'Death Solves All Problems,' He Said By Richard Pipes
Nov. 10, 1991
(STALIN Breaker of Nations. By Robert Conquest. Illustrated. 346 pp. New York: Viking.)
This biography is about a mean-spirited little man with "cockroach whiskers" (the phrase is the poet Osip Mandelstam's) whose ambitions far outran his capacity: to realize them, he used the machinery of total power set in place by Lenin and Trotsky to destroy all who stood in his way. They numbered in the tens of millions. No man ever possessed such power over so many human beings; no one ever inflicted such havoc on his own country. The magnitude of the devastation stands in stark contrast to the intellectual and moral nonentity who was responsible for it.
Robert Conquest is the author of more than a dozen pioneering studies on subjects that most of the Sovietological profession has studiously avoided: the man-made famine of 1932-33, the exile of Soviet nations, the Great Terror of the 1930's. His books, recently translated into Russian, have found an attentive audience in the Soviet Union. The latest, "Stalin: Breaker of Nations," is a precis of his life's work. Intended for the general reader, it provides a superb portrait of the man who terrorized his country for 30 years and inflicted the cold war on the rest of the world. It is the third major study of the tyrant to appear in a year (the other two are by Robert Tucker and Dmitri Volkogonov, a Soviet general turned historian). Briskly written, authoritative yet not pedantic, filled with interesting incidents and anecdotes, "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" makes for fascinating reading.
Mr. Conquest focuses on the man, concentrating on the political machinations by means of which Stalin first acquired total power and then used it physically to liquidate anyone who actually or even potentially threatened it. Murder was his way of resolving difficulties: "Death solves all problems," he is quoted as saying, "no man, no problem." This principle he applied to individuals as well as to whole categories or "classes." In his last years, the passion for killing became entirely irrational, a way of exorcising spirits that haunted his paranoid psyche.
The author's stress on biography and politics (the historical background has merely been sketched) is likely to displease that part of the Sovietological establishment that views politics as a byproduct of economic and social processes, and historical figures as instruments of those processes. But in the case of Communist Russia, the evidence indeed points to the primacy of politics. There is nothing to indicate that Lenin and Stalin reacted either to the exigencies of the economy or the pressures of the population, but a great deal to show that their supreme consideration at all times was maintaining and expanding their personal power.
The relatively weakest part of Mr. Conquest's book is that dealing with Stalin's ascent to power. As in Mr. Conquest's chef-d'oeuvre , "The Great Terror," the reader gets hardly any inkling that nearly every one of Stalin's political practices had been conceived and tested by Lenin. The invasive presence of the secret police; concentration camps; show trials; summary executions; collectivization and the war on the kulaks as well as the other familiar features of Stalinism save one -- the killing of fellow Communists -- were introduced by the regime's founding father. The 1932-33 Ukrainian man-made famine, for example, singled out by Mr. Conquest for savage condemnation, had its forerunner in the famine of 1921, which claimed almost as many victims and had been in large measure precipitated by Lenin's inane policies of food requisitioning.
Apparently influenced by Trotsky's writings, Mr. Conquest minimizes Stalin's personal closeness to Lenin. But it is worth recalling that on the eve of Lenin's death, Stalin was the only person to sit on all three of the directing organs of the party's Central Committee: the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat. In 1921-22 he was Lenin's principal deputy and heir apparent. His political base was the party bureaucracy, which he staffed with personnel who satisfied Lenin's criteria of orthodoxy but in fact were selected on the basis of personal loyalty to him. That Lenin should have chosen such a man to enforce party purity tells a great deal about his limitations as a statesman.
Mr. Conquest is without peer in the knowledge of Soviet history of the 1930's. He has supreme command of the sources, including those currently being released from Soviet archives. The byzantine intrigues by means of which Stalin, having transformed the country into his private domain, subjected the Soviet Union to experiments that were as cruel as they were senseless are told succinctly, with reference to reminiscences of contemporaries and a wealth of engrossing detail. He depicts with cold detachment foreign dupes like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Lion Feuchtwanger, who out of self-deception or self-interest portrayed Stalin as a humane and popular leader, finding all manner of excuses for his barbarities. The gullibility of foreign apologists knew no bounds. When Stalin passed a law making children as young as 12 liable to the death penalty for "economic crimes" like stealing food, the French Communist newspaper justified the measure on the ground that under Communism children matured so rapidly that by the age of 12 they were fully responsible citizens.
As this biography makes clear, Stalin owed his political successes to an uncanny ability to conceal his murderous instincts behind a mask of moderation and bonhomie. He learned early to pose as a pragmatic man of the middle, steadier and more dependable than his rivals. He also possessed throughout his life a remarkable ability to charm: even experienced foreign statesmen, well aware of his record, fell under his spell. Mr. Conquest admits to being puzzled by this paradox. At one point he comes close to suggesting that Stalin may have "possessed the gift of instilling hypnotic blindness by some psychological method as yet uninvestigated." Astonishingly, Stalin succeeded in deceiving even his mentor, Lenin, who became aware of his true nature only at the very end of his life, when it was too late to bring him down; and then, the worst quality that he saw in Stalin was rudeness. Even Andrei Sakharov admitted to being taken in. He recalled that on the day of Stalin's funeral he was "under the influence of a great man's death . . . thinking of his humanity." Such, he noted in retrospect, "shows the hypnotic power of mass ideology."
The legacy of Leninism-Stalinism will take a long time to overcome. It consists not in the destruction of the country's economy alone -- the ruin of agriculture, which once had fed its people and produced sufficient surplus to permit sizable exports, and the creation at great cost of an anachronistic industry centered on the production of weapons. It also lies, first and foremost, in the spiritual realm. Seven decades of Communism have obliterated among the peoples living under it the qualities necessary for citizenship, including respect for law and mutual trust. To survive under its regime, one had to mind one's own business; any interest in public affairs was judged under Stalin as prima facie evidence of subversive intent and under his successors as a symptom of insanity. Little wonder that the effort to eliminate altogether private concerns had the opposite effect, causing self-interest to obliterate all traces of public spirit. The successor states of the defunct Soviet Union have the unenviable task of rebuilding what had been destroyed in the vain attempt to remake man and (in Trotsky's words) "overturn the world."