Stalin and the Communist Party in the
1920s
Did the system spawn a monster - or a monster the
system? Norman Pereira re-evaluates the road to
totalitarianism in the Soviet Union after the
Revolution, and Stalin's part in it.
The chief political story of the 1920s in Soviet Russia was the rise to supreme power of Joseph Stalin, and the
related failure of Leon Trotsky. Their rivalry – which moved from relatively minor antagonisms and jealousies to
bitter competition for the role of Lenin's successor – deeply divided the Bolshevik (renamed Communist in 1918)
party and the international revolutionary movement in general; it also coloured many of the more important issues
facing the new state.
In the West, Stalin has been depicted as a sinister figure, virtually unknown until Lenin's death in January 1924,
who somehow managed to outmanoeuvre the vastly more talented and deserving Trotsky to become Lenin's
successor. This picture is misleading because it does not acknowledge Stalin's years of service in the Bolshevik
cause, long before Trotsky turned his back on Menshevism to join the party in 1917; and it does not take into
account the cultural parochialism of the millions of workers/peasants who entered the ranks during the critical
1917-21 years of revolution and civil war, and became Stalin's base constituency. For these people, Stalin was a
role model, while the other top leaders were either too cosmopolitan and intellectual, or simply alien. It was his
closeness to the unlettered masses which constituted Stalin's great, and often misunderstood, strength. Of
course, intrigue, treachery, and terror also contributed to his success, but by themselves they do not account for
Stalin's extraordinary role or popularity (which survives in some circles in the former Soviet Union to this day).
Stalin was never an intimate of Lenin in the manner of either Grigory Zinoviev or Lev Kamenev; they were Lenin's
most trusted assistants and close personal friends from the founding of the Bolshevik party in the early years of
the twentieth century. Nor was Stalin the intellectual equal of Nikolai Bukharin who, with Lenin, was responsible
in 1921 for formulating the New Economic Policy (NEP) which offered the peasantry a partial return to smallscale agrarian capitalism and a free market economy. And almost everyone – including Zinoviev, Kamenev, and
Bukharin – assumed that Stalin was no match for Trotsky, whose prestige had just reached its zenith with his
triumphant leadership of the Red Army in the civil war (1918-21).
Stalin was not without his own special qualities which prompted Lenin to have him appointed to the Central
Committee as early as 1913. With the possible exceptions of Zinoviev and Kamenev, there was no one upon
whom Lenin relied more for the most difficult party tasks. When the rest of the leadership had been forced into
exile abroad by the Tsarist authorities, Stalin remained in Russia, and continued to look after the unglamorous
day-to-day work of the party. If he lacked the verbal facility of some of his peers, Stalin more than made up for it
with shrewd judgement, a fine memory, common sense, and an uncanny sense of timing. Even his relatively poor
education and ungrammatical Russian worked to his advantage because they made him appear to he more a
man of the people, especially in comparison with the silver tongued Jews, Trotsky and Zinoviev.
During the initial period of Soviet power, Stalin appeared to be the mediator among titans. When clashing
ambitions in the leadership jeopardised party unity, it was he who offered to step down – at the Twelfth Party
Congress in 1923 (when Lenin was already too ill to participate) and again at the fifteenth, in 1927. Even if they
were ploys, these gestures were effective and stood in marked contrast with the too obvious self-promotion of the
Zinovievs and the Kamenevs. Stalin could also be tactful in disagreement; his rhetoric was low-key, even with a
touch of self-deprecatory humour. Remarkable as it may seem in retrospect, until the end of the 1920s, he was
widely regarded as the man of the golden mean, as the bridge between the extremes of left (Trotsky and later
Zinoviev and Kamenev) and right (Bukharin and his allies).
Stalin cultivated this role of mediator in another way as well. He concentrated on the thankless and unglamorous
task of providing exegesis for one or another of Lenin's dense texts. This was no small contribution, since so
much of what the leader wrote was not readily accessible to the general public. It was Stalin's job to grasp the
gist of the argument and paraphrase it for wider consumption.
Gradually Stalin developed his own unique rhetorical style, marked by deliberateness, concreteness, and
repetition. As in a good undergraduate lecture or parish sermon, his listener/ reader was taken step-by-step
through the esoteric new knowledge, given specific examples drawn from common experience, guided through
the whole process again, and told exactly what it all meant. He peppered his writings and speeches with italics for
emphasis, especially when quoting Lenin or himself. Using common folk idiom, he reduced complex issues to
neat formulas which could he easily absorbed. In bringing the message from the stratosphere to the ground,
Stalin did for Lenin what, in a different context, Lenin had done for Marx. But his goal was more narrowly
conceived: to convince the masses of the correctness of the Party's policy.
Stalin's famous oath of fealty to the just-deceased Lenin perfectly conveys the sing-song, patristic quality of his
style:
In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordered us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the Party. We
vow to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we shall honourably fulfil this thy commandment... In leaving us, Comrade
Lenin ordered us to guard the unity of our Party like the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin, that
we shall fulfil this thy commandment, too... In leaving us, Comrade Lenin ordered us to guard and strengthen the
dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin, that without sparing our strength we shall
honourably fulfil this thy commandment, too...
It was unimaginable that Trotsky or Lenin would under any circumstances express himself in such mawkish
terms, but to the Russian peasant ear the words were familiar and comforting.
With the onset of Lenin's critical illness in 1922 and the power vacuum it created, Stalin began to position himself
for the imminent succession struggle. He challenged Trotsky's ingenious theory of 'Permanent Revolution' which
provided a justification for the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks (in apparent contradiction of orthodox Marxism)
within a still largely rural and pre-industrial society.
For Stalin this was a potentially risky line of attack, since Lenin himself had sanctioned Trotsky's theory as the
appropriate refutation of the Mensheviks' main criticism that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was historically
premature. By contrast to Bolshevism's revolutionary ardour, Menshevism was characterised by a strict
adherence to the generic rules set forth by Marx and Engels for evolution from capitalism to socialism. Trotsky
countered the Menshevik argument by proposing that the two revolutions, bourgeois and proletarian, could be
'telescoped' into one continuous process which together with the more developed West would bring about a panEuropean socialist community. Implicit to Trotsky's analysis, however, was the assumption that socialism in
Russia was dependent upon socialist revolutions in the advanced industrial nations of the West; by itself the
Russian revolution would become isolated and inevitably succumb to domestic reaction and foreign intervention.
Stalin's strategy was to depict himself as the true disciple of Lenin, and Trotsky as a Menshevik renegade who
was twisting Lenin's legacy. For his part, Trotsky pointed to the dying leader's belated concern with the
unrestrained growth of bureaucracy which every one knew signified the apparatus of Stalin's Secretariat. With
Lenin out of the way, at the Party Conference of January 1924 Stalin counter-attacked by accusing his foe of
slandering 'the collective leadership and splitting the party'.
Stalin made the most of the fears of the party majority for whom Trotsky's anti-bureaucratism was not merely a
matter of high politics, but a direct threat to their own new-found prominence and status in society. That was why
it had to be refuted as apostasy, even if to do so meant distorting both the theory of 'Permanent Revolution' and
Lenin's position. Thus they echoed Stalin's words:
The Leninist theory of proletarian revolution is the negation of the theory of 'permanent revolution.' Distrust in the
strength and capacity of our revolution, distrust in the strength and capacities of the Russian proletariat forms the
basis of the theory of 'permanent revolution'. The theory of 'permanent revolution' advanced by Comrade Trotsky
is but another variety of Menshevism.
Trotsky countered with his 'Lessons of October', published in autumn of 1924, which argued that the revolution
was being betrayed from the right, but he stopped short of implicating Stalin.
The problem for Trotsky was tactical as well as strategic. He believed that he was obliged by Leninist norms of
party discipline to fight the battle inside the party where there was little chance of success because of Stalin's role
as General Secretary. As of the beginning of 1923, party membership was barely half a million people and
therefore only a tiny proportion of the general population. In society at large and in the army Trotsky was far more
popular. But there was the real danger of a split in the Bolshevik leadership being exploited by their common
enemies.
Trotsky, nevertheless, always believed that he could overcome opposition with the force of his arguments and
reasoning. By contrast, Isaac Deutscher describes Stalin as a 'Communist pessimist' because he 'treats his own
doctrine as a piece of esoteric knowledge. He does not believe that the working classes are really capable of
accepting it, unless it is, brutally speaking, pushed down their throats'. Stalin counted on rank-and-file members
caring less about intellectual consistency than about social solidarity and party-consciousness:
We Communists are people of a special type. We are carved out of special matter. We are those who form the
army of the great revolutionary strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin. There is on loftier title than member of the
Party of which Comrade Lenin was the founder and director. It is not given to everyone to endure the misfortunes
and the storms involved in belonging to such a party. The sons of the working classes, sons of poverty and
struggle, sons of incredible privations and heroic efforts – they are the men to he members of such a party. That
is why the Leninist Party, the Communist Party calls itself the party of the working classes.
Stalin, it is true, stressed a particular side of Lenin: his revolutionary will, his scorn of Menshevik 'objectivism' – all
those rules about when the situation would finally be ripe for socialism – and his contempt for 'bourgeois
democracy' in politics. Stalin also shared with Lenin a fierce commitment to the primacy of the Communist Party.
The essence of the matter for them both was the party's claim to being the sole legitimate representative of the
working class: 'Our party is a party of the elect... Our party has a monopoly among the working class'.
Stalin was shrewd enough to realise, moreover, that this monopoly would only last so long as the party promoted
the interests of its mass membership, made up increasingly of recent recruits from the unskilled workers and
peasants. Through his appointment in April 1922 as General Secretary (a position which initially was seen to be
largely administrative rather than the fulcrum of authority it became) he was able to create a network of likeminded and class-allied local party bosses around the country. These men became his eyes, ears, and loyal
agents.
But that was not all. Again taking his cue from Lenin, Stalin insisted that the party operate like an army. In a
speech on December 2nd, 1923, he described it as 'a military union of those who act alike on the basis of a
common programme'. The image was not fortuitous, armies are not democratic and they do not tolerate division
of authority or dissent within their ranks.
Because of its special role and nature, Stalin believed that the party was particularly vulnerable to hidden internal
enemies. Robert Tucker portrays Stalin as a victim of his own delusions:
In Stalin's mind, then, the hero-image of himself was in symbiosis with a villain image of the enemy.
Counterposed to the picture of himself as a great revolutionary and Marxist, the truest of Lenin's disciples and his
rightful successor at the head of the movement, was a picture of the enemy inside the party as would-be betrayer
of it and the Revolution.
To fight such dangerous influences, it was absolutely necessary for Stalin to be tough, even if that made him look
like an oriental despot. Indeed, for many of his followers it was an important part of his appeal. The omnipotent
and omnicompetent boss was still the norm in a society so recently under Tsarist autocracy. Moreover, Stalin's
notion of Russia at the centre of the universe was close to the cosmology of the Orthodox Church and peasantry:
The centre of the revolutionary movement was bound to shift to Russia. Is it surprising, after all this, that a
country which has accomplished such a revolution and possesses such a proletariat would have been the
birthplace of the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution? Is it surprising that Lenin, leader of this
proletariat, became the creator of this theory and tactics and the leader of the international proletariat?
This had a triple effect: it asserted Russian primacy, rejected the indignity of dependence upon and comparison
with the West, and implicitly refuted Trotskyism.
Stalin's own seminal theory – Socialism In One Country – asserted that Soviet Russia could successfully build
socialism on its own. Sanctioned by the Fourteenth Party Conference in April 1925, this marked a real shift in
emphasis for the Communist party as for the Soviet state. In Sheila Fitzpatrick's words, it 'meant that national
modernisation, not international revolution, was the primary objective of the Soviet Community Party'. Thereafter
the explicit priority was to strengthen the international position of the Soviet state, even at the expense of the
world revolution and Communist parties ahead, since the survival of Soviet Russia was the chief thing.
Socialism In One Country had much to offer the party faithful. First of all, it was optimistic and affirmative about
Russia's future:
Whereas Lenin considers that the victory of socialism in one country is possible..., Trotsky, on the contrary,
considers that if a victorious revolution in one country does not very soon call forth a victorious revolution in other
countries, the proletariat of the victorious country will not be able even to retain power (let alone organize a
socialist economy); for, Trotsky says, it is hopeless to think that a revolutionary government in Russia can hold
out in the face of a conservative Europe..
The point was to make Trotsky appear disloyal and defeatist, as well as a usurper. According to Stalin,
Trotskyism meant that Russia's future was 'either (to) rot to the root, or [to] degenerate into a bourgeois
government'. This, of course, was unfair to Trotsky, but it had enough truth in it to give pause and to pave the
way for bigger lies.
At the Twelfth Party Congress it was Zinoviev (rather than Stalin) who took charge of beating back Trotskyist
demands for greater accountability on the part of the Secretariat:
the good of the revolution – this is the highest law. Every revolutionist says: to the devil with 'sacred' principles of
'pure' democracy.
Inexplicably Trotsky himself kept silent, despite Lenin's last-ditch offer from his sick-bed of support in the fight
against Stalin's bureaucratic concentration of power. The next round in the political struggle took shape during
the spring and summer of 1925 when Zinoviev and Kamenev attempted to out-flank Stalin from the left. They now
joined Trotsky in emphasising that NEP had been conceived by Lenin as a 'strategic retreat' in the face of
overwhelming temporary privations of war and natural disasters facing the young Soviet state, and that it was
time to scrap NEP and retake centralised command of the economy in order to build socialism without further
delay.
Stalin, with the support of the right, quickly responded that such criticism demonstrated a Trotskyist
misunderstanding of the purpose and nature of NEP which was based upon winning over the poor peasantry to
the side of the proletarian dictatorship; and that in their failure to distinguish between the rural poor and rich
kulaks, Zinoviev and his allies were showing themselves to be both bad Leninists and fundamentally 'antipeasant'.
By the end of 1925, moreover, it was already too late for the reunited left to he effective against Stalin's growing
monopoly on power. There had been so much blood spilled in public between Zinoviev and Trotsky that it
obscured their basic agreement on economic priorities. Even more important, their differences with Stalin were
not well-known or understood, particularly outside the narrow confines of the Central Committee.
At the Central Committee plenum in April 1926 the United Opposition (of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev) still
stopped short of a direct attack upon the General Secretariat or open repudiation of NEP. It was not until the
middle of 1927, and then only for limited circulation, that they attributed both international and domestic failures to
Stalin's theory of 'socialism in one country'. For this breach of discipline, all three were formally expelled from the
ranks of the party at the Fifteenth Congress in December, 1927. Thus at the tenth anniversary of their glorious
combined victory in 1917, Lenin's closest comrades-in-arms saw their role within the party come to an abrupt and
ignominious end.
Having disposed of the left, Stalin was only half done. He then had the Congress reaffirm the principles of NEP
but also lay the groundwork for the first Five Year Plan (FYP) which proposed the consolidation of agricultural
production into large collective farms as well as a new emphasis upon heavy industry. The FYP, in fact,
represented a sharp turning away from NEP toward centralised command of the economy. Initially, however, the
transition was presented as a gradual and voluntary plan; there was no indication of the brutally coercive features
of implementation which Stalin introduced several months later.
An ideological division had existed all along between a minority (led by Bukharin) in the party which was really
enthusiastic about NEP as an alternative path to socialism, and a silent majority which regarded any such
concessions to private enterprise as backsliding and a betrayal of Marxism. While Lenin was alive, this restive
majority kept quiet, but always in the anticipation that NEP was transitory and that the drive to socialism would be
rekindled at the first opportunity.
Stalin maintained a studied silence, whether out of respect for Lenin or for more opportunistic reasons. Prior to
1927-28, and especially in the period just after his 1924 lectures under the title 'Foundations of Leninism', he
seemed to be squarely on the side of Bukharin and those who supported the continuation and even extension of
NEP, while assiduously promoting the view that Trotsky and the left were anti-NEP and anti-peasant.
When Stalin performed his great turn-about in late 1927 and took over the left analysis, after disposing of its chief
advocates, he was not only affirming his own true instincts hut also reaping clear political benefits. Thus the
decision to abandon NEP coincided with a concerted campaign to depict his former allies on the right as naive
and too willing to make common cause with all peasants, including the rich kulaks.
At the end of May, 1928, Stalin sounded the new call to party members: the only solution was massive
application of force against the recalcitrant kulaks. Harsh administrative measures were necessary as well to deal
with 'wreckers' who were everywhere – in industry, in management, even in the party. Stalin hinted that the
policies of the right and a general lack of vigilance were responsible for major industrial sabotage and other social
reversals. On October 19th, 1928, he attacked the Moscow party leadership for taking part in a 'Right Deviation'.
Between April 23rd and 29th, 1929, the Sixteenth Party Conference met to adopt Stalin's new industrial and
agricultural policy. Bukharin was explicitly identified as leader of the right opposition and denounced for his 'nonMarxian theory that the kulaks will grow into socialism, [and] his failure to understand the mechanism of the class
struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat'. The right was now in full disarray; on November 26th, 1929,
Bukharin, A.I. Rykov and M.P. Tomsky suffered the humiliation of having to denounce themselves in public, just
as the left opposition had done in the recent past. A month later, Stalin announced ominously that the party had
moved on from 'a policy of limiting the exploiting activities of the kulaks to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a
class'. It amounted to a declaration of war on the peasantry.
The decade ended with Zinoviev and Kamenev broken, Bukharin discredited, Trotsky in disgrace and exile
abroad, and Stalin alone at the helm about to launch his great adventure in social engineering. Still no one
imagined the full terrible consequences of what was to follow, least of all the common people and the party
masses who saw in him their natural leader and champion. With one rousing voice they joined the Central
Committee in celebrating the occasion of Stalin's fiftieth birthday on December 21st 1929, just as his revolution
from above was descending upon their heads.
Further Reading:
JV Stalin - Problems of Leninism (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947), The October Revolution
(International Publishers, 1934); Selected Works (Cardinal Publishers, 1971); GR Urban (ed) Stalinism (St
Martin's Press, 1969); L Schapiro - The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Vintage Books, 1971); RC Tucker
- Stalin as Revolutionary (WW Norton, 1990); S Fitzpatrick - The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 (oxford UP,
1985).

Norman Pereira is Professor of Russian History at Dalhousie University, Canada.
Stalin and Stalinism
Martin McCauley argues that our obsession with
Stalin as a mass murderer evades the real question
– how did his system work?
Stalin has now been dead for over 40 years but the system he developed, Stalinism, lived on after him. It used to
be claimed that Lenin was more alive than the living but it would be more true to say that Stalinism is always with
us. The Stalin period can be viewed as dating from his rise to power in 1928, although the Stalinist system was
not fully in place before 1936 to 1953. This extraordinary quarter of a century has left an indelible mark on the
Soviet Union, its successor states and the world. Stalin had many admirers in the outside world, from those who
revelled in his use of coercion against his opponents, real and imagined, to more intellectual types who admired
the symmetry and harmony of his system. Harold Wilson, the most successful Labour politician in the 20th
century and the victor of four general elections in Britain, was greatly taken by the Soviet planning system. Ways
were sought whereby a market economy could he introduced to the benefits of a plan. It was not only in Britain
that the concept of planning gained currency. France went further than Britain along this path. Another spin off
was the belief that utilities and other key industrial sectors could be better managed if state run. Hence
nationalisation was deemed to be necessary to make the economy more efficient and more just. Unconsciously –
and in a few cases consciously – Labour politicians were following the Soviet example.
The reaction against state planning
The turning of the tide against collectivism and state regulation began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in
1979. She began to preach the-virtues of privatisation, individual initiative and freedom. A devoted follower of
Hayek (she ignored the fact that politically he was left of centre), she embraced the market as the regulator of
economic life. When she arrived in power about 60% of Britain's Gross Domestic Product was administered by
the state. This she identified as one of the fundamental reasons why the British economy was weak. It took the
breath away when she proposed that a public utility such as British Telecom could be privatised and would
thereby become more efficient. She was appalled to discover that there was no economic theory stating that
privately owned enterprises were more efficient than state owned ones. Economic theory was more concerned
about how the assets were managed than about ownership. The anti-state ethos which pervaded her thinking
was mirrored in the United States by President Ronald Reagan.
With the wisdom of hindsight it is astonishing that the tide against the increasing role of' the state, on the grounds
that most state-run enterprises were increasing inefficient, did not lead to a rethink about the communist
economic system, fashioned by Stalin. The major reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that
state investments had become increasingly unprofitable. If state investments in the west were not producing
rising profitability, what were (he implications for the Soviet Union where practically all investment was by the
state? The most dynamic economies in the 1980s were the 'Asian tigers', (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.)
and they were aggressively capitalist. Europeans and Americans were so enamoured of the belief that the Soviet
Union was a superpower that they failed to apply the lessons of the 1980s to the Soviet Union. No leading
scholar concluded that the Soviet planning system would collapse under its own inefficiency. There was a
widespread view among western political scientists and economists that Gorbachev's perestroika could not
succeed. In order to survive, the USSR had to revert to the tried and (rusted methods of the pre-Gorbachev age.
The Soviet ruling class, the nomenklatura, was more perceptive. They did not believe that the Soviet system, the
Stalinist system, could be successfully reformed to produce dynamic economic growth. By the late 1980s they
had ensured that their future in the post-communist state was secure. With the resources of the state at their
disposal, they established businesses, commercial banks, engaged in foreign trade and acquired much property
at home and abroad. Part of their wealth was deposited abroad. This epitomises the morality of the Soviet
nomenklatura – fashioned under Stalin. They were concerned about their own wellbeing and not that of the
population at large.
Stalin's basic aims
Stalin deliberately destroyed civil society (autonomous institutions outside the control of the state), horizontal
links between regions and institutions, and imposed a ruthlessly effective coercive political and economic system.
It was effective but not efficient. Logically his plan was breathtakingly simple. Concentrate all resources (human
and capital) at the centre, mobilise the country to achieve centrally given goals and the result was bound to be
gratifying. Stalin, like Lenin, always believed that the end justifies the means. Shorn of any moral constraint, he
demanded the achievement of impossible goals – irrespective of the human or material cost. Statistics measure
the results but, from Stalin's point of view, all statistics are first political and then economic, social, etc. He once
commented that 'paper will take anything that is printed on it'. Reporting became careless. The Central Statistical
Administration, housed in a splendid Le Corbusier-designed building, was wont to boast that 'all five year plans
were constructed in the building and they were all fulfilled within the building'. This reveals that the functions
assigned to the statistical agency can best be understood as monitoring and propaganda functions. Here Stalin
fell into his own trap. How was he to discover what the real state of affairs was? He attempted various reforms to
unearth the real reserves of enterprises, for instance. He launched, for example, campaigns of social competition.
They, however, became counter-productive as enterprises conspired to emulate one another – but only on paper.
Stalin never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good story line. The two soldiers who hoisted the Red flag
over the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945 were Russian and Tatar. This did not please Stalin, who decided he
wanted a fellow Georgian to have the honour. When the Russian and the Tatar turned up at anniversary parades
to reclaim the honour they were arrested and then released afterwards. On the other hand, Stalin is one of the
great politicians of the 20th century. He inspired a whole generation of Soviets to attempt: the impossible (after
1991, those who bad selflessly served him were wont to complain that he had betrayed them and robbed them of
their youth). He fashioned an elite which never attempted to remove him – the coup against Khrushchev in 1964
and the attempted coup in 1991 would have been inconceivable under Stalin. Many of his cohorts remained loyal.
For example, Molotov and Kaganovich averred to their dying days that Stalin had acted correctly and that the
mess the Soviet Union later got itself into was the result of deviating from Stalin' s path.
What of foreign and security policy? A Soviet leader has to satisfy various constituencies: the domestic, involving
strengthening the state and providing the population with inspirational leadership and direction and convincing
them that things are getting better; military; foreign affairs – negotiating with foreign states according to normal
diplomatic practice; and promoting the expansion of communism. Stalin provided strong, at times inspirational,
leadership; as commander in chief he guided the country to victory in 1945 but never trusted his military. He
outwitted Churchill and Roosevelt but was outmanoeuvred by Hitler. The tendency is now, in Russia and outside,
to blame him for beginning the Cold War and setting in train (he ruinously expensive arms race. Eastern Europe,
his prize for winning the Second World War, had become an albatross by the 1980s. His treatment of Mao
Zedong and the People's Republic of China – he wanted to make the Chinese as subservient as eastern Europe
– fuelled the conflict which erupted into border clashes in the 1960s and almost led to war. He was highly
successful at promoting communism abroad but the obverse of this coin was that it stoked up the Cold War and
the armaments race as western insecurity grew.
His economic and political system collapsed when Gorbachev attempted to reform it. Herein lies its greatest
weakness – its unreformability. The ruling class it spawned was incapable of innovative thinking and instead
preferred to feather their own nests while the ship of state sank.
Hence the balance sheet shows more liabilities than assets. What were his lasting achievements? He dragged
the Soviet Union into the modern world and transformed a largely agrarian country into a superpower capable of
taking on and defeating Germany. Great scientific achievements were recorded under his aegis. Rocket
technology, later to put Yury Gagarin in space, was well under way when Stalin died in 1953. He effected a social
revolution without a civil war. He kept the lid on the nationality problem. The unprecedented growth of educational
opportunity produced new elites, especially in the non-Russian areas. A health, housing and social security
system was fashioned at a time when no other country was attempting to do anything similar.
Earlier analytical approaches
What about western analyses of Stalin and Stalinism? There are two main schools of thought – they can be
labelled the 'totalitarian' or 'intentionalist' on the one hand and the 'structuralist', 'social' or 'pluralist' on the other.
The totalitarian approach grew out of the beginning of the Cold War and held sway until the 1960s. It is
dominated by the personality and preferences of Stalin. Totalitarians would not claim that Stalin ever achieved his
goal of a totalitarian state but that their approach provides incisive insights into the phenomenon of Stalinism. It
was believed that the Stalinist state was strictly disciplined and that the ruler was able to impose his will on
society. Conquest now concedes that this is flawed and that the state was often ineffective and that initiatives
from below were significant. The experiences of the anti-Vietnam War campaigners and the 'generation of 1968'
led to a realisation that the state and the existing order could be challenged and changed from below. Applied to
the Soviet Union, this produced the pluralist approach. This implies that the state merely acts as referee between
competing interests in society. However, the state for instance is responsible for defence, security and foreign
affairs. The government has its own preferences since it needs to nurture a constituency in order to be reelected.
Another way of portraying the totalitarians and the pluralists is to borrow terminology from the study of Nazi
Germany and label them intentionalists and structuralists. The former view Hitler as a strong leader, imposing his
policy agenda on the nation. Here most emphasis is placed on politics and ideology. The latter see a semichaotic polycratic power structure under (he apparent monolithic surface of the regime.
In Stalinist studies the intentionalists are the totalitarians and the structuralists are the social historians. The key
source for the views of the social historians is that of Sheila Fitzpatrick. She sees the Stalin era as a dichotomy
between the 'revolution from above' and the 'revolution from below', presented by the totalitarians and the
revisionists, the social historians. The totalitarians, in her view, analyse Soviet developments in the context of the
dichotomy between state and society, with society reacting, seeking to resist, evade, subvert or through passive
resistance neuter the impositions of the state. The state therefore seeks to mobilise a victimised, weak, inchoate
society. Fitzpatrick collides with these views head on and claims that society was dynamic: with new hierarchies,
new privileges and levels of status, vertical and horizontal cleavages were emerging'. State coercion was the
response engendered by the problems of managing this social fluidity. The indoctrination of society can be
interpreted as a necessary part of the training and culture needed in the new era of socialism. There are social as
well as political dynamics in Stalinism. The social historians concentrate not on the 'actions of the state, but the
dynamic of relationships between the different social strata and classes; the prevalent social distinctions and their
significance in the lives of individuals; the ways in which the individuals could improve their status and protect
themselves; the various aspects and repercussions of social mobility; and the ways in which some aspects of the
social hierarchy could persist or emerge in spite of, rather than because of, the actions of the regime' (p.26).
Another major concern is whether the new elite at the top of the social hierarchy was a ruling class, in the Marxist
sense, or whether it was the group with the highest status and economic advantages in society. This approach is
referred to as social history to distinguish it from political history which is mainly concerned with the party-state.
A touchstone is the assessment of the terror. The social historians or the 'new cohort' regard the differences
between the Stalinist and the normal political process as one of degree rather than quality. The mobility and
dynamism of society were such as to devolve almost into anarchy. Rittersporn traces the origins of the terror to
the ungovernability of the country resulting from the bureaucratic in-fighting and the centre-periphery conflict.
Getty argues that the Great Purges were not the 'result of a petrified bureaucracy stamping out dissent and
annihilating old radical revolutionaries. In fact, it may have been just the opposite... a radical, even hysterical
reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave
of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism' (p.206). Hence Stalin's role fades into the background. Rittersporn
and Getty view him as just one of the actors who played a role in the drama of factional strife. Others play down
his influence by mentioning him only in passing.
Critics of the social historians scorn their approach as an attempt to 'de-demonise Stalin and the Politburo' and
make their policies appear 'humdrum' and mundane – as if the Soviet government were 'just like any other
government operating in difficult circumstances'. By consciously avoiding any link between social and political
history, these scholars give the impression that one is dealing with the pluralist model of politics, and hence that
there are similarities between Stalinism and pluralist democracy. One critic sees them as deflecting some of the
blame for the brutalities and the suffering of the 1930s away from Stalin and offloading it elsewhere. Their
approach is broadly Marxist in that they search for causes in the 'socio-economic base rather than the politicalideologicaI superstructure'. It is instructive that Fitzpatrick excludes Moshe Lewin from her new cohort' of social
historians, presumably because he does address the problem of the interaction of the social and the political.
Gainers and losers
What distinguishes the work of the 'new cohort' from that of Lewin? Fitzpatrick researches 'mass education,
social mobility, cultural revolution and a revolutionary continuity spanning from February 1917 until the
consummation of the first five year plan'. She is mainly concerned to examine the newly emerging society from a
positive point of view. Education is one of' her passions and she delves into the effects it has on creating a new
social elite. She is not concerned with the cultural and social cost of the new policies. She does not dwell on the
old elites and their fate since they have little to contribute, besides being the handmaidens, to the new order. She
conceives revolution as spanning the years from 1917 to the early 1930s and hence has a wide palate to work
with. Getty examines radical tendencies within the party, which sought to bring the bureaucracy under the
influence of a mobilised grass roots democracy. He is engaged in refuting the view that the party was merely the
instrument of a dominant leader, Stalin. It had its own inner dynamic. Many of its members achieved social
mobility through the party's ranks. The upper ranks of the party did attempt to dominate and transform the rank
and file into instruments to implement their policies but grass roots democracy was a reality and a powerful force
when mobilised. Rittersporn, as well, finds political forces at play which tried to grapple with bureaucratic
conservatism. Again the view emerges that the party was not monolithic and the instrument of one dictator. There
was a powerful undercurrent which made itself felt and hence had to be taken into account when shaping
policies. Manning writes of participatory management in the collective farms, Viola of working class enthusiasm
for the collectivisation campaign. Here one cannot fault her, but in the end it was not workers but peasants who
were eventually to decide the effectiveness of the collectivisation approach to agricultural growth. One should not
forget that many of the enthusiastic workers were first generation workers and hence still had vivid memories of
the countryside. Collectivisation to most of them was taking the land away from the barin or landlord. Thurston
retells the pleasurable as well as the grim aspects of everyday life in the 1930s.
Broadly speaking these scholars have radical sympathies. Lewin, on the other hand, regards the 1930s as a
disaster of epic proportions as the Stalinist state established a string of bureaucratic institutions to stabilise the
quicksand society it had engendered by its own destructive campaigns. Lewin underlines the view that Stalin was
an historical demon by providing it with roots in peasant culture, but the 'new cohort' regard this demonic nature
as a myth. Lewin's very negative view of Stalin permits little positive to be said about him. The revolution from
above was destructive and the cost paid by the Soviet Union too high. It was destructive rather than constructive
and because of this a bureaucratic strait jacket had to be placed on the country. Without it there would have been
anarchy and chaos since the changes were not organic but forced.
These social scholars attract fire from revisionist scholars, such as Stephen Cohen, who emphasise the
discontinuities between Leninism and Stalinism. Cohen objects to their approval of certain developments in the l
930s, which implies continuities between the radicalism of the early revolutionary years and the 1930s. However
one critic of the 'new cohort' concedes that their emphasis on life at grass roots and middle management level
tends to 'provide circumstantial evidence that some of the Stalinist policies were couched in terms which were not
without popular appeal, thus in effect raising the possibility that they were the product of shared perceptions and
reasons rather than of Stalin's personal designs' (p.40). In other words, some of Stalin's policies were organic
and developed naturally from the economic and social environment. As such they benefited some strata of
society and moved the country forward. Mass education, mainly in technical disciplines, the expansion of literacy,
the growth of social services (a rudimentary health service began to emerge), the rapid decline of unemployment
and the sheer excitement of the drama which began unfolding in the early 1930s rallied support to Stalin's
revolution. This undermines the contention that the grandmaster Stalin played political, economic and social
chess with the inhabitants of the country. Economic and social changes cannot be wrought according to the
tenets of a grand design if they are to achieve success understood as the rapid modernisation of the Soviet
Union so as to transform it into a leading and eventually the leading world economic power.
Totalitarians emphasise the power of the state and the deliberate terrorisation of society. The state could and did
crush any group which stood in its way and could even deliberately provoke a famine (for example in Ukraine in
1932-33). Its goal was the atomisation of society. However, there were still areas where autonomy remained: a
major one was the family; others were the persistence of religious faith, nationalism and ethnicity.
Social historians have worked hard to identify the social base of the Stalinist state, those who supported and
benefited from its policies. Most belong to the party-state bureaucracy, the military, control agencies (NKVD, etc),
mass organizations, party and Komsomol members. Fitzpatrick is concerned with the new elite, Kuromiya, the
younger generation of industrial workers, Viola, workers promoting collectivisation, Siegelbaum, the
Stakhanovites who led the way in showing it was possible to increase labour productivity. This, of course, made
them unpopular with many since they were expected to follow. A striking fact about the social base so far
identified is how small and insecure it was. This may have been the result of the tremendous social mobility and
upheaval of the 1930s. It is clear that there was considerable resistance to new practices at the work place.
Studies of the immediate post-Stalin period indicate how ineffective controls were. For example, it was very
difficult to mobilise factory workers since they paid more attention to their own regional leaders than to the factory
foremen. Their loyalty was still to their region of origin and this solidarity blocked many measures. They also
gradually discovered that they could collectively slow down the work process and thereby hamper technical
innovation.
Totalitarians lay great stress on the state control of education, the mass media and propaganda in producing
social consensus through mass indoctrination. This was probably more effective in the 1930s than later. Given
the low level of formal education and the lack of alternative sources of information, most Russians probably
believed the official version. It is difficult to measure the level of ideological uniformity imposed by Stalin in and
after 1933. People hesitated to express opposing views in public but there was always the private sphere. Hence
Soviet citizens lived in two worlds, the official Soviet world, and the private, real world.
Totalitarians see continuities between Leninism and Stalinism, stressing the strong state, monopolistic
communist party and the desire to transform society according to policy preferences agreed at the top. Both
Leninism and Stalinism are viewed as negative phenomena. On the contrary, the social historians are broadly in
sympathy with the goals of Leninism and Stalinism and see links which are not necessarily negative. Sheila
Fitzpatrick analyses the Russian revolution in a social context and concludes that it reached from 1917 to the
early 1930s.
The reccon approach
Given the shortcomings of the totalitarians (intentionalists) and the social historians (structuralists), it is worth
attempting a more rounded approach which pays due attention to the interaction of political and social policies.
Following Tucker'", this can be called the 'reconstruction-consolidation or reccon approach'. This views the
history of the Soviet Union as a series of advances and retreats in order to consolidate gains. Revolution and war
communism were an advance; NEP was a retreat in order to allow the Bolsheviks to build up their strength before
attempting further advance; 1928-32 was a whirlwind advance; 1933-36 was a temporary slowdown to
consolidate; 1937-39 was another violent advance; 1939-41 was less radical as it saw the end of the purges;
then war intervened; 1946-52 again saw consolidation; but in 1952-53 it would appear Stalin was again
considering an assault on the bureaucracy and the party. The evidence for this was the smaller and larger
Presidium elected at the XIXth Party Congress and the Doctors' Plot.
The reccon approach gives due weight to the power of the state but also takes into account social resistance to
official policy. This explains the need for periods of' consolidation. The crisis of 1932-33, the terrible famine and
the slowdown in economic growth rates, all of which put Stalin's position in jeopardy, rendered necessary the
period of consolidation which followed. Recent research has revealed that Stalin and Molotov believed that there
was widespread opposition to the regime which could become critically important in the event of war. This may
explain the assault on the Red Army in 1937-38. In addition, Molotov and Kaganovich harboured doubts about
the wisdom of certain aspects of the violent advance of 1937-39 which included wiping out the old Bolsheviks.
Advances built on previous experience. The 1936-38 purges are inconceivable without the accumulated
experience of war communism and 1928-32. The terror may be read as evidence of the weakness of the regime
as it struck out at perceived enemies. The terror redefined societal relations and promoted social mobility.
Egalitarianism was pushed aside in the 1930s. There are parallels between the USSR and China. After the Great
Leap Forward came a period of calm, followed by the Cultural Revolution. Mao was always concerned to
proletarianise and renew the bureaucracy and downgrade accumulated experience.
The Stalinist betrayal
Trotsky's interpretation of Stalin has been influential. As a Marxist he was concerned to provide a Marxist critique
of the Stalinist phenomenon. This played down the role of the individual and placed great emphasis on
circumstances. Trotsky came up with concepts of 'Thermidorian reaction' and 'bureaucratic degeneration'. The
failure of the socialist revolution abroad led to the gradual degeneration of the revolution at home. Russia's
minuscule working class, decimated, Rispersed and weakened by war, revolution and famine, could not elevate
the gains of October 1917 to a fully functioning democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, a bureaucratic
Leviathan, the totalitarian party-state machine, placed itself above society and took control of politics,
administration and the manufacture and distribution of scarce goods. Russian's burgeoning civil society was
overwhelmed as commissars, enterprise managers, party officials, soviet functionaries – appamtchiki who
controlled supply and distribution of goods and services – took control of the small 'surplus product'. They were
not concerned about the goals of October.
Stalin was apparat man personified. Initially the apparat sided with the right, since only NEP could guarantee its
privileges. Stalin was forced into violent conflict with the 'revolutionary vanguard', the left and united opposition.
After their defeat the contradictions of NEP obliged Stalin to turn to the right and introduce the 'third phase' of
Soviet history, collectivisation and industrialisation, orchestrated from above. To Trotsky the decay of socialism
was not the fault of Lenin or the Bolshevik party or the left or the united opposition. It was due to the coming
together of a unique set of' historical circumstances. The 'dialectics of history' had thrown up Stalin who worked
through human instruments fashioned by NEP, the dross, the flotsam, the bureaucrats, the sneaks, the 'worms
who were crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution', Trotsky was convinced that Stalinism
would not last. He even believed that the Second World War would fatally weaken the system. In the end,
however, he was right but he did not live to see Stalinism's demise.
Stalinism in the full-blown sense only came into being in and after 1936. Hence it is necessary to bear in mind
that this phenomenon evolved over time and is therefore different during the various stages of its growth. One
can speak of various degrees of Stalinism. Research since 1991 has concentrated on revealing how awful and
vile it was. It will be some time before some comprehensive theory emerges to explain its rise and fall. Whether
one approves or disapproves of it, it is a truly remarkable phenomenon, one that profoundly mared the twentieth
century. One can only approve of it if one suspends moral judgement
Further Reading:
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Robert Conquest, Stalin, Breaker of Nations, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, Hutchinson,
London, 1986
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Hutchinson, 1990
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of the New Elite 1928-1939’, Slavic Review, xxxviii, no.3,
September 1979
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘New Perspectives on Stalinism’, The Russian Review, vol. 45, 1986
J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1934,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993
H. Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers 1928-1932, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1988
Nick Lambert and Gabriel Rittersporn (eds), Stalinism. Its Nature and Aftermath, Macmillan,
Basingstoke, 1992
Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System. Essays on the Social History of Inter-War Russia,
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1985
Alec Nove, The Stalin Phenomenon, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, rev. ed. 1993
Gabriel Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political
Conflicts in the USSR, 1933-1953, Harwood, Chur, 1991
Leonard Shapiro, Totalitarianism, Pall Mall, London, 1972
Lewis H. Seigelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR 1935-1941, Cambridge
University Press, 1988
Robert W Thurston, ‘The Soviet Family during the Great Terror, 1935-41’, Soviet Studies, vol. 43, no. 3,
199
Robert C Tucker (ed), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, W.W. Norton, New York, 1977
L. Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers of the Vanguard of Collectivization, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1987
Chris Ward, Stalin’s Russia, Edward Arnold, London 1993.
About the Author
Martin McCauley is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of
London. The second edition of his Stalin and Stalinism was recently published by Longman.
History Review September 1999 | Issue: 34 | Page 48-53 | Words: 3479 | Author: McCauley, Martin
Printable version
Was Stalin's Foreign Policy a Failure?
Martin McCauley reviews Stalin's foreign policy,
paying special attention to his covert involvement in
the Korean war. He shows that, despite short-term
successes, his record can be seen as one of longterm failure.
In Russia at present there is growing support for the view that the Stalin years (1929-53) were the best
experienced by Russia in the 20th century. The present Russian government has had to ask the US and the EU
for food aid, while the western world feared the expansion of communist power during the last years of Stalin.
The Korean war (1950-3) appeared to add credence to this view. The Soviet Union was only a regional power
when Stalin became leader in 1929 but, when he died in 1953, it had become a world power, soon to be a
superpower. Does this mean that Stalin was brilliantly successful in foreign affairs'? Yet the state he built up
collapsed in 1991 and today Russia is again only a regional power. So Russia has gone full circle. May one trace
this fiasco back to Stalin, or is it the fault of his inept successors? To answer these questions, we need to
examine the purpose of foreign policy and criteria for its success or failure.
Soviet foreign policy, 1928-39
In general, foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy and its major task is to ensure the security of the
state. Soviet foreign policy was different from that of capitalist countries. It consisted of two tracks: enhancing the
security of the Soviet state and promoting world socialist revolution. There was an international organisation, the
Communist International or Comintern. It became an instrument of Stalin's foreign policy from the late 1920s
onwards. The Comintern was dissolved in 1943, to allay suspicions that Soviet foreign policy was expansionist,
and its duties passed to the newly established International Department of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party. Soviet foreign policy was always global but, of course, particular countries and areas assumed
paramount importance at various times.
Stalin's experience of foreign affairs in the 1920s was not very felicitous. A major blunder was the tactical alliance
struck, on Soviet advice, by the Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong, with the Kuomintang (the
Nationalist Party), headed by Chiang Kai-shek. When the combined forces took Shanghai in April 1927, the
Kuomintang turned on the communists and massacred them. So sure were the Soviets that they had Chiang in
their pockets that they had made him an honorary member of the executive committee of the Comintern shortly
before! After Shanghai, Stalin knew he had to be extra cautious in foreign affairs. He did not break with Chiang
Kai-shek but cultivated him, playing him off against the communists. The undeclared war between China and
Japan saw the latter make rapid advances and this led Chiang Kai-shek to appeal to Stalin, in February 1938, to
declare war on Japan. Stalin declined. In May 1938, however, he was ready to provide the Kuomintang with
weapons and a multi-million dollar loan. This was Stalin's preferred way of conducting foreign affairs, by way of
secret talks and deals. Stalin believed that socialism would gradually prove victorious. This would occur by states
leaving the 'imperialist' camp and coming over to the socialist. When this happened the Soviet Union would
become a base for the further development of the world revolution and a 'lever for the further dislocation of
imperialism'.
In the 1930s the Soviet Union was a weak state, so Stalin's key objective was to ensure that his country did not
become involved in any wars. This led the Soviet Union to seek to sign non-aggression pacts with as many states
as possible. Between January and March 1932, pacts were signed with Finland, Latvia and Estonia and then with
Poland in July 1932, with France in November 1932 and with Italy in September 1933. The goal of these pacts
was to secure agreement on the non-use of force, refusal to participate in economic boycotts or to permit hostile
propaganda, and to observe neutrality in conflicts involving third parties. The pacts prepared the way for the
admission of the Soviet Union to the League of Nations and the policy of collective security.' Japanese expansion
in the Far East in 1931-2 and the appointment of Hitler as German Chancellor, in January 1933, added urgency
to the search for collective security. Stalin advocated the formation of Popular Front governments (coalitions of all
anti-fascist parties, including the communists), but although there was a Popular Front government in France the
concept never gained momentum due to the lack of trust of the communists and varying interpretations of the
German threat.
Despite Stalin's efforts the Soviet Union was forced to fight the Japanese. The battle of Khaikhin-Gol, in
Mongolia, in May-August 1939, obliged the Japanese to rethink their policy of moving east- wards. The Red
Army, under General (later Marshal) Zhukov launched 'tanks, artillery, aircraft and men in an integrated offensive
for the first time in modern war'.' The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in August 1939, convinced the Japanese
that the Soviet-Japanese balance of power had shifted against the Japanese. Tokyo then signed the SovietJapanese Neutrality Pact of June 1941. Fortunately for Moscow, a majority of civilian and military leaders, in July
1941, decided not to join in the attack on the Soviet Union but to wait on events. When Japan attacked the US in
December 1941, Washington requested air bases in the Soviet Far East but was rebuffed. Stalin only came into
the war against Japan, on 8 August 1945, after the defeat of Germany.
The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, August 1939
This pact was signed because the policy of collective security was perceived to have failed. After Great Britain
had guaranteed Poland's security in March 1939, London sought (together with France) a military alliance with
the Soviet Union. Stalin was wary because he did not wish to be drawn into a war with Germany, with, possibly,
Britain and France standing on the side- lines. The pact that he did sign, with Hitler, shortened the odds against a
war in Europe. The pact included the clauses of the Berlin treaty of April 1926 which committed both parties to
desist from aggression and observe neutrality in conflicts involving third parties. A secret protocol (the existence
of which was denied until 1991 by the Soviet Union) defined future spheres of influence, with Estonia, Latvia and
Bessarabia passing to the Soviet Union, as well as part of east Poland. The Red Army moved into eastern
Poland in September 1939, and a German-Soviet friendship and frontier treaty laid down the new frontiers in the
east, Moscow was now free to force the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) to sign treaties in
September and October 1939 which permitted the stationing of Soviet troops on their territories, while in June
1940 Romania conceded Bessarabia and north Bukovina to the USSR. A Soviet-German economic agreement
was signed in January 1941; and, for not taking a part of Lithuania, as had been originally agreed, Germany
received Soviet written assurance of compensation of 31.5 million German gold marks. The Finns rejected the
Soviet demand that they should cede territory to the Soviet Union, and the Winter War of 1939-40 ensued,
followed by the continuation war of 1941-4. The pact with Hitler had produced a rich crop very quickly.
Stalin used the breathing space the pact afforded him to strengthen the Red Army. On 5 May 1941 he stated: to
'carry out the defence of our country, we are obliged to act in an offensive way. [We have] to move from defence
to a military policy of attack. We must restructure our training, our propaganda and agitation, and our press in an
offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an offensive army'.' Does this mean that
Stalin was preparing to invade Germany, as Viktor Suvorov in various publications has claimed? No document
has come to light which would support this claim, Indeed front commanders were ordered, by 20 May 1941, to
work out a 'detailed plan of defence of the state frontier'. If Stalin was contemplating a pre-emptive strike against
Germany it would have happened much later.
The German attack on 22 June 1941 was a terrible blow to Stalin, sending him into shock. He chose to ignore the
message from the German spy Richard Sorge, in Tokyo, on 15 May that Hitler would attack on 22 June. On this
message, Stalin scribbled: 'German disinformation'.' His comment on a report from the NKVD (secret police), that
preparation' to attack were complete, was: 'You can tell your "source" in German air force headquarters to go f***
himself. He's not a "source", he's a disinformer'.
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe fell into Stalin's lap as war booty at the end of the Second World War. Even Churchill, the
supreme master of Realpolitik, conceded that ir 1944. An added bonus was that the Soviets occupied a third of
Germany and almost half of Berlin. The only problem was that the Americans were not playing the imperialist
game and did not regard the Yalta agreement as transferring the region to Soviet control indefinitely, Stalin was
in his element in the region as the various communist leaders fell over themselves to please him. Even Tito, in
Yugoslavia, was like a pet poodle wagging his tail at every bon mot which flowed from the master's mouth.
Moscow was the chic, radical capital of the world where Stalin held court, usually after midnight. He seated his
guests and then proceeded to meander round the room, smoking his pipe, while he held forth. He instructed them
on how to consolidate their power and rewarded them with goods, weapons and money. He was not too greedy.
He kept to the agreement with Churchill that Greece would remain in the western camp. However, he made one
fatal mistake: he misread Tito. In May 1946, in Moscow, Tito and he talked about the Yugoslav Federation.
Would it include Albania and even Bulgaria? Stalin was keen for a large federation which would dominate the
Balkans. However, a year later they were at daggers drawn. Stalin had thought that Tito would do his bidding but
the Yugoslav leader had no intention of being a tinpot Stalinist. In June 1948 Yugoslavia was drummed out of the
Cominform, the communist European league. Stalin thought he could manipulate Yugoslav politics to get rid of
Tito. When this failed, he ordered Beria, the head of the NKVD, to dispose of him. However, the latter was too
crafty for him and all assassination attempts failed.
China and Korea
Stalin regarded himself as a dab hand at Chinese affairs, even though he had never visited the country. In 1946
the Soviet government recognised the government of Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate government of China.
However, Mao Zedong and his followers were made of sterner stuff, On 1 October 1949 the People's Republic of
China was proclaimed. Victory had come with minimal Soviet support. When Mao arrived in Moscow, in
December 1949, Stalin kept him waiting, the normal procedure with foreign guests. When they met, Mao stressed
that China needed three to five years of peace. Stalin told Mao there were no direct threats to China at that time.
'Japan hasn't yet got back on its feet. America shouts about war but is afraid of it ... in Europe they're scared of
war ... No one wants to fight China.' China got a loan, among other things, but had to pay interest on it. There
was no real meeting of minds, as Mao spoke in aphorisms and was steeped in Chinese poetry and Confucian
thought, Stalin was hard- headed and regarded himself as the leading authority on any subject which came up.
However, the Soviet leader was aware of Mao's vanity and that he saw himself as a great statesman. Since he
had captured power by his own efforts, he did not come to Moscow with an inferiority complex. Could he turn out
to be another Tito?
Kim ll-sung, the leader of north Korea, was hewn from a totally different stone. He was a Soviet creation and
arrived on his first visit as leader in March 1949. Stalin supervised the regular transfer of arms and other military
equipment to north Korea throughout 1949. The north Koreans could probe and infiltrate the south but only under
Soviet guidance. In January 1950 Kim asked Stalin for permission to attack the south in order to liberate it and
unify Korea. Stalin discussed the matter with Mao, who was in Moscow. He then informed Kim that it would be a
major undertaking and that it had to be organised in such a way as to ensure there was no big risk. After further
consultations with Beijing, Stalin, in February 1950, authorised the beginning of massive preparations.
Soviet deliveries of tanks, artillery and other equipment increased rapidly. In return Moscow requested lead, silver
and gold. In April l 950 Kim saw Stalin again in Moscow. The Soviet leader then informed Mao that the go-ahead
had been given to move towards the reunification of Korea. Stalin covered himself by saying that the final
decision had to be taken by the Chinese and Korean comrades jointly. Beijing agreed. Stalin's man in Pyongyang
reported that Kim would be ready by late- June and urgently needed petrol and medical supplies. Stalin ordered
these dispatched, signing himself Gromyko, then deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. When Kim asked for Soviet
advisers on ships which would participate in the attack, Stalin refused, He was obsessed with camouflaging from
the Americans that he had agreed to the invasion.
Stalin's original order had been that Kim could only attack if the south attacked first. This fell by the wayside and
the north attacked on 25 June 1950. Again Soviet advisers were not to be involved, except as Pravda
correspondents, in civilian clothes! Under no circumstances was one to be captured. That would have given the
game away! Stalin provided all the war materiel Kim needed. Defeat of the south was only averted by LIS
involvement from September, and on 1 October Kim begged Stalin for direct military help from the Soviet Union –
otherwise the north would be defeated and occupied. Stalin contacted Mao and talked of a joint Soviet- Chinese
intervention against the Americans. He even contemplated the beginning of the third world war. Mao also saw
this as a possibility. The Soviets did not want to intervene until the last moment to save Kim. Stalin was
immensely relieved when the Chinese revealed their willingness to fight. On 25 October 1950 the Chinese
launched a great counter-offensive along the whole front. Stalin now knew that north Korea could not be defeated
militarily. In November the Soviets provided the Chinese with air cover. Soviet aircraft sported Chinese markings
and aircrew wore Chinese or Korean uniforms. Stalin's bluff was never called because not a single serviceman
was ever captured by the Americans. Exasperated by the unwittingness of many north Korean commanders to
carry out his orders, Stalin transferred command of the ground force to the Chinese. Neither Stalin nor Mao was
keen to end the war as it was one the Americans could not win.
The Balance Sheet
The first criterion of foreign policy success is whether it protected the country from military attack, The Japanese
in Mongolia could not be placated, so Stalin cannot be blamed for that encounter. In September 1939 Stalin
attacked eastern Poland and secured a quick victory, In December 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland in the
Winter War and claimed victory in 1940, but then the Finns joined the war against Moscow in 1941. Stalin
certainly miscalculated his timetable for conflict with Germany and paid a heavy price and almost the ultimate
price. In 1941-43 his foreign policy seemed an abysmal failure. However, the Soviet Union turned the tables on
Hitler and became the leading military power in Europe in 1945. The Soviets claimed an empire in eastern
Europe as their prize. Unwillingness to dilute their control of this region led to the Cold War, beginning in earnest
in 1947. In 1950 Stalin released the clogs of war in Korea. If necessary, he would have intervened to prevent the
defeat of the north, risking conflict with the Americans. Hence one can say that Stalin, following Clausewitz,
regarded war as an extension of politics by other means. One will never know if and when he would have
attacked Nazi Germany. He never had any intention of launching a military attack against the Americans. He
believed to his dying day that communist parties could be used as shock brigades to weaken the structures of the
capitalist state. He provided them with millions of dollars in aid to promote his dream of a communist world.
Military forces were built up in eastern Europe to provide a cordon sanitaire for the Soviet Union. He instructed
the east German communists to build up armed forces at a time when this was forbidden by the Potsdam
agreement.
One can judge Stalin's military policy a success if one consider it in great power terms. In 1953 only America was
stronger militarily. The west feared Soviet military might and Moscow was also a nuclear power. On this criterion
Stalin had succeeded magnificently. Compare the situation with that of the 1920s and 1930s when the Soviet
Union had been a weak state.
If one wishes to argue it was a failure how would one proceed? Instead of looking exclusively at the militarily
aspect, one would examine security. The latter involves various aspects: political, economic and military. The
strength of the Soviet military inevitably provoked counter-measures. This led to the formation of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation, in 1949, and the beginning of the arms race in earnest. Inevitably the rearming of
West Germany followed. The Korean war ensured that the US had to remain in the south to prevent any future
attack from the north.
Arguably Soviet security interests would have been better served by reaching an agreement with Britain and
France in 1939. This might have prevented Germany launching a European war. By attacking Finland in 1939
Moscow ensured that Finland would come in on the German side in 1941. Eastern Europe was regarded as
enhancing security. Yet one can argue that it was a liability. Soviet behaviour led to the Americans being obliged
to remain in Europe after 1947, contrary to their plans. Germany was the core of Moscow's European policy. It
wanted to prevent Germany ever again becoming a military threat to the Soviet Union. The Berlin blockade, in
1948-9, when the Soviets tried to force the west out of Berlin, increased the perception that Moscow was an
aggressive power. It led to the establishment of West Germany and that country's integration in NATO. This was
diametrically opposed to Soviet interests. Moscow, and arguably Germany, would have been better off with a
neutral, demilitarised Germany.
Politically Stalin sought control of his satellites and to bring other states within his orbit. His first major postwar
defeat was in Yugoslavia, in 1948. Mao resented Stalin's behaviour towards him but probably no Soviet leader
could have placated the vain Chinese leader.
Economically Stalin’s foreign policy resulted in greater and greater defence spending. Since America was much
richer, this meant that the defence burden was proportionately greater.
There was a terrible inevitability about Stalin’s foreign policy. Security was essentially conceived in military terms.
His famous quip about how many divisions the Pope had sums him up. Security is based on force. One can also
view Stalin as a product of 19th-century European imperialism. The more territory one occupies, the stronger one
is.
What was the alternative? Stalin could have concluded an agreement with the Americans after 1945 which would
have allowed them to leave Europe. Economically western Europe was exhausted and offered the real prospect
of communist parties coming to power. Stalin’s unwillingness to come to terms with Washington forced the
Americans into the Cold War. It also led to their financing European economic recovery and providing security
against Soviet aggression. In total, Soviet policy after 1945 was a disaster. It set in motion the arms race which
eventually contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.
This is being wise after the event. In the short term, Stalin’s foreign policy was highly successful but in the long
term a failure. The political and economic system he developed appeared impregnable in 1953 but turned out to
be deeply flawed. Every empire produces a counter force which eventually topples it.
Further Reading





J Haslam Soviet Foreign Policy 1930-33 (1983)
J HaslamThe Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security (1984)
Michael Lynch Stalin and Krushchev: The USSR 1924-64 (1990)
David S. Painter The Cold War: An International History (1999)
Geoffrey Roberts The Soviet Union in World Politics 1945-91 (1998)
About the Author
Martin McCauley teaches history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University. He is
the author of many books on Soviet history.
History Review December 2003 | Issue: 47 | Page 47-49 | Words: 1490 | Author: Roberts, Geoffrey
Printable version
Josef Stalin
Geoffrey Roberts assesses Stalin’s changing
reputation, 50 years after his death.
In the pantheon of 20th-century dictators Josef Stalin’s reputation for brutality and criminality is second only to
Adolf Hitler’s. Yet when Stalin died in 1953 his demise was widely mourned. In the Soviet Union itself Stalin was
a cult figure and his death provoked a massive outpouring of popular grief. Elsewhere in the world emotions were
more mixed, but most people still saw him as a relatively benign dictator and, above all, remembered him as
‘Uncle Joe’ – the great war leader who had led his people to victory over Hitler and had saved Europe from Nazi
barbarism.
Stalin’s Critics
Stalin’s reputation, however, began to nosedive when three years later he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev,
his successor as Soviet leader. At the 20th congress of the Communist Party in 1956 Khrushchev delivered a
‘secret speech’ which indicted Stalin as a repressive, authoritarian leader who was personally responsible for the
deaths of many millions of Soviet people.
Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ did not remain secret for long and a growing catalogue of Stalin’s crimes followed.
Among Stalin’s many victims were millions of peasants who died as a result of the ruthless collectivisation (i.e.
state takeover) of Soviet agriculture at the end of the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of state and communist
party officials were arrested and executed during purges in the 1930s of the so-called ‘enemy within’; and
countless soldiers and civilians paid the price for Stalin’s military mistakes during the Great Patriotic War against
Nazi Germany.
Outside the Soviet Union the downturn in Stalin’s reputation in the 1950s was compounded by the cold war
ideological contest between communism and capitalism. Western critics of Soviet communism depicted Stalin as
a worse mass murderer than even Hitler and characterised the system he presided over as totalitarian and
terroristic.
In response, defenders of the Soviet system argued that Stalin’s rule represented a distortion of socialism and
communism and pointed to the ‘destalinisation’ and liberalisation of Soviet society under Khrushchev. But while
the terror undoubtedly abated, the dictatorial state socialist system built by Stalin remained largely intact until the
1980s. Stalinism without Stalin summed up the essence of the Soviet system until Gorbachev came along.
Gorbachev’s aim was to transform the Soviet system into a more liberal communist regime. But his radical
reforms led to the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991, not its reform. In its place came a post-communist,
capitalist Russia headed by Boris Yeltsin – an ex-communist anxious to distance himself from all things Soviet,
not least Stalin. This led to a new phase in the public exposure of Stalin’s criminal record, including the
publication of many valuable documents from the Soviet archives and opening up access to the archives
themselves.
The Need for Balance
The detailing of Stalin’s crimes is an important task of historical research, but the greater challenge for historians
is the assessment of his contradictory record and legacy.
Stalin was the mass murderer who saved civilisation from that other great 20th-century dictator, Adolf Hitler.
Stalin’s rule was bloody and brutal but at the time he was a popular and admired leader, at home and abroad.
Stalin’s communist system was politically chaotic, economically inefficient and spiritually barren, but no society
experienced and survived greater trauma than the Soviet Union during the Second World War, a victory which
cost the country 25 million dead. Soviet communism lost the political and economic competition with western
capitalism but the advanced industrial socialist state created by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s survived for nearly
seven decades. Stalin terrorised Russia, but he transformed and modernised the country as well.
Adding to these contradictions are public attitudes to Stalin in contemporary Russia. According to opinion polls
conducted on the 50th anniversary of his death in March 2003, more than half the population considers Stalin to
be a great historical figure, while more than a third believes that he did more good than harm.
The continuing popular appeal of Stalin in Russia is all the more mysterious given that he wasn’t even Russian.
Stalin was from Georgia (where he is still a great folk hero) and his command of the Russian language was far
from perfect. Moreover, while Stalin was not unintelligent, he was not an intellectual like his predecessor as
Soviet leader, Lenin. In private Stalin was a powerful, magnetic personality but he had none of the public
charisma of Hitler, Mussolini and other demagogic dictators. Stalin was a master of tactics but he had little
strategic sense, his rule being characterised by the lurch from one crisis to another. The public image projected
by his personality cult was that of a kindly, saintly, benevolent figure. In private, however, he was often a petty
tyrant, not least in his dealings with closest associates.
Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, died in 1924 and there began a struggle for the succession. Stalin’s rivals
in the communist party depicted him as a gray, unimaginative administrator and derided him as ‘comrade card
index’. How did such a personality emerge as Lenin’s successor and then go on to exercise supreme, dictatorial
power in the Soviet Union?
Man of Steel
Stalin was certainly a bureaucrat but his abilities as an administrator in full command of the details of policy
suited perfectly the task of rebuilding the Russian state following the upheavals of revolution and civil war. Stalin
used his tactical flair to isolate his opponents within the communist party and to make sure that he always
occupied the centre ground in political disputes. Stalin’s lack of strategy did not mean he lacked vision and his
project to build a new, socialist society in backward Russia was central to his appeal as a political leader.
Above all there was Stalin’s determination and ruthlessness. He was not called ‘the man of steel’ for nothing. It is
this aspect of Stalin’s personality that provides the clue to his popularity when he was alive and his continuing
appeal 50 years after his death.
For the Soviet people the Stalin era was a time of constant turmoil and trauma. Millions lost their lives as a result
of his policies, while the lives of millions of others were uprooted and transformed beyond recognition. But the
upheaval, chaos and violence were not generally attributed to Stalin. Like Hitler, Stalin took the credit for
improvements in people’s lives and usually escaped popular censure as the cause of the country’s woes. Rather,
Stalin personified continuity and stability in a time of troubles. It is Stalin as a symbol of order that is appealing to
the people of today’s Russia suffering the travails of a brutal transition from communism to capitalism.
Timeline:
1879
Born (6 December) in Gori, Georgia. Son of a shoemaker.
1894
Enters seminary in the Georgian capital of Tiflis to train for the priesthood.
1898
Joins the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) – later to become the communist
party. Subsequently expelled from the seminary and embarks upon a career as a revolutionary
organiser in Tsarist Russia.
1911
Becomes a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Active in the 1917 revolution in Russia
and in the civil war that follows.
1922
Appointed General-Secretary of the Communist Party. Uses this to consolidate his position in the
power struggles that follow Lenin’s death in 1924.
19271929
Launches campaign for the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, initiates five-year plan for the rapid
industrialisation of Russia, and defeats the last of his rivals for the communist party leadership.
1932
Suicide of wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.
19351938
Presides over massive purges of communist party members and state officials in a paranoid
campaign against the ‘enemy within’.
1939
Concludes the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler. Keeps Russia out of the war and takes the opportunity to
expand into Poland, the Baltic States and the Balkans.
1941
German invasion of Russia, which reaches Moscow and Leningrad but is turned back at Stalingrad in
1942.
1945
Fall of Berlin to the Red Army. Stalin meets with western leaders at the Yalta and Potsdam
conferences to decide the fate of the postwar world.
1947
Outbreak of the Soviet-American ‘cold war’. Tightening of Soviet and communist grip on Eastern
Europe. Division of German and the splitting of Europe into opposing cold war blocs.
1949
Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb and breaks the American monopoly of nuclear weapons – a
decade earlier than predicted by western experts.
1953
Death (5 March) of Stalin. Body embalmed and placed alongside Lenin in the mausoleum on
Moscow’s Red Square.
1956
Denounced by Khrushchev at 20th congress of the communist party. Cult of Stalin’s personality
officially repudiated by the party.
1961
Body removed from mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin. Stalingrad renamed Volgograd.
Further Reading:




Michael Lynch, Stalin and Khrushchev: The USSR 1924-64 (Hodder & Stoughton ,2nd edition, 2001)
Martin McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism (Pearson, 3rd edition, 2003)
Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (Cass, 2001)
Chris Ward, Stalin’s Russia (Arnold, 1999)
Dr Geoffrey Roberts is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at University College Cork. He is currently
writing a biography of Stalin for Routledge.
2003 | | Page 58-58 | Author: Rappaport, Helen
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps
Helen Rappaport reviews Anne Applebaum's
sobering account of the Soviet Gulag system.
 Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps
Anne Applebaum
Allen Lane 610 pp. £25
ISBN: 0 713 99322 7
Joseph
statistic’.
of the
Stalin is once said to have remarked ‘One death is a tragedy – a million deaths is a
This exhaustive, seminal work sets out to commemorate and give an identity to some
millions of lives that make up what is still a highly contentious set of statistics
cataloguing the arrest, torture, execution, exile and slave labour of the people who fed
the relentless ‘meat-grinder’ of the Soviet Gulag system.
Such an epic work is long overdue, but has been worth the wait. After seven years of travelling back and forth to
Russia, conducting painstaking research, interviewing survivors and tracking down a mass of eye-witness
accounts in the most obscure of archives, Applebaum has attempted to uncover the truths about a selfperpetuating system that consumed vast numbers of innocent people – not just Russians, but people from many
Soviet ethnic minorities, and foreign nationals too. The book serves as a salutary reminder not just of the
continuing reluctance of Russians to engage in a full and open discussion of the Gulag and its legacy, but also of
the West’s ‘failure to remember’. For while we continue to agonise over the appalling atrocities committed against
the Jews in the concentration camps of the Second World War, there is a persistent lack of international
awareness about the even larger system of mass murder that existed throughout the Stalin years.
It is now generally accepted that the camp system was not a Soviet invention, but began in Cuba in the 1890s
and was made notorious by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1901. Nor was forced labour anything new in
the Soviet Union, the system of katorga having been introduced by the tsars as early as the 17th century. The
first third of Applebaum’s book is taken up describing the evolution of this system of repression, from the
Revolution to its highpoint during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. By this time it had metamor-phosed into an
organ of nationwide social control, with local NKVD officials running their own individual fiefdoms within particular
camps. Applebaum draws attention to the economic impulses behind the Gulag’s rapid extension during the
1930s, in order to meet the impossible, punitive targets set by Stalin’s Five Year Plans. The voracious rate at
which industrialisation consumed the lives of Gulag prisoners meant that by the Second World War, the country
had become heavily reliant on them for its economic survival. Such an inexhaustible labour force was ruthlessly
expended in the exploitation of Siberia’s mineral wealth – the coal mines of Vorkuta and gold fields of Kolyma.
Some critics have complained that this book is short on political analysis of the Gulag, but Applebaum makes
clear from the outset that her major objective is commemorative – to place on record the experiences of some the
Gulag’s many millions of unmourned and unacknowledged victims. And this is the book’s great strength – in a
central section describing a world within a world, with its own hierarchies, criminal culture and language, where
the prisoner not only had to fight his fellow inmates to survive, but had to do so against a backdrop of persistent
hunger, exposure to extremes of climate, and an often punishing sixteen-hour workday.
Drawing on newly opened Gulag and secret police archives, Applebaum has been able to fill in many of the gaps
in Robert Conquest’s much-respected and long-standing account, The Great Terror . She can now complement
the testimony of the Gulag’s great chronicler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose three-volume Gulag Archipelago
has never been an easy read, as well as add new eye-witness accounts to such classics as Evgeniya Ginzburg’s
Into the Whirlwind or the stunning, visceral Kolyma Tales of Varlam Shalamov.
In the appendix to Gulag , entitled ‘How Many?’, Applebaum wisely refuses to be drawn into convenient, catch-all
conclusions and definitive lists of statistics that might put paid, once and for all, to the arguments that have been
raging for decades over the true number of victims of the Gulag system – a system which, between 1929 and
1953 saw about 18 million people pass through its byzantine bureaucracy. The surreal world created by Stalin’s
Great Terror was a world gone mad, where nobody was immune from arrest, where children were taught to take
a pride in betraying their own parents, and where normal human values no longer prevailed. Applebaum’s superb
account pulls no punches in its often traumatic descriptions of the daily battle for survival, but goes some way to
explaining the inexplicable. It is also a reminder to those of us privileged to live in democratic societies, that we
should never be complacent about the world we live in. For the sobering message of this book is that similar,
repressive engines of social control such as the Gulag could reappear in support of future totalitarian regimes.

Helen Rappaport is the author of Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (ABC-Clio, 1999).