Isaac Deutscher is most famous for his biographical trilogy
about Leon Trotsky. After reading the first volume (‘The Prophet Armed’), I
searched in vain for the sequel but noticed instead his earlier 1949 biography
of Stalin. Both books are extremely readable and engaging, it is impossible not
to be impressed by Deutscher’s elegant and clear prose style. If you are like
me and also sympathetic to the ideals of socialism which motivated people like
Lenin and Trotsky, Deutscher provides an insightful alternative to the typical
narratives of the Russian revolution. There are of course many narratives which
have crossed their swords over various interpretations of the Russian
revolution and the nature of Stalinism, providing us with an historical
battlefield littered with a variety of ideological corpses. Deutscher’s place
within this battlefield is itself a subject with its own idiosyncratic story.
He is remembered principally as the author who made Trotsky famous again in the
late 1950s, and who had a massive impact on the ‘New Left’ of the 1960s. But
although he was sympathetic to Trotsky he was never a “Trotskyist”, and while
he told truths about Stalinism which helped to disillusion and educate many
misguided Stalinists in the west, he also placed hopes on the future of Stalinist
Russia which appear quite deluded from our position of hindsight.
Isaac Deutscher was never a member of any academic
institution. He made a living as a journalist, and wrote books aimed at an
educated western audience. Although he is a very good writer, and avoids many
of the stylistic pitfalls of academic historical writing, there are a few
drawbacks. The most obvious is the almost complete lack of references. There
are a handful of footnotes sparsely scattered throughout the text, but for the
most part you just have to maintain faith in Deutscher’s scholarship, because
it is simply not visible in the text. I’m not a specialist in this particular
area of history, but I would still appreciate some pointers towards a larger
literature. As an interested but casual reader I’m not too bothered about
primary sources, but it seems weird that such an eloquent and frequently
insightful text is something of an island, unconnected to a wider tradition of
secondary sources.
I found the book hard to put down, and compared to the only
other Stalin biography I have read – Martin Amis’ “Koba the Dread” –
Deutscher’s is the best by a very large margin. All I can remember of Amis’
book to be honest is a massive litany of Stalin’s crimes, together with a
petulant and barbed attack on his father (how could he have embraced socialism
if Stalin was so evil) and Christopher Hitchens (how could he have embraced
Trotsky if Stalin was so evil). I don’t remember any kind of analysis of why Stalin did the incredibly awful
deeds laid out by Amis beyond a recourse to the most obvious moral psychology:
Stalin was simply insane and evil. Neal Ascherson, in his 2002 review of Amis’
book, pretty much backs up my memory of this almost complete lack of analysis:
Surprisingly, the weakest element in the book is its handling of Stalin.
A brilliant novelist reaches into the dark for this creature but fails to
reconstruct a character out of the slimy bits he can feel. Amis falls back on
the weak idea that he was mad, an envious loner driven into homicidal lunacy by
the taste of power, and argues that when he did sensible things, like defeating
Hitler, he stopped being mad. "... The invasion [of 1941] pressed Stalin
into a semblance of mental health. Certainly, in August 1945, remission ended and
the patient's sanity once again fell apart". Unhappily, Stalin was not
mad. He was sane, but callous and cruel on a scale so staggering that hopeful
views of human nature crumple.
To be fair to Martin Amis, putting aside his questionable
political motives, it is surely impossible to deny that Stalin committed
monstrous crimes, and that any decent biography should grapple with the
enormity and hideousness of his actions. Deutscher also has political motives,
but these (as I will attempt to outline below) are far more complex than those
of Amis, and result in a much more interesting - if head-scratchingly contentious
- book. His tone throughout is the complete opposite of Amis, rather than
sustained moral outrage Deutscher is cool and consistently dispassionate. His
explanation for this approach deserves to be quoted:
Some critics have remarked on my
‘cool and impersonal’ approach to Stalin. Yet the work on this book was to me a
deeply personal experience, the occasion for much silent heart-searching and
for a critical review of my own political record. I had belonged to those whom
Stalin had cruelly defeated; and one of the questions I had to ask myself was
why he had succeeded. To answer this question the partisan had to turn into an
historian, to examine dispassionately causes and effects, to view open-mindedly
the adversary’s motives, and to see and admit the adversary’s strength where
strength there was. (from 1961 Introduction)
Here is an example of Deutscher’s analysis, in which he
explains Stalin’s motives for the 1936 purges:
‘His charges against them were, of course,
shameless inventions. But they were based on a perverted ‘psychological truth’,
on a grotesquely brutalised and distorting anticipation of possible
developments. His reasoning probably developed along the following lines: they
may want to overthrow me in a crisis – I shall charge them with having already
made the attempt. They certainly believe themselves to be better fitted for the
conduct of war, which is absurd. A change of government may weaken Russia’s
fighting capacity; and if they succeed, they may be compelled to sign a truce
with Hitler, and perhaps even agree to a cession of territory as we once did at
Brest Litovsk. I shall accuse them of having entered already into a treacherous
alliance with Germany (and Japan) and ceded Soviet territory to those states.
No milder pretext for the slaughter of the
old guard would have sufficed. Had they been executed merely as men opposed to
Stalin or even as conspirators who had tried to remove him from power, many
might still have regarded them as martyrs for a good cause. They had to die as traitors,
as perpetrators of crimes beyond the reach of reason, as leaders of a monstrous
fifth column. Only then could Stalin be sure that their execution would provoke
no dangerous revulsion; and that, on the contrary, he himself would be looked
upon, especially by the young and uninformed generation, as the saviour of the
country. It is not necessary to assume
that he acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power. He may be given the dubious
credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the
revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright. (p.377 –
378)
I have highlighted the last two sentences because they
represent one of the moments of ‘head scratching’ I mentioned above. Even if
Deutscher’s description of Stalin’s motives is correct, isn’t it at least
logically possible that these motives were accompanied by a sadistic and cruel
psychology? Is Deutscher trying too hard to be objective, and are we involving
ourselves in apologetics for the hideous crimes committed in the name of the
revolution if we accept the attribution of “dubious credit”? It is worth noting
the reaction of George Breitman, a Trotskyist contemporary, who in a 1949 review focused his outrage on those same sentences:
He
also has the irritating habit, after detailing one of Stalin’s crimes against
the revolution, of engaging in entirely uncalled for speculation about possible
justifications for his acts which Stalin may have had in his mind. Thus, after
reporting the Moscow Trials and showing them to be monstrous frameups, he adds:
“It is not necessary to assume that he [Stalin] acted from sheer cruelty or
lust for power. He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction
that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone
interpreted those interests aright.”
We must remember and recognise the
fact here that Stalin was still very much alive in 1949, so Deutscher’s cool
objectivity was understandably offensive to many – including Trotskyists. There
is also the fact that Deutscher had restricted access to relevant sources, and
may have changed his mind had he known the full extent of Stalin’s murderous
tyranny. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Deutscher had access to more sources,
including the testimony of Nikita Khruschev. He updated the 1949 version with a
‘postscript’ written in 1966, which includes the following passage:
‘Khrushchev points out that Stalin had
become especially wilful and tyrannical since the liquidation of the
Trotskyists and Bukharinists (in which Khrushchev and his like had eagerly
assisted him). “Stalin thought that henceforth he could decide all things
alone; he now needed only extras; he treated all in such a way that they could
only listen and praise him”. In fact, after
he had destroyed the anti-Stalinist opposition, Stalin proceeded to suppress
his own faction, the Stalinists. Khrushchev’s revelations bear precisely upon
this, the last stage of the great purges, when Stalin suspected his own
adherents of crypto-Trotskyism or crypto-Bukharinism. Consequently, he
ordered the arrest and execution of the great majority – 1,108 out of 1,966 –
of the members of the Central Committee elected at that Congress. These were
all Stalinists – the textbooks referred to the Seventeenth Congress as the
“Victor’s Congress”, because at it the Stalinists had celebrated their final
triumph over all inner-party oppositions. After the annihilation of over two
thirds of the leading Stalinist cadres, the survivors trembled for their lives.
‘In the situation which then prevailed,’ Khrushchev relates, ‘I often talked
with Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin; once when we two were travelling in a car,
he said: “It happens sometimes that a man goes to Stalin, invited as a friend;
and when he sits with Stalin he does not know where he will be sent next, home
or to jail.”’ ‘Stalin was a very distrustful man, diseased with suspicion … He
could look at you and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you
turning so much today and trying to avoid looking me directly in the eyes?”’ ‘He
indulged in great wilfulness and choked one morally and physically.’ After the
war ‘Stalin became even more capricious, irritable, and brutal. …. His
persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions.’
Since Khrushchev made these statements it
has become common to refer to Stalin’s paranoia. Yet it is not necessary to
assume that he became insane in the strict sense. His quasi-paranoiac behaviour
followed from his situation; it was inherent in the logic of the great purges
and in their consequences. The suspicion with which he treated even his own
adherents was not groundless. They had been with him and had abetted him during
the persecution of the Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and Bukharinists; but as the
persecution turned into the great massacre of 1936-8, many of the most faithful
Stalinists were shocked and became remorseful. They had accepted the premises
of Stalin’s action, but not the consequences. They had agreed to the
suppression of the opposition, but not to physical annihilation. Postyshev,
Rudzutak, Kossior, and others dared to express their remorse or doubts and to
question Vyshinsky’s procedures. In doing so they at once incurred Stalin’s
suspicion of disloyalty; and, in truth, they were becoming ‘disloyal’ to him.
Questioning the need for the extermination of the Trotskyists and Bukharinists,
they were not disputing any of Stalin’s ordinary political decisions; they were
impugning his moral character and suggesting that he was guilty of an
unpardonable enormity. If they were to behave consistently, they were bound to
work henceforth for his overthrow. In that case, they could become more
dangerous to him than the Bukharinists or the Trotskyists, for they could use
against him the influence and power they still exercised as the leading men of
his own faction. He had to assume that their actions would be consistent with
their words. He could not afford to wait and see whether they were actually
going to use their power against him. For the sake of self-preservation he had
to forestall them. And he could forestall them only by destroying them. (p. 610
– 611)
This
is a compelling analysis: Stalin creates a social reality in which paranoia is
a perfectly logical and rational response to the political conditions. Sitting
at the apex of this political system, Stalin is like a spider which is caught
inside its own web. Like a murderous snowball, the terror of the purges creates
its own hideous reality, and Stalin must keep on killing to ensure that he too
does not become a victim. Is Deutscher involved in apologetics? Surely not –
how could anybody even begin to think that such a political system could
include anything worth defending? I don’t think Deutscher is involved in
apologetics in these passages, even if they provoke debate about the nature of
insanity and totalitarianism. Which is not to say that Deutscher is innocent of
apologetics. The most outstanding example is the concluding paragraph of the
1949 edition:
Hitler was the leader of a sterile counterrevolution, while Stalin has
been the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative
revolution. Like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon he started as the servant
of an insurgent people and made himself its master. Like Cromwell he embodies
the continuity of the revolution through all its phases and metamorphoses,
although his role was less prominent in the first phase. Like Robespierre he
has bled white his own party; and like Napoleon he has built
his half-conservative and half-revolutionary empire and carried revolution
beyond the frontiers of his country. The
better part of Stalin’s work is as certain to outlast Stalin himself as the
better parts of the work of Cromwell and Napoleon have outlasted them. But in
order to save it for the future and to give to it its full value, history may
yet have to cleanse and reshape Stalin’s work as sternly as it once
cleansed and reshaped the work of the English revolution after Cromwell and of
the French after Napoleon. (p. 569 – 570)
How can we understand this strange synthesis of insightful
critique and dated apologetics? The best explanation for the apologetics I
could find is contained in an article by Neil Davidson, writing for the
International Socialism journal:
……orthodox Trotskyists continued to hold fast to a
position which had been proved inadequate by events, and even extended it to
Eastern Europe and China. Like them, Deutscher accepted that Russia, its
satellites and imitators were all ‘workers’ states’ because they were based on
nationalised property. Yet his description of how The Revolution Betrayed
(1937) became ‘the Bible of latter-day Trotskyist sects and chapels whose
members piously mumbled its verses long after Trotsky’s death’ conveys his
impatience with the religious veneration they accorded Trotsky’s last writings.
Why? Not because they clung to its definition of a ‘workers’ state’, but
because they refused to abandon their formal commitment to political
revolution. Even the dominant tendency within the Fourth International,
associated with Michael Pablo, which had successfully argued that the Stalinist
states in Eastern Europe and China were ‘workers’ states’, assumed that future
revolutions would be led by Stalinist parties under ‘exceptional
circumstances’, ‘pressure from the masses’, and the like. Deutscher described
himself as ‘free from loyalties to any cult’, by which he meant Trotskyism as
much as Stalinism. He was therefore able go much further than orthodox
Trotskyists could (without rendering their existence completely redundant) and
claim that Stalinist Russia was not only
capable of internal self-reform, but that, even unreformed, it was the major
force for world revolution. At one level this is, of course, merely the logic
of orthodox Trotskyism taken to its conclusion. For many Trotskyists,
therefore, their rage at Deutscher was that of Caliban at seeing his face in
the mirror.
So to what extent does this
dubious political orientation undermine or distort Deutscher’s analysis of
Stalin? Again, my response is a mixture of admiration and wariness. One of the
most fascinating aspects of Deutscher’s narrative is his treatment of Stalin’s
relationship with Lenin. When Stalin meets Lenin for the first time in 1905, he
is already an avid and committed disciple. Deutscher quotes Stalin’s own words
to describe the impact Lenin had on the 26 year old Stalin:
I had
hoped to see the mountain eagle of our party, the great man, great physically
as well as politically. I had fancied Lenin as a giant, stately and imposing.
How great was my disappointment to see a most ordinary-looking man, below
average height, in no way, literally in no way, distinguishable from ordinary
mortals …. Usually, a great man comes late to a meeting so that his appearance
may be awaited with baited breath. Then, just before the great man enters, the
warning goes round: ‘Hush … silence … he is coming.’ The rite did not seem to
me superfluous, because it created an impression and inspired respect. How
great was my disappointment to see that Lenin had arrived at the conference
before the other delegates were there and had settled himself somewhere in a
corner and was unassumingly carrying on a conversation, with the most ordinary
delegates. I will not conceal from you that at that time this seemed to me to
be rather a violation of certain essential rules. (p.78, quoted from J. Stalin,
Sochinenya, vol. vi, p.54)
Stalin wants to see Lenin as a
Great Man and has a strong attachment to traditional protocols around hierarchy,
masculinity and leadership. Duetscher provides a convincing picture of the
young Stalin which explains the character of this hero-worship. Unlike the
majority of Bolshevik leaders, Stalin’s parents were serfs. His early years are
shaped by the incredibly strict and harsh conditions of the Theological
Seminary of Tiflis, a town in the southern part of Russia close to the modern
day state of Armenia. He rebels against the stifling authoritarian discipline
of the Jesuits, and joins Messame Dassy,
a social democratic organisation which is ‘tinged with Georgian patriotism[i]’. Stalin
learns from a young age the art of secrecy and undercover maneuvers, taking on
various pseudonyms to evade the watchful eyes of the monks. The implications
Deutscher draws out of this background of cultural “backwardness” involve a
series of inter-related descriptions of Stalin which neatly stack up against
the exact opposite characteristics of his arch nemesis, Leon Trotsky. Stalin
remains psychologically attached to the traditional mentality associated with
orthodox religious practices, whereas Trotsky is a true atheist (in spite of
his Jewish background). Trotsky is brilliant and highly educated, Stalin is
mediocre and relatively uneducated. Trotsky finds his spiritual home in the
metropolitan and cosmopolitan atmosphere of big European cities, Stalin rarely
leaves Russia and retains the rural and ‘Asiatic’ influence of his native
Georgia. It isn’t hard to join the dots and contrast the internationalist
politics of Trotsky with Stalin’s later doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’.
Deutscher describes how Stalin
cleverly out-maneuvers Trotsky in the period after Lenin’s death by helping to
create a ‘Lenin cult’ which prevents the Bolsheviks from revoking or changing
any decision made by Lenin in the previous years of the revolution. Stalin
succeeds in codifying Lenin’s political doctrines into an ossified system of
dogma, not at all unlike the authoritarian belief system of the Jesuits.
Deutscher’s description of Lenin’s funeral brings all these elements together:
The elaborate ceremony was altogether out of keeping
with the outlook and style of Lenin, whose sobriety and dislike of pomp were
almost proverbial. The ceremony was calculated to stir the mind of a primitive,
semi-oriental people into a mood of exaltation for the new Leninist cult. So
was the Mausoleum in the Red Square, in which Lenin’s embalmed body was
deposited, in spite of his widow’s protest and the indignation of many
Bolshevik intellectuals. To myriads of peasants, whose religious instincts were
repressed under the revolution, the Mausoleum soon became a place of
pilgrimage, the queer Mecca of an atheistic creed, which needed a prophet and
saints, a holy sepulchre and icons. Just as original Christianity, as it was
spreading into pagan countries, absorbed elements of pagan beliefs and rites
and blended them with its own ideas, so now Marxism, the product of western
European thought, was absorbing elements of the Byzantine tradition, so deeply
ingrained in Russia, and of the Greek Orthodox style. The process was
inevitable. The abstract tenets of Marxism could exist, in their purity, in the
brains of intellectual revolutionaries, especially those who had lived as
exiles in western Europe. Now, after the doctrine had really been transplanted
to Russia and come to dominate the outlook of a great nation, it could not but,
in its turn, assimilate itself to that nation’s spiritual climate, to its
traditions, customs, and habits. Imperceptibly, the process had been going on
for some time. Nobody had had a deeper insight into it and felt more
embarrassed by it than Lenin. His own death was the catharsis, which relieved
many of his disciples from the inhibitions of pure Marxism. It revealed the
degree of the mutual assimilation of doctrine and environment that had taken
place so far. (p. 269)
The only references Deutscher
provides in this entire section are to Stalin’s autobiography, plus a couple of
Lenin quotes. The idea that Stalin took Lenin’s ideas and codified them into
rigid and mechanical set of dogmas, infused with an authoritarian religious aura, is to me
unproblematic. The problem I have with Deutscher’s Stalinism-as-religion
narrative is the hinted at, yet not quite explicit idea, that Stalin’s message
was received by a credulous and fully ‘backward’ Byzantinian peasantry. Deutscher
is not alone in referring to the cultural ‘backwardness’ of Russia, and there
is surely a great deal of truth in the consensus that the vast majority of
Russian peasants were uneducated and religious. But the idea that Stalin could
easily sell them a cultified Lenin does not follow from this fact in an a priori fashion: where is the evidence?
We might easily point to the ‘cult of personality’ which grew up around Stalin,
but this was a much later development. What did everyday workers and peasants
think of Lenin’s embalmment, how did they respond to Stalin’s crudely
manipulative ‘oath to Lenin’, including lines such as “In leaving us, Comrade
Lenin ordained us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the
party. We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we shall honourably fulfil this thy
commandment”? It isn’t hard to speculate about a range of distinct reactions,
from credulous emotional acceptance to suspicious distrust of Stalin’s motives.
Deutscher seems far too content to rely uncritically on the familiar tropes
about the backward, superstitious Byzantinian masses.
My mental alarm bells sounded off
again when I came to Deutscher’s description of Stalin’s role in the early
1920s as the ‘Commisariat of Nationalities’:
Apart from the Ukraine, ruled by an
independent-minded government under Christian Rakovsky, the Commissariat of
Nationalities faced primarily Russia’s vast, inert, oriental fringe. None of
the leaders who had spent most of their adult life in western Europe was as fit
to head that Commissariat as Stalin. His first-hand knowledge of the customs
and habits of clients was unsurpassed. So was his capacity to deal with the
intricacies of their ‘politics’, in which blood feuds and oriental intrigue mixed
with a genuine urge towards modern civilization. His attitude was just that
mixture of patience, patriarchal firmness, and slyness that was needed. The
Politbureau relied on this and refrained from interfering.
The Asiatic and semi-Asiatic periphery thus
became his first undisputed domain. Immediately after the revolution, when the
leadership of the nation belonged to the turbulent and radical cities of
European Russia, in the first place to Petersburg and Moscow, the weight of
that periphery was not much felt. With the ebb of revolution, the primitive provinces took their revenge.
They reasserted themselves in a thousand ways, economic, political, and
cultural. Their spiritual climate became, in a sense, decisive for the
country’s outlook. The fact that so much of that climate was oriental was of
great significance. Stalin, who was so
well suited to speak on behalf of Russian communism to the peoples of the
oriental fringe, was also well suited to orientalise his party. During his
years at the Commissariat he made and widened his contacts with the Bolshevik
leaders of the borderlands, on whose devoted support he could count, and of
whom so many were to be found in his entourage at the Kremlin later on. (p.229
– 230)
Those wily and cunning Orientals!
The only way to deal with them is to send out our hard man Stalin, he knows how
they think and plot! This crude example of Orientalism only crops up a few
times in the 600 odd pages of Deutscher’s book, but unfortunately it does play
a role in answering the original question he poses about the reasons for
Stalin’s success. According to Deutscher Stalin succeeds not just because of
his murderous bureaucratic talents, but because he knows how to play to his
audience. Uneducated, psychologically predisposed towards tyranny by hundreds
of years of Tsarist rule, religious, Oriental, Byzantinian, superstitious,
nationalistic – all of these aspects of ‘backwardness’ match up comfortably
with Stalin’s totalitarian endeavours. Deutscher is never fully explicit about
this claim, although it is a fairly clear subtext running throughout his
narrative. It has a very peculiar and awkward corollary: if it is true, then
the Stalinist state is not completely undemocratic. To the extent that Stalin
succeeds by ‘playing to his audience’ (rather than killing people, for
example), his power is gained through consent rather than force. From a
western, educated and liberal perspective, Stalin’s rule appears cruel and
tyrannical. But if you know the ‘truth’ about the natives, you will see that it
is what they want, what suits their culture and undeniable ‘backwardness’.
Having made these critical
remarks, mention needs to be made of the numerous threads in Deutscher’s
biography which are compelling and insightful. The standout sections for me
were his portrait of Stalin’s early years, his description of the devastation
wrought by forced collectivisation, and the complex web of political strategy
surrounding Hitler and ‘Third Period’ Stalinism. Deutscher’s biography has the
virtue of opening up a window revealing the contours of both Stalin’s life and
the political history of the first half of the twentieth century. Read
critically, Duetscher’s text helps to make sense of the weird and chilling
impact of Stalinism.
No comments:
Post a Comment