In Stalin the world of primitive magic was perhaps even more strongly alive than the tradition of Greek Orthodoxy. In his native Georgia the tribal way of life, with its totems and taboos, had survived into his own day. The Caucasus had been the meeting ground of Oriental and Greek mythologies, which had permeated native poetry and folklore. We know even from official Soviet biographies how strongly these worked upon the mind of the young Stalin; and, according to all the evidence, his deeply emotional, unsophisticated sensitivity to folk legend remained with him to the last. Quite recently, Mr. Budu Svanidze, Stalin's nephew, has told us what a strong hold some of the tribal Georgian taboos had on Stalin in his mature years. Incidentally, Mr. Svanidze, who was once his uncle's courtier and is still his admirer, relates this with the tribesman's pride rather than with any intention to detract from Stalin's greatness.
He dwells in particular on the fact that Stalin was powerfully swayed by the Georgian traditions of blood feud. He describes, for instance, a pre-revolutionary incident when Stalin refused to sing a certain song in the presence of two Georgian party members, because the song was about a blood feud in which the ancestors of his two comrades had been involved as enemies. When someone remarked that his scruples were ridiculous and that the two Georgians ‘were no longer savage mountaineers or feudal princes’ but members of the same revolutionary party, ‘Stalin replied: "It makes no difference. We Georgians have our own code of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, a life for a life — the law of the Khevsures, which obliges us to take vengeance. Revolutionaries or not, comrades or not, the law still binds us. No Georgian ever forgives an offence or an insult to himself, to his family, or to his forebears. Never!" ’
Mr. Svanidze goes on to say that in the great purges of 1936-8 Stalin was influenced once again by the traditions of ‘the tribe of the Khevsures, who gave to Georgia its basic customs, above all the law of vengeance and vendetta’. While Stalin was brooding over the decision to start the purges, he went to the Crimea, retired into solitude, but took with him his nephew in order to have by his side, again in accordance with the primordial Georgian custom, a man of his tribe before embarking upon the blood feud.
It is difficult to dismiss all this as petty gossip, as one might otherwise be inclined to do, when one considers how much of the spirit of primitive magic Stalin brought with him into Bolshevism.
The most characteristic landmark of Stalinist Moscow, indeed of Stalinist Russia, was the Lenin Mausoleum in the Red Square, to which long queues of Russian peasants and visitors from the most remote Asiatic corners of the U.S.S.R. made their pilgrimage to see the mummy of the founder of Bolshevism. The Mausoleum had been set up despite the protests of Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, and of other members of the Central Committee. To old Bolsheviks its mere sight was an offence to their dignity, and — so they thought — an insult to the maturity of the Soviet people. The Mausoleum was the monument which primitive magic erected to itself in the very heart of the Russian revolution, the totem pole and the shrine of Stalinism. It had its fascination for the Soviet people; it was for them a place of pilgrimage during nearly thirty years. (And Stalin's oath of fealty to the dead Lenin had all the undertones of a funeral homage to a deceased tribal chief.)
Under Stalin the story of Bolshevism came to be rewritten in terms of sorcery and magic, with Lenin and then Stalin as the chief totems.
In the tribal cults there can be no graver sin than to offend the totem; and so in the Stalin cult whoever had at any time disagreed or quarrelled with Lenin was guilty of sacrilege. (Stalin himself, of course, was quite cynical about this. He knew the real history of all the inner party controversies; and he himself had had his disagreements with Lenin. But this was the manner in which the story of the party had to be presented in order to help to secure his own immunity from criticism and attack.)
Stalin's opponents, Bukharin and others, had to be charged with the attempt to murder the ancestral totem — the cardinal sin in primitive magic. They were indeed accused of having attempted to assassinate not only Stalin but Lenin also; and the charge was brought against them twenty years after the alleged attempt. The whole atmosphere of the purge trials, with their countless accusations, their incredible confessions, and all the violent curses thrown at the defendants by prosecutors, judges, and witnesses, can never be fully explained, whatever the plausible political explanations, in terms other than those of primitive magic.
And what was Stalin himself, the remote, inaccessible ruler, the Life-giving Sun, the Father of all the two hundred millions of Soviet Citizens, if not the totem whom the tribe considers as its forebear and with whom all the members of the tribe must feel themselves in a close personal relationship?
Something like a belief in the transmigration of the political souls of great leaders was essential to the Stalin cult: Lenin was the ‘Marx of his time’, Stalin was the ‘Lenin of his time’. This motif too sprang from the inner recesses of the primitive imagination.
In recent years the world was taken aback by the irrational campaign designed to convince the Soviet people that the Russians, and the Russians alone, had been the initiators of all the epoch-making ideas and of all the modern technical discoveries. The campaign may have been dictated by cold political calculation, by the desire to enhance Russia's self-confidence in the conflict with the West. In respect of its claims, the campaign has by no means been unique. Almost every Western nation has at one time or another boosted itself by means of chauvinistic self-adulation. But the grotesque form which the self-adulation has assumed in Russia transcends the experience of any modern chauvinism. It goes back to that remote epoch when the tribe cultivated a belief in its own mysterious powers which set it apart from and above all other tribes.
Similarly, the fear instilled in Soviet citizens of contamination by contact with the West has been in its violence and irrationality reminiscent of the taboo — it suggests the savages' dread of incest.
Stalinism is a complex phenomenon, which needs to be viewed from many angles. But when it is seen from the angle from which we are now viewing it, it appears as the mongrel offspring of Marxism and primitive magic.
Marxism has its inner logic and consistency: and its logic is modern through and through. Primitive magic has its own integrity and its peculiar poetic beauty. But the combination of Marxism and primitive magic was bound to be as incoherent andincongruous as is Stalinism itself. Stalin was exceptionally well equipped to embody that combination and to reconcile in some degree the irreconcilables. But he did not himself create the combination. It was produced by the impact of a Marxist revolution upon a semi-Asiatic society and by the impact of that society upon the Marxist revolution.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LEGACY OF STALINISM
I.DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
Stalinism, we have seen, was no accidental phenomenon in post-revolutionary Russia. It was no freak of history, as some of its old-Bolshevik opponents were inclined to believe. It had its roots deep in its native soil, and it quite naturally flourished in its native climate. This accounted in the last instance for its stupendous strength and resilience, which allowed it to survive so many convulsions and shocks that might have broken any less organically constituted regime.
The question whether Stalinism can survive Stalin for long depends on whether the social conditions from which it had sprung are still prevalent in the Soviet Union. Does the blend of Marxism, autocracy, Greek Orthodoxy, and primitive magic still satisfy a vital need of Russia's development? If so, then, failing some national calamity like a defeat in war, Stalinism may be expected to survive Stalin for a long time, regardless of temporary difficulties and possible rivalry and division in the ruling group. But if the social conditions which have produced it have vanished or are about to do so, then Stalinism cannot long endure.
A survey of the legacy of Stalinism, in both domestic and foreign affairs, may therefore not be out of place here. What does that legacy consist of? What meaning has it for the present and
for the new and rising Soviet generations?
In trying to answer these questions one does not have to resort to guesswork, but has only to draw certain inferences from the changes which Stalinism has wrought in Soviet society.
The changes are, on the whole, well known, although the knowledge of them is no guarantee against the temptation to think of the Russia of the 1950's in terms that would have been perfectly up to date and realistic in the 1930's, or even 1940's, but which are now becoming obsolete. It is a common propensity of the political analyst to lag mentally behind the times. It is even more common for statesmen and politicians to try to apply to new problems solutions successfully or even unsuccessfully applied to previous situations. We are liable to make such errors in our thinking about any nation. But with regard to no nation is this time lag likely to be as great as in relation to Russia, because every recent decade has brought about changes in Russia's national existence more radical and profound than those normally occurring in the life of a nation over half a century.
The West has had its eyes fixed on the purges, the witch-hunts, and the terror which Stalinism employed in its merciless struggle to perpetuate its hold over the minds and bodies of the Soviet people, and more recently of all peoples within the Soviet orbit. That struggle has been real enough; and so has its effectiveness. Yet it was Stalin himself, not his opponents, who in a sense waged the most bitter and effective struggle against the perpetuation of his own system.
Stalinism has persistently and ruthlessly destroyed the soil in which it had grown, that primitive, semi-Asiatic society on whose sap it fed. By its barbarous methods it has succeeded in driving out of Russia most of the barbarism from which it had drawn its strength.
It has achieved this because, even while it expressed the ascendancy of the Oriental-Russian backwardness over Marxism, it also represented the dictatorship of Marxism over that backwardness.
Marxism had postulated an industrial society as the prerequisite for the establishment of socialism. In a titanic struggle with the inefficiency, the sluggishness, and the anarchy of Mother Russia, Stalinism has carried its industrial revolution almost to every corner of its Eurasian realm. The core of Stalin's genuine historic achievement lies in the fact that he found Russia working with the wooden plough and left her equipped with atomic piles.
None of the great nations of the West has carried out its industrial revolution in so short a time and under such crippling handicaps.
Great Britain long enjoyed the advantages of being the world's first and only industrial workshop. Protected by the Channel from foreign invasion, the British devoted their undivided economic strength to the development of their productive resources. The industrialization of Britain, now gaining and now losing momentum, stretched over centuries.
In the United States the process took several decades only. But the United States benefited from exceptional geographic, climatic, and historical advantages. Its people were protected by two oceans and had no need to waste their resources on the requirements of war. They were also fortunate in not having to break down and to overcome inherited anachronistic forms of economic life in their own country. And they were assisted by an abundant influx of foreign capital and machinery, by the immigration of many enterprising spirits and vast numbers of skilled and unskilled labour from all countries of the old world.
Germany also was assisted in her industrialization by foreign capital; and she could freely draw on resources in craftsmanship accumulated over the ages. The process by which Germany changed from an agricultural into an industrial nation lasted nearly half a century, a half-century of an expanding world economy and peace in Europe (1871–1914), which allowed Germany to invest only a negligible proportion of her resources in unproductive armaments.
The Stalinist industrial revolution has so far lasted less than a quarter of a century; and nearly half a decade of this was taken up by a most devastating war, which obliterated much of the achievement of previous years. Even in peace the threat of war hung over Russia's vulnerable frontiers most of the time; and armament production drained off a huge portion of the nation's resources. Foreign investment played no part in Soviet industrialization. The contribution of foreign skill and labour, if not totally absent, was comparatively negligible, while Russia's own resources in administrative and industrial skill were extremely poor.
Tens of millions of muzhiks had to be hastily trained as industrial workers; and hundreds of thousands of men and women had to become technicians and managers within the shortest possible time. Managers and workers alike had to acquire their skill on the job like soldiers who learn to handle rifles and guns for the first time on the battlefield. The effectiveness of the industrialization was correspondingly reduced. Nor could industrialization be carried out on the scale intended without a forcible break-up of anachronistic forms of economic life, especially of the primitive small farm, which tied up labour needed in industry and which could not feed the swelling industrial population. The forcible break-up of the old rural economy engendered chaos, famine, and widespread and violent discontent which in its turn drove the industrializers to use even more violence in the pursuit of their objectives. All this again reduced the effectiveness of industrialization.
This is the economic story of Stalinism in the 1930's. Many critics have convincingly exposed the inhuman cruelties then perpetrated by Stalinism. Their criticisms have by now become so familiar and widely accepted in the West that they need not be repeated here. However, the exclusive and somewhat belated dwelling on the horrors of Stalinist industrialization tends to obscure the general balance of the Stalin era and to substitute the picture of the Russia of the 1930's for that of mid-century Russia. Much, although by no means all, of the dust of the murderous 1930's has long since settled; and towards the end of the Stalin era the Russian scene presented a very different aspect from that of the middle ofthat era.
The up-to-date balance sheet of the Soviet industrial revolution can be outlined here only in the most general terms.
In the early years of the Stalin era Russia's industrial strength was hardly more than that of any small, or at the most of any medium-sized Western nation. In those days Russian economists still looked up to France, the most backward of the industrial powers of the West, while Germany was a giant whom they admired and feared. American technology was fabulously remote, as if beyond the range of the imagination.
Towards the end of the 1930's the Soviet Union, as an economic power, was catching up with and beginning to surpass Germany, as can be seen from the following basic figures:
Basic Industrial Figures for Germany* and Russia in 1929 and 1940
1929 1940
Output of coal (in millions of tons) Russia 41 166
Germany 177 185-190
Steel (in millions of tons) Russia 5 18
Germany 18 20
Electricity (in billions of kwh) Russia 6 48
Germany 30 55
Goods traffic on rail-ways (in millions of tons) Russia 187 590
Germany 463 500 (approx.)
* The figures for Germany do not include the output of Austria, the Sudetenland, and other territories annexed by Hitler.
The table indicates, of course, only that Russia's aggregate industrial power was catching up with Germany's. The degree of Russia's industrial saturation was, because of her much more numerous population, well below the German level. In consumer industries Russia was far behind Germany. On the other hand, in engineering and armament industries she was already well ahead of Germany precisely because she devoted only a negligible proportion of her basic materials to consumer industries and used them mainly for the expansion of her engineering plant.
Basic Production*
Million metric tons
U.S.S.R. in 1951 U.S.S.R plan for 1955 Great Britain, France, and West Germany 1951 United States 1951
Coal 281 372 398 523
Oil 42 70 1.7 309
Electricity (billion kwh) 103 162 147 370
/> Pig iron 22 34 29 63
Crude steel 31 44 39 95
* This table is taken from The Economist of 30 August 1952. Another table in the same paper showed that Russia's industrial saturation, i.e. her output per head of population, remains well below that of Western Europe, although it is approaching that of France. Here again, Russia is much further behind Western Europe in consumer industries than this table indicates, but she is also more ahead in engineering and armament.
In the present decade Russia is beginning to overtake the combined industrial power of Germany, France, and Great Britain; and she obviously aspires to catching up with the United States in the not too remote future.
Whether or not Russia will ever be able to realize her ambition of attaining industrial parity with the United States, the mere fact that she is about to leave behind the combined industrial power of the great nations of Western Europe and is thinking ahead so ambitiously, gives a measure of the profound transformation she has undergone in the Stalin era.
This transformation has taken place on the basis of a publicly owned and planned economy. Stalinism claims to have provided the first historically significant demonstration, carried out on a gigantic scale, that planning is the most effective method for the rational use and the most rapid development of a nation's economic resources. Stalinism has implanted this conviction in the new Soviet generations even in its most bitter opponents and enemies among them; and it impresses upon the new generations of China and Eastern Europe that their way of escape from inherited poverty and the anarchy of their underdeveloped capitalism lies also in a publicly owned and planned economy.
What validity, it may be asked, has this claim concerning the superiority of Soviet planning? How much of Russia's industrial expansion has been due to planning, and how much has been achieved by, for instance, the use of forced labour?
It is important to make a distinction between the fundamental elements of the Soviet economy and its marginal phenomena. A few years ago the number of the inmates of Soviet concentration camps was most implausibly estimated by Western commentators from 12 to 20 millions. If these figures were correct the whole Soviet experiment in planning would be only of negative significance to the rest of the world, for it would represent nothing but the recrudescence of slavery on a staggering scale.
Russia After Stalin Page 5
