Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
By Dmitri Volkogonov
Edited and translated by Harold Shukman
Grove Weidenfeld, 642 pages, $29.95
Joseph Stalin created the most brutal and pervasive system of mass terror in modern history. Not counting the tens of millions who died in World War II and the millions more who returned broken and useless from NKVD slave labor camps, Stalin`s 25-year war against the citizens of the Soviet Union killed at least 15 million innocent people-nearly three times the number of Jews killed in Hitler`s Holocaust. Here was a system built upon the malignant violation of every human right by a man who loved nothing better than to abuse his power.
As striking as Stalin`s readiness to abuse his power was the willingness of his victims to cheer him on. It was truly unique in the annals of human history, as Dmitri Volkogonov writes in ”Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy,” that one man could ”exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country`s blind adulation.” How could this have happened? And what sort of man could create a system that took the lives of millions and imposed untold suffering upon tens of millions more?
Like Robert Tucker`s brilliant ”Stalin in Power,” published in 1990, Volkogonov`s book explores these questions. But Tucker concentrated on Stalin between his rise to power and the outbreak of World War II, while Volkogonov tells the entire tale of how, in his words, the ”triumph of one man became a tragedy for a whole people.”
Volkogonov, director of the Soviet Institute of Military History, specialized in political indoctrination during much of his 40-year military career as a colonel general in the Red Army and a professor at Moscow`s prestigious Lenin Military Academy. ”He acquired,” translator Harold Shukman`s preface tells us, ”a reputation as a hard-liner who advocated the ideological indoctrination of the army and wrote numerous books on the subject.”
After working successfully within the system until well into middle age, Volkogonov began the research for ”Stalin” at age 50. By the time the book was published, a decade later, his studies of the classified sources to which his reputation for reliability gave him access had led him to conclusions that forced him to retire from the Red Army and turn his life onto a new course.
As Volkogonov the loyal Communist officer worked through massive files of documents from Stalin`s private chancery, he came to understand that the great Soviet economic achievements of the `30s and the heroic war efforts of the
`40s had come about ”not thanks to but in spite of the Stalinist way of thinking and doing.” Such a judgment was more than difficult to reach, as Volkogonov readily admits. ”Stalin,” he explains, ”cast his huge, baneful shadow over every aspect of our lives, and it has not been easy to liberate ourselves from that bureaucratic and dogmatic eclipse.”
Volkogonov`s portrait of Stalin reveals a man obsessed: by work, by a grim determination to discover and destroy his enemies and, most of all, by how he would be viewed by posterity. Stalin believed that ”nothing is impossible for the will” and that ”the higher aim always justified whatever means were necessary to achieve it.” For him, the people`s power-one of the Russian Revolution`s most cherished aims-was never more than a meaningless phrase to be invoked with all the cynicism a tyrant could muster. Stalin never understood what a people`s democracy ought to be, nor did he care.
”From his archives,” Volkogonov writes, ”we see that democracy for him was nothing more than the freedom to support-and only to support-the decisions of the party.” Absolutism, imposed from above with the heaviest of hands, made possible Stalin`s war against the Russians.
How could such a man and such a system survive? Certainly, the active support of the legions of moral cripples who rushed to do Stalin`s bidding was a major reason. Yet it was also true, as Volkogonov writes, that ”Stalin`s popularity was genuine among the masses,” largely because of massive indoctrination campaigns that began in kindergarten and continued throughout every citizen`s life.
”From their first years,” Volkogonov explains, ”infants were taught that `Stalin is thinking about every one of us,` (that) `if it were not for Stalin, we wouldn`t be an industrial power, we wouldn`t have a roof over our heads and a guaranteed crust of bread.` ” As adults, men and women indoctrinated in this fashion found it easy to glorify Stalin as their
”beloved leader,” ”wise architect,” and ”military leader of genius”
who was leading the Soviet people to a better future.
There were real and impressive achievements that could be cited to support such epithets-the Soviet Union`s surging industrial output, its successful program of rural electrification and the virtual elimination of illiteracy the most real and obvious among them. But there were also obvious and massive failures that undercut the successes, as agricultural production refused to keep pace with the more rapidly developing industrial sector. Convinced that internal class war must inevitably grow more intense as the Soviet Union drew closer to achieving socialism, Stalin declared war upon millions of ”enemies of the people” who, he insisted, had become entrenched in every nook and cranny of Soviet life.
Factories, collective farms, mines, shops, government offices, universities, the armed forces-even the highest echelons of the secret police and the Communist Party-all were declared to have their share of ”shirkers,” ”wreckers,” ”saboteurs” and ”traitors.” The purges of the `30s claimed 40,000 men from the Red Army officer corps, nearly all of the Politburo, tens of thousands of party members, and 23,000 officers and men of the secret police.
In the pages of Volkogonov`s book one finds a veritable rogues` gallery of Stalin`s henchmen. We meet the inscrutable and malevolent Molotov, one of the few members of the Politburo to remain untouched by the purges and one of the accomplices without whom, Volkogonov insists, ”Stalinism would not have been possible.”
Next to Molotov, there was Lazar Kaganovich, the bootmaker who rose to Stalin`s Politburo. ”The classic man of the system,” in Volkogonov`s words, Kaganovich gloried in having destroyed some of Moscow`s greatest historic monuments and took pride in having sent thousands of men and women to their deaths. His great virtue was his superhuman capacity for work; his sins included his willingness to support Stalin`s every decision, even when it came to driving his own brother to suicide.
There is Kliment Voroshilov, the general of minimal talent whose unswerving loyalty to Stalin transformed him into a national hero; Andrei Vyshinsky, the public prosecutor who relished his key role in the great purge trials of the `30s; Lavrenti Beria, chief of the secret police, a ”disgusting pervert” whose aides had the task of supplying him with the girls and young men whom he violated in vicious ways; and a score of others who, Volkogonov writes, personified the ”abuse, criminality, and moral degeneracy” of the men who filled Stalin`s inner circle.
Just how far such men were prepared to abase themselves can be illustrated by an incident that Volkogonov reports as having occurred on the eve of the 18th Party Congress in 1939. After being shown the report that Stalin said he intended to present to the deputies, the inner circle chorused their approval, only to have Stalin reply: ”Ha, I gave you the variant I`d thrown out and you all chant your hallelujahs. The speech I`m actually going to give is completely different!” Even Molotov and Kaganovich had no response, until Beria saved the day. ”But one can feel your hand in this version,” he told Stalin while his comrades sat in fearful silence. ”So if you`ve revised even this version, one can imagine how strong the final report is going to be!”
Volkogonov`s book serves more as a verification and elaboration of what has been written recently in the West about Stalin and Stalinism than as a source of deep new insights into the man and the system he created. But the publication of ”Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy” is a major event nevertheless. That a man born, educated and indoctrinated at the height of the Stalin system has at last stripped away so many of the falsehoods of the Stalin era shows not only great strength of character and a deep concern for the truth but also indicates how far the curtain of lies that obscured the Soviets` view of their own history has been lifted in recent years. Shukman notes in his preface that Volkogonov now is preparing to embark upon a reinterpretation of Lenin. One can only hope that he will be able to accomplish that even more formidable task with the same even-handedness and concern for the truth that is so amply displayed here.
