Stalin

As a child, Stalin used only Georgian, the language in which he composed verse and revolutionary articles in his youth. He occasionally used Georgian later in life as well. At the age of eight or nine, the future dictator began to study Russian and was able to achieve a high level of proficiency, almost to the point of making it a second native language. But until the end of his life, he spoke with a strong accent. This “accent” can also be felt in his written texts. Stalin’s writing in Russian is grammatically correct and expressive, but he occasionally let slip jarring stylistic infelicities and mangled idioms. Students of Stalin’s language have been able to assemble quite a few examples from his published works.¹⁶ Such examples are also found in his day-to-day writings not intended for publication. As general secretary of the Central Committee, Stalin reviewed Politburo resolutions before they were finalized and often made changes to them. In a number of cases, the fact that he was not a native Russian speaker led to errors and ambiguities.¹⁷

There is scant information concerning Stalin’s knowledge of other languages. He traveled abroad several times before the revolution (to Berlin, Stockholm, London, Vienna, and Krakow), but it is unlikely that he had either the time or the need for serious study of the languages spoken in those cities. These trips were made on party business, and his time was spent mainly with party comrades. His 1913 work on the nationalities question, which made use of sources in German, was written in Vienna with the help of someone who knew that language. While in exile in Turukhansky Krai in 1913–1917, he demonstrated a desire to improve his knowledge of languages. He asked to be sent books by German authors (although it is not clear whether he was asking for the originals or translations). In February 1914 he wrote to a society in Paris that assisted Russian exiles, requesting a French-Russian dictionary and some English newspapers. A May 1914 letter that he wrote to Zinoviev urged him to send “some sort of (civic) English journal (old, new, it doesn’t matter—for reading, since here there’s nothing in English and I’m afraid that without practice I’ll lose what English I’ve learned).” In November 1915 he again wrote to his comrades: “I don’t suppose you could send something interesting in French or English?”¹⁸ In 1930, while vacationing in the south, he asked his wife to send him a textbook for learning English.¹⁹ How serious was Stalin’s intention to study languages? How far did he advance? We cannot answer these questions. As far as we know, he never tried to demonstrate a knowledge of languages during any of his countless meetings with foreigners.

In the end, Stalin’s self-education, political experience, and character formed a mind that was in many ways repellant but ideally suited to holding onto power. His oversimplification of reality, in which phenomena were explained in terms of a historic standoff—between classes, between capitalism and socialism—outlived his system. Whatever the sources of this simplistic worldview—his religious education, his adherence to Lenin’s version of Marxism—its unidimensionality simplified the dictator’s life. A model of the world based on the principle of class struggle permitted him to ignore complexity and despise his victims. It allowed the regime’s most heinous crimes to be seen as a natural expression of historical laws and innocent mistakes to be seen as crimes. It allowed criminal intentions and actions to be attributed to people who intended and committed no crimes. In a relatively uneducated country, simplification was an excellent tool of social manipulation.

Stalin’s theoretical model of the world was in fact tottering and unreliable. Excessively simple and ineffective, it gave rise to abundant contradictions and failures. Yet he saw any adjustments to the ideological system that might have benefited the country as threatening to the stability of his regime. So he responded to life’s demands with rigid ideological and political dogmatism and agreed to limited changes only as a last resort, when crises reached a breaking point. Shielding himself from reality, he retreated—and tried to bring others with him—to the thickets of ideological scholasticism. The contents of his personal archive, which reflect what he thought was worthy of being kept close at hand, are almost completely devoid of documents that represent any sort of outside, expert perspective. Meanwhile, a huge country was engaged in the earnest study of Stalin’s “expert” opinions on fields as diverse as linguistics and political economy. It followed his dictates in crushing “formalists” and “cosmopolitans.” Fearing change and the pernicious influence of the West, Stalin rejected a number of scientific advances, such as genetics.²⁰ He believed only in what “you could touch with your hands,” what he understood and felt to be politically safe.

This dogmatism and rejection of the complex posed serious impediments to the country’s development. Yet even as his life came to an end, Stalin had no intention of changing the political system that had brought him power, a system that he methodically forged throughout the 1930s.

3 HIS REVOLUTION

By the end of 1928, the crushing of the “left opposition” had been transformed into Stalin’s personal victory. Cohesion among the Politburo majority, which had been easy to maintain during the fight against Trotsky and Zinoviev, began to deteriorate. The growing socioeconomic crisis was paralleled by a crisis at the upper echelons of power, a volatile mix that put the system of government in peril. This political kindling was finally ignited by the state’s failure to collect sufficient grain supplies in 1927, one of many signals that the NEP was not working.

The NEP model of development was doomed by a range of factors. Allowing market forces to govern the relationship between the peasants and the state violated fundamental Bolshevik doctrine. Despite the tragic experiences of War Communism, the ruling party continued to preach radical socialism and punish private economic initiative. Furthermore, Soviet agriculture was simply incapable of immediately producing the resources the government needed to support industrialization. Every camp within the ruling party—rightists, leftists, and everyone in between—was aware of the need to adjust the NEP and spur industrialization. The problem was finding how to best modify the system. The fierce battle for power severely limited the available options. The economy was once again falling victim to political conflict and the need to adhere to dogma, and no one was more guilty of putting political expediency before the needs of the economy than Stalin.

The reasons for the crisis of late 1927 were perfectly familiar to the country’s leadership. Pricing policy errors and a disproportionate investment in industry, among other factors, had undermined peasant incentives to sell grain to the state and disrupted the overall economic balance. In previous years, the leaders had found successful recipes for overcoming similar crises. Such a recipe was needed again. At first the Politburo searched for solutions as a unified collective. Although they considered economic stimuli, on this occasion members decided to try intensifying pressure on the peasants through “administrative” means. This meant a campaign to expropriate grain by force, and a key component was visits by the country’s leaders to grain-producing regions to inspire greater effort on the part of local officials. Molotov, who was sent to Ukraine, reported to Stalin on the first day of 1928: