonism—and in a State without freedom, free intimacy and free hostility are unthinkable.
The thousand-year-old principle nurtured by the Russia of the boyars, by Ivan the Terrible, by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the principle according to which Russian enlightenment, science, and industrial power develop by virtue of a general increase in the degree of human non-freedom—this principle achieved its most absolute triumph under Stalin.
And it is truly astonishing that Stalin, after so totally destroying freedom, continued to be afraid of it.
Perhaps it was this fear that caused Stalin to display such an astonishing degree of hypocrisy.
Stalin’s hypocrisy was a clear expression of the hypocrisy of his State. And it was expressed, first and foremost, in his demand that people play at being free. The State did not openly spit on the corpse of freedom—certainly not! Instead, after the precious, living, radioactive content of freedom and democracy had been done away with, this corpse was turned into a stuffed dummy, into a shell of words. It was like the way savages, after getting their hands on the most delicate of sextants and chronometers, use them as jewelry.
The freedom that had been done away with became an adornment of the State—but not, in fact, a useless adornment. This dead freedom became the lead actor in a piece of theater on a gigantic scale. The State without freedom created a mock parliament; it created mock elections, mock trade unions, a mock society, and a mockery of social life. In this State without freedom mock groupings of every kind—mock collective-farm administrations, mock governing boards of writers’ and artists’ unions, mock presidiums of district and provincial executive committees, mock bureaus, and mock plenums of district, provincial, and central committees of national Communist parties—held discussions and passed resolutions that had already been resolved; they took decisions that had already been taken elsewhere. Even the presidium of the Party Central Committee was no more than theater.
This theater reflected Stalin’s nature. And it reflected the nature of the State without freedom. That is why the State needed Stalin, a man whose character fitted him to bring out the character of the State.
What was real— really real, and not theater? Who really made decisions—and did not merely appear to make them?
The real power was Stalin. The decisions were made by him. But he could not, of course, personally decide every question—whether Semyonova should be granted a holiday from teaching, whether the Dawn collective farm should plant peas or cabbages.
The principle of the State without freedom did, in fact, require exactly this: that Stalin should make every decision himself, without exception. This, however, was physically impossible, and so questions of secondary importance were decided by Stalin’s trusted agents. And they always decided them in the same way—in the spirit of Stalin.
That indeed is why they were Stalin’s agents, or the agents of his agents. The decisions made by them had one thing in common: whether these decisions related to the construction of a hydroelectric power station in the lower reaches of the Volga or to the possibility of a milkmaid called Anyuta Feoktistova being sent on a two-month course of study, they were made in the spirit of Stalin. The spirit of Stalin and the spirit of the State were, after all, identical.
It was always easy, at any congress, meeting, or briefing of any kind, to recognize the trusted agents of Stalin-and-the-State. They were people whom no one argued with; they spoke, after all, in the name of Stalin-and-the-State.
That the State without freedom always acted in the name of freedom and democracy, that the State was afraid to take a step without invoking the name of freedom and democracy, bears witness to the strength of freedom. There were few people whom Stalin feared, but he feared freedom constantly; he feared it to the end of his life. After killing it, he fawned on its corpse.
It is wrong to see what happened during collectivization and during the Purges simply as a senseless expression of cruelty, simply as a senseless expression of the unlimited power possessed by a single man.
In reality, the bloodshed of 1930 and 1937 was necessary to the State. As Stalin himself said, this blood was not shed for nothing. Without it, the State would not have survived. It was non-freedom that brought about the bloodshed, in order to conquer freedom. And it all began long before, under Lenin.
It was not only in politics and public activity that freedom was overcome. Freedom was overcome everywhere, from the realm of agriculture—the peasants’ loss of the right to sow freely and harvest freely—to the realms of poetry and philosophy. It is the same whether we are talking about shoemaking, the choice of reading matter, or moving from one apartment to another; in every sphere of life, freedom was overcome. It was the same with regard to factory work: work norms, pay, safety measures—all depended on the will of the State.
From the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea, non-freedom triumphed—everywhere and in everything. Everywhere and in everything, freedom was killed.
It was a victorious offensive, and it could never have been carried out without a great deal of bloodshed. Freedom, after all, is life; to overcome freedom, Stalin had to kill life.
Stalin’s character found expression in the vast projects of the Five-Year Plans. These thundering twentieth-century pyramids corresponded to the grandiose palaces and monuments of Asiatic antiquity that so captivated his soul. Mankind had no more need of Stalin’s vast constructions than God needed those vast temples and mosques.
Stalin’s character found especially vivid expression in the work of the security organs he created.
Interrogations under torture; the destruction wrought by Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki , who were called upon to destroy not only individuals but whole social classes; police methods introduced by Malyuta Skuratov and further developed by Count Benckendorff—all these found their equivalents in Stalin’s soul, and in the work of the apparatus of repression that he created.
But a still more sinister phenomenon was the conjunction, in Stalin’s soul, of the Russian revolutionary tradition with the no less Russian tradition of a powerful sec
ret police force operating without restraint. This conjunction—which became part of Stalin’s nature and was reflected in the security organs that he created—also had its historical prototype.
It is the fateful association of Degaev—an intellectual, a prominent member of The People’s Will, and, eventually, a double agent—with Colonel Sudeikin, head of the tsarist Secret Police, an association that occurred when Stalin was still only a little boy, that most clearly represents this prototype.
Sudeikin was intelligent and skeptical. He knew a great deal about the power of revolutionary Russia and he was no less aware of the pathetic incompetence of his masters, the Tsar and his ministers, whom he observed with sardonic amusement. In his capacity of secret policeman, he made use of Degaev. Degaev was thus working at one and the same time for the Revolution and for the Secret Police.
Sudeikin failed. His aim had been first to encourage the revolutionaries, then to forge false cases against them. With the help of the Revolution he would intimidate the Tsar, seize the reins of power himself, and become a dictator. Having won supreme power, he would then annihilate the Revolution. But his bold dreams were never realized—he was assassinated by Degaev.
Stalin, however, succeeded. And Stalin’s triumph contained within it—somewhere hidden from everyone, somewhere hidden even from his own self—the triumph of Sudeikin’s dream. Sudeikin had dreamed of harnessing two horses—revolution and the secret police—to one cart; Stalin had realized this dream.
Stalin, who had been born of the Revolution, did away with the Revolution and the revolutionaries once and for all—with the help of the Secret Police.
Perhaps the persecution mania that so tormented Stalin was born of fear—the same secret fear that Sudeikin had felt with regard to Degaev.
Apparently obedient, apparently harnessed to the work of the Third Section, Degaev had continued to inspire terror in the police colonel. But what was far more terrifying was that both of these men—friends, enemies, mutual betrayers—had remained alive in the cramped darkness of Stalin’s soul.