Many people have felt something of the same about the squat, vulgar figure of Stalin against the tremendous dawn of the Russian Revolution. But, in the first place, Wells is more than a little unfair to Napoleon. His political, as well as military, talents were considerable. Doubtless the Emperor vulgarized the Revolution, but it had already vulgarized itself.
No doubt all revolutions are doomed to vulgarization. But the idealization of the first glories of the new regime often contains a large element of vulgar sentimentalism, and the change to vulgar cynicism may constitute only a comparative deflation. Both Napoleon and Stalin, however that may be, established their rule largely, though not entirely, by to some degree replacing the motivation of general ideas by that of careerism and personal loyalty.
Napoleon was, of course, a vain man. Stalin’s vanity has also been much remarked on. But it did not, at least until his last years, run to palatial ostentation. Until the Second World War, he dressed with traditional Bolshevik modesty in a plain brown military coat and dark trousers stuffed into leather boots. He lived unpretentiously in a small house in the Kremlin, formerly part of the Tsar’s servants’ quarters. Ownership and money as such played no part in his life. In the 1930s, his official salary was about 1,000 rubles a month—in purchasing power, perhaps $40. One of his secretaries accepted and dealt with this small sum, paying the superintendent of the Kremlin a modest rent for his apartment, and dealing with his Party dues, his payment for his holiday, and so on. He owned nothing but had immediate right to everything, like the Dalai Lama or the Mikado in the old days. His country villa at Borovikha and his seaside Government Summer House No. 7 at Sochi were “State property.”23
With all this personal simplicity, Stalin’s reputation for envious emulation arose early among his colleagues. When the Order of the Red Banner began to be awarded in the Civil War, and was to be given to Trotsky, Kamenev proposed that Stalin should receive it too. Kalinin, the new Head of State, asked in surprise, “For what?” Bukharin intervened: “Can’t you understand? This is Lenin’s idea. Stalin cannot live unless he has what someone else has. He will never forgive it.”24
In the final stages of the “cult of personality,” he was built up with the most astonishing adulation as a genius not only in politics, but also in strategy, the sciences, style, philosophy, and almost every field. His picture looked down from every hoarding; his bust was carried by Soviet alpinists to the top of every Soviet peak. He was elevated to be, with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the fourth of the great political geniuses of the epoch. The histories were, of course, rewritten to make his role in the Revolution a decisive one. Khrushchev describes him inserting in a draft of his own Short Biography the following passage: “Although he performed his task as leader of the Party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”
Khrushchev goes on to say:
In the draft of his book appeared the following sentence: “Stalin is the Lenin of today.” This sentence appeared to Stalin to be too weak, so, in his own handwriting, he changed it to read: “Stalin is the worthy continuer of Lenin’s work, or, as it is said in our Party, Stalin is the Lenin of today.” You see how well it is said, not by the nation but by Stalin himself.
… I will cite one more insertion made by Stalin concerning the theme of the Stalinist military genius. “The advanced Soviet science of war received further development,” he writes, “at Comrade Stalin’s hands. Comrade Stalin elaborated the theory of the permanently operating factors that decide the issue of wars, of active defense and the laws of counter-offensive and offensive, of the cooperation of all services and arms in modern warfare, of the role of big tank masses and air forces in modern war, and of the artillery as the most formidable of the armed services. At the various stages of the war Stalin’s genius found the correct solutions that took account of all the circumstances of the situation.”
And further, writes Stalin: “Stalin’s military mastership was displayed both in defense and offense. Comrade Stalin’s genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.”25
It can be argued, though, that precisely because his claim to leadership was shakily based, it had to be exaggerated and made unchallengeable. Lenin, whose dominance in the Party was genuine and accepted, had had no need of such methods. For Stalin they were, in part at least, the necessary cement of autocracy. One shrewd Soviet diplomat in the 1930s writes, “Anyone who imagines that Stalin believes this praise, or laps it up in a mood of egotistical willingness to be deceived, is sadly mistaken. Stalin is not deluded by it. He regards it as useful to his power. He also enjoys humiliating these intellectuals….”26
To discuss Stalin’s character and beliefs is not to estimate his abilities. There have been two main views of these. On the first, he was an infallible genius, a “Coryphaeus of science,” an inspired leader of the human race, and so forth. On the second, he was a mediocrity. The first view, taken (during Stalin’s lifetime) by Professor Bernal, Khrushchev, and others, has been submitted to enough destructive criticism, and we need hardly deal with it. The view that he was a nonentity who reached the top by luck and low cunning still has influence. It is true that most of those who hold it would concede that he was also a monster. But they would grant him few other active qualities.
The Menshevik historian Sukhanov, soon to be his victim, described him in 1917 as making no more impression than a gray blur. Trotsky called him “the most outstanding mediocrity in our Party.”27 And Khnishchev later said, in his Secret Speech of 1956, “I shall probably not be sinning against the truth when I say that ninety-nine percent of the persons present here heard and knew very little about Stalin before 1924.” He had, in fact, made little impression on the talkative politicians of the Party at that time. Thus there was some basis for the judgment of Trotsky and his successors. But on the whole it was a shallow one, as later events bore out. The qualities Stalin lacked and Trotsky possessed were not the essentials for political greatness. And Lenin alone among the Bolshevik leaders had recognized Stalin’s ability.
It is early yet to look at his career objectively, with his technique of despotism simply “considered as a fine art.” Nevertheless, we can avoid dismissing with the negative estimate of his unsuccessful rivals and their intellectual heirs the brilliant politician who was able to produce such vast and horrible effects.
Stalin had a good average grasp of Marxism, and though his adaptations of that flexible doctrine to suit his purposes were not so elaborate or so elastic as the similar interpretations of his rivals and predecessors, they were adequate to his career. His lack of the true theoretician’s mind was noted by many, and he seems to have resented it.
Bukharin told Kamenev in July 1928 that Stalin was “eaten up with the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks.” The old Marxist scholar Ryazanov once interrupted Stalin when he was theorizing: “Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows that theory is not exactly your field.” Nevertheless, as Isaac Deutscher rightly comments, his great theoretical departure—“socialism in one country”—however crude and even un-Marxist a notion, was a powerful and appealing idea.28