Joseph Stalin： The Unmovable Red Tsar ｜ Our History)

Throughout the USSR, the 50th birthday of Joseph Stalin, leader of 176 million people, is being celebrated in a blaze of glory that hasn't been seen since the days of the Tsars. There was a special birthday issue of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Russian Communist Party, yesterday, the 21st of December 1929. It gave over the whole of the paper to praising Stalin as leader of the party, true successor of Lenin, the faithful best disciple of Lenin. He's seen by Lenin's side in paintings. It's as Lenin's true follower that he's shown in this special birthday photograph surrounded by faithful comrades. And in his message of On behalf of the great party of the working class, I accept your congratulations and greetings. You can be sure that in the future, too, I am prepared to give to the working classes of the world all my strength, my very best, and if need be, all my blood, drop by drop. Already it's rumoured some have whispered, why be modest about drop by drop? Can't it be given all at once? But to Western observers, Stalin certainly now seems safe as the all-powerful dictator, the Red Tsar. In spite of all this hero worship, it's his links with Lenin that today makes Stalin's power seem safe to most people. This photograph was taken two years ago at the party conference. The words below say, long live the unity of Lenin's ranks, long live the steel-like party of Lenin. A pun, not by chance, on Stalin's name, which means man of steel. It's nearly six years ago since Lenin died. People wept openly in the streets, not only in the USSR, but throughout the world. For Lenin, as the British Daily Herald newspaper put it, was loved by his own Russian people, whom he understood and loved so well as no leader of men in our time has been loved. He thought always of men and women whom he understood, and millions of whom came therefore to love and trust him. Some just couldn't accept his death. The poet Tsarov spoke to the communist youth movement, the pioneers. Lenin is dead? We don't believe it. We'll prove, pioneers, that Lenin still lives among us. The world shakes with alarm. Listen to the fateful call. Prepared to become a Leninist? Prepared. A cult or worship of Lenin has grown in spite of his wife Krupskaya's pleas. Don't organize memorials for him or lavish ceremonies in his memory. In his lifetime, he felt this was of so little importance, he was so bored by it. But all over Russia, the busts and statues, the posters and the paintings appeared. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1924. In Red Square, Lenin's embalmed body lies to be visited and almost worshipped. It's as if the Russians await his return. And now in December 1929, the Soviet people are saluting the Lenin of today, Joseph Stalin. Mountains have been named in his honor. Towns and cities have been renamed. Yuzhovo became Stalino in 1924. Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad in 1925. And this year, Dushanbe is now Stalinabad. To us outside the USSR, the publicity now being given to this man, little known in the West, seems very strange. A colleague, Sukhanov, has commented that Stalin produced the impression of a grey blur, floating dimly across the scene and leaving no trace. Of course, he's been an active Bolshevik and revolutionary figure since 1903. And if his official positions after 1917 didn't seem exciting, they were important, such as Commissar for Nationalities. He seemed well-trusted by Lenin and Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. Yet always he was in the shadow of government men who at the time seemed more powerful, were certainly more in the public eye. Men like Voroshilov, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and of course Trotsky. When Lenin died in January 1924, although all of them except Trotsky hurried to be present at the funeral and help carry the coffin, none of them seemed to be a clear successor. Some observers believe that a kind of joint or collective leadership would develop. Certainly to have put your money on Stalin to win would have seemed foolish. Trotsky called him the party's most eminent mediocrity. It's known in party circles and abroad that towards the end of his life Lenin criticised Stalin as rude, coarse, and cruel. But it's Stalin who's become the true heir of Lenin, while the rest have fallen from favour and some, like Trotsky, into disgrace and exile. Why has victory gone to the outsider? Were his rivals less able than they seemed? Is there something in the communist system that needs dictators like Lenin and Stalin? Perhaps he wasn't such an outsider after all. Two difficulties immediately appear when anyone tries to understand what's happening in Russia. First, there's the problem that Russia, whether under the Tsars or communist, is huge, covering half of Europe and one third of Asia. It's hard to get information you can trust and then to understand what it really means. Listen to this. Russia is a country in which the government says what it pleases because it alone has the right to speak. In Russia, fear replaces thought. To enter Russia, you must leave your right of opinion at the frontier. Westerners are regarded as spies. Historical truth isn't respected. Even the dead are exposed to the make-believe of him who rules the living. This wasn't written about Russia under communism, but in 1839 by the Marquis de Cousteau about Russia under the Tsars. This raises the question, how much of what happens in Russia and in Russian policy happens because Russia is communist and how much because Russia is Russia? The second problem is that unlike Western discussions over political leadership, in Russia everything takes place in secret and involves only a small number of party leaders. For in Russia, there are two systems of government that run side by side. There is the formal government and there is the party. The formal government is headed by the president, who's more a figurehead and heads a council of people's commissars elected from a parliament called the All-Union Congress of Soviets, chosen from provincial congresses, chosen by local Soviets, elected by the people. Within the communist party, the general secretary and the Politburo decide policy. They are elected from the central committee, chosen from the party congress, elected by party members. In the struggle for power since 1924, what has mattered above all has been influence in the party. As commissar for nationalities, Stalin had his links with Bolshevik leaders of non-Russian peoples, who numbered about half the whole population, and are in areas such as the Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkmenistan. As commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, he controlled every part of the government administration. As general secretary, he's been responsible for running the party, and the general secretary also controls the Org Bureau, which is responsible for party organization. So Stalin has been able to hire and fire almost anyone in government or party below the top leadership. Under the Lenin enrolment, 240,000 new members have been added to the communist party since 1924, and into the Politburo have come people like Voroshilov, a civil war comrade of Stalin, Molotov, who worked with Stalin on the first issue of Pravda in 1913, and Kirov. It looks very much as if Stalin has used his position to pack the party with his own men, and as his support has grown, many of the top leaders seem to have felt it sensible to go along with him. Faced with a choice between the brilliant, unpredictable Trotsky and the dull, hard-working Stalin, people like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin backed the grey blur. From the great speechmaker Trotsky, who had built and still controlled the Red Army, there was much to fear. But from the general secretary, perhaps they felt they could control this man, but they were wrong. One by one, they've gone. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were expelled from the party in 1927, Bukharin this year, and now Trotsky has been expelled from Russia. It's almost as if Stalin planned it all from the first, and if he's played his hand with great skill, Trotsky simply seems to have made a mess of his. Look at Lenin's funeral again. Where is Trotsky? Still in the Caucasus on holiday. Why wasn't he there to stake his claim? Why didn't he use the Red Army and his popular support? Why did he allow himself to be pushed out? Now that he's in Turkey and safe from Stalin, perhaps he'll give us his own version of events. But perhaps it's not people that have mattered so much as what life has really been like in Russia when the events took place. Since the Bolsheviks took over in November 1917, the government has faced almost continuous crisis. For three years, there was civil war with the anti-revolutionary white forces. The whites were helped by the Allies. Bolshevik propaganda used this alliance of internal and external enemies to good effect with powerful posters. Here, an opposition leader is shown in league with the white army and the capitalists, while a French military figure provides the cash. After the civil war, the Russians were reminded they were still under siege by posters in which the returning soldier is shown that even while he's at work, he must keep his weapon handy. In the last few years, events like the Locarno Pact between the Western powers and Germany have made the Russians feel that they still face a hostile capitalist world, only too ready to restart a war, as this poster shows. Of course, we have felt threatened as well. This is how a Russian artist sees the Bolshevik party leading the world, and the poet Mayakovsky has urged, Isn't this what the common term, the Communist International, is all about? But what are the Russians to make of the speeches of Mr Churchill, who constantly calls them So now in Soviet life, there seems to be greater discipline than before. In the early years, Lenin and his comrades seemed to believe in freedom, at least for those who shared their idea of a new world. Political freedom has never existed. The secret police and labor camps have seen to that. But in society and the arts, people were free to experiment. Artists like Petrov, Vodkin, and Malevich, and Tatlin with his revolutionary designs. In the last two years, this freedom has gone. Leading artists, writers, and musicians like Shostakovich have been criticized, and some stopped from working. They have to obey the new rules of social realism. Economic problems have also been enormous. By 1921, inflation had compared with 1914. Industrial production was only a third of that of 1913. Even captured tanks were used to help till the land, but crops failed. Famine stalked large areas of Russia. 18 million people were starving by 1921. Pathé newsreels showed these pictures to the outside world. There was a cry for help. It was like the times of famine under the Tsars. In January 1922, a League of Nations observer for famine relief recorded his visit to a village near Tashkent. In one house, there were eight people, including an ex-soldier. Three were children being fed at the kitchen. All the adults were lying down, and none of them seemed to have any chance of recovery. The only food in the house was a horse's hoof, which was being boiled in a pot on the fire. In the house of the richest farmer, the only food was a little flour made from pounded grass. His horses were reduced from 15 to 1. Many kinds of substitute food were shown. Pounded grass, birch and beech bark, and some scrub bush ground into flour, and the like. Even cannibalism went on in some areas. So desperate were people to keep their children alive. In the face of all this, Lenin gave up war communism and started the new economic policy. The aim was to encourage the peasants to produce food for the towns and for export, by allowing them to trade freely and to become rich if they could. To become kulaks, as rich peasants are called. But what Lenin called the commanding heights of the economy, heavy industry, transport, power, remained in state hands. For some years, all went well. By 1925, four years ago, inflation was checked and pre-war production levels restored. Lenin's slogan, communism is Soviet power plus electrification throughout the land, seemed to be true. Always some doubted, like Trotsky, who argued that the peasant must be driven and the worker forced to bring about rapid economic growth. That kulaks and private traders were enemies of socialism. Posters today saying, smash the kulaks, show that this view now seems to have been accepted by the leadership. For the last two years, Russia has bought grain abroad, proof of reports that harvests have been poor. And now look at what Stalin is asking the Russians to do in his five-year plan, begun last year. Coal, iron and steel output to increase by 100%. Oil by 260%. Chemicals by 290%. Agricultural machinery by a staggering 550%. Food and consumer goods by 60%. And 19 days ago, there came the call to achieve it in four years. All this reminds us of Lenin's ruthless determination between 1917 and 1921. History, he said then, will never forgive us if we do not act now. So far, history, at least in the Soviet Union, has forgiven Lenin everything. Even in the non-communist world, he's been praised. At his death, the Daily Herald described him as the friend of the common people of Russia, the man who sought to win the world, not for himself, but for them. Will there be the same sort of verdict on Stalin when his time comes? Or is he already showing he can be even more ruthless than Lenin? Is this angry cartoon by a Russian exile of an all-powerful Stalin a warning?