Here, in our country, on the contrary, elections are held in an entirely different atmosphere. Here there are no capitalists and no landlords and, consequently, no pressure is exerted by propertied classes on non-propertied classes. Here elections are held in an atmosphere of collaboration between the workers, the peasants and the intelligentsia, in an atmosphere of mutual confidence between them, in an atmosphere, I would say, of mutual friendship; because there are no capitalists in our country, no landlords, no exploitation and nobody, in fact, to bring pressure to bear on people in order to distort their will.
That is why our elections are the only really free and really democratic elections in the whole world.297
Implicit here was the theoretical rationale of the one-party Soviet system: competitive party elections in capitalist democracies reflected the existence of antagonistic classes, whereas in the Soviet Union class relations were non-antagonistic, so there was no need for more than one political party. Hence Soviet electors could only vote for candidates pre-selected by the communist party. They could vote against candidates (who required a majority to get elected) but in practice it was difficult to do so without identifying yourself as a dissident. Unsurprisingly, 98 per cent of the 90 million votes in the 1937 election were cast in favour of the party’s candidates.
A decade or so later, Stalin read with evident interest a 1945 book, Osnovy Inostrannogo Gosudarstvennogo Prava (Fundamentals of Foreign State Law). Written by N. P. Farberov, it was based on the author’s lectures to the Higher Intelligence School of the Red Army. Stalin followed closely Farberov’s discussion of different federal and confederal systems and the nature and basis of state sovereignty. He also noted sections on the role of parliaments, cabinet government and the difference between constitutional referendums and ‘factual’ referendums. On the US, Stalin was drawn to details of eligibility to vote and to stand in congressional elections. He showed no particular interest in the role of the Supreme Court but marked the fact that the US Constitution had only been amended twenty-one times in its 157-year history.298
Soviet–American economic relations were hampered by the US’s refusal to recognise the USSR diplomatically because of a dispute about the Soviets’ refusal to pay Tsarist-era debts. When diplomatic relations were established in 1933, Stalin was enthusiastic, especially about newly elected US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he described as a realist and ‘a determined and courageous politician’.299 He repeated this characterisation in his interview with H. G. Wells in July 1934, adding that ‘Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world’.300
These remarks presaged the close working relationship that Roosevelt and Stalin enjoyed during the Second World War. Stalin was impressed by Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional support for the Soviet war effort and by his determination to send as much American aid to the USSR as possible. Roosevelt’s motive was transparent. ‘Nothing could be worse’, he said in March 1942, ‘than to have the Russians collapse.’ Better to ‘lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else’. Why? Because ‘the Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together’, he wrote to Winston Churchill later that year.301
Stalin was genuinely upset when Roosevelt died unexpectedly in April 1945, shortly after the two men had met, along with Winston Churchill, at the Yalta conference. ‘When I entered Marshal Stalin’s office I noticed that he was deeply distressed at the news,’ reported American ambassador Averell Harriman. ‘He greeted me in silence and stood holding my hand for about 30 seconds before asking me to sit down.’ ‘President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on,’ Stalin told Harriman.302
Stalin’s enthusiasm for the United States knew no bounds during the war, when the awesome power of American industrial capitalism flooded the USSR with billions of dollars’ worth of Lend-Lease supplies. For a while after the war he hoped for an American loan that would help pay for the reconstruction of the ravaged Soviet economy. ‘Had I been born and brought up in America,’ Stalin told the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in June 1944, ‘I would probably have been a businessman.’ Stalin’s fervour cooled considerably when the cold war broke out in the mid-1940s, but as late as April 1947 he told the visiting US Republican politician Harold Stassen, ‘I am not a propagandist, I am a man of business,’ pointing out that he and Roosevelt had never indulged in the name-calling game of ‘totalitarians’ v. ‘monopoly capitalists’.303
Stalin was puzzled as well as impressed by the United States, finding it difficult to understand why the working class movement in the world’s leading capitalist country was so weak politically. When asked why he thought this was the case by a visiting American labour delegation in 1927, Stalin had no answer except to blame reactionary trade union leaders for not forming an independent proletarian party to compete with the Democrats and Republicans.304
One of the last articles Stalin ever read was A. A. Poletaev’s ‘V. I. Lenin and the American Workers Movement’, published in a 1952 issue of Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History) devoted to Lenin.
Poletaev’s article seems to have been the only one that Stalin read in that issue of the journal and the first passage he marked was a 1907 citation from Lenin on the characteristics of the ‘Anglo-American workers’ movement’. There were four, and Stalin, as he often did, went to the trouble of numbering them: the fact that the proletariats of these two countries had no important social-national democratic tasks to fulfil; the complete subordination of the proletariat to bourgeois policy; the sectarianism and isolation of the socialist movement; and the lack of support for the left in elections.
Stalin picked up on the sectarianism point later in the article, noting the ‘dogmatism’ of both De Leon’s American Socialist Party and the British Social Democratic Federation. He also underlined Lenin’s point that what was needed in the United States was a mass Marxist party that would form an alliance between workers, farmers and ‘toiling negroes’.
Always on the lookout for points with contemporary resonance, Stalin noted this graphic passage in Poletaev’s article:
The American bourgeoisie have more than once warmed their hands with the flames of war in Europe, thereby profiting from the blood and suffering of millions of people. US monopolies have rapidly developed into a mighty fortress of capital with a vice-like grip not only on the American people but the peoples of Europe and Asia.305
Another Voprosy Istorii article that Stalin read during these early cold war years was an article on American intervention in Siberia during the civil war. Beside the paragraph citing the official US claim that the intervention was prompted by ‘love’ for the Russian people, Stalin wrote ‘ha ha’.306
A country that had once been a beacon of hope for Stalin, then a business partner and wartime ally, had reverted to being ‘Enemy Number One’.307
CHAPTER 6
REVERSE ENGINEERING
Stalin and Soviet Literature
Stalin read literature for leisure, pleasure and edification. As a young man his first love was poetry, and patriotic poems were his earliest published writing. Radical fiction guided the young Stalin to the revolutionary cause. Like Marx and Lenin, he valued the enlightening role of literary classics, and quickly grasped the mobilisational power of theatre and film. Famously, he described writers in a socialist society as ‘engineers of the human soul’. For Stalin, literature was the means to win hearts as well as minds.