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STALIN THE MONSTER



Robert Conquest is one of my favorite authors. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute in California. He is an historian, poet, literary critic, political writer and the author of a number of marvelous books about the dreadful years of Stalin’s rule over the Soviet Union. One of them, The Great Terror, depicts Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930’s that swallowed up old of his old Bolshevik comrades plus millions of other hapless Russians. Another work of his, The Harvest of Sorrow – The Great Famine – details the fate of the millions of Russian peasants killed by him through starvation and other means in the 1920’s as part of his mad Marxist scheme of agricultural collectivization. Conquest writes with insight, clarity, brevity and the necessary sardonic view that allows one to read on without retching in disgust at the barbarity of the “progressive, peace-loving” forces headed by Stalin. Only by reading these books, can one begin to appreciate the Divine gift granted to the rest of humanity by Stalin’s unexpected death in 1953. In a century that also featured Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and other such mass murderers, Josef Stalin still remains the champion killer of all the twentieth century and thus probably of all time.

 

                  Conquest wrote a biography of Stalin ten years ago. It ahs recently been reissued in paperback form. It is aptly titled “Stalin –Breaker of Nations.” Another author would have written a thousand page work about Stalin’s life. Long and detailed biographies are all the rage in literary circles today. But Conquest has written a great book about 330 pages in length that gives the reader a clear and unambiguous picture of the man who frightened the whole world and ruled over half of it. The book has great anecdotes and vignettes and portrays the hunger for power that dominated the mind and soul of this brutish, coarse, wily and completely unprincipled Georgian. Stalin destroyed everyone he came into contact with – his colleagues, political allies not to mention his political foes, and even his own wives and children and others in his family. He also unwittingly almost destroyed Russia while building it into an apparent superpower. His legacy to Russia and the world is one of malevolence and scorn. He, who invented the “cult of the personality” to create for himself a god-like aura is regarded now by his fellow countrymen and the world generally as the epitome of evil, mediocrity and viciousness.

 

                  Conquest details Stalin’s virulent anti-Semitism. Stalin, from his earliest days as a seminary student in Tiflis, hated “yids.” In 1906 he stated that the hated Mensheviks were a “Jewish organization” but that the Bolsheviks were a truly Russian group. He therefore, ‘in jest’ recommended a pogrom against the Mensheviks.  But it was not until after Hitler’s defeat in World War II and the beginning of the Cold War that this latent hatred turned into a public obsession. As Conquest writes: “Stalin’s attitude [towards the Jews] seems to have been based in part on what he took to be Hitler’s successful use of anti-Semitic demagogy. It was certainly also due to his increasing Russian nationalism, to which he felt, most, or many, Jews were not truly assimilable. And the idea of a special Jewish predilection for capitalism is of course to be found in Marx. He especially opposed Jews who were Bundists, or religious activists, or ‘cosmopolitans,’ or secessionists, or Zionists, or were agents of American-Israeli organizations. In the autumn of 1948 Golda Meir arrived in Moscow as Israeli ambassador. A huge crowd of Jews turned out to greet her on Rosh Hashanah. On 8 November she was warmly welcomed at a diplomatic reception by Polina Molotov (the wife of V.M. Molotov, Stalin’s longtime foreign minister), herself a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. For Stalin this public and private demonstration of Jewish feeling seems to have been the last straw. …an open, full-scale campaign of attacks on Jewish culture and attitudes, and on Zionism, soon began in the press. The theme was that the country’s values were being undermined by ‘rootless cosmopolitans.’ There was a particularly vicious assault on [Jewish] theater critics, eventually described as ‘an anti-party group.’  When their Russianized names or pseudonyms were given, the original Jewish name was printed in brackets, and papers asked how anyone so named could understand Russian culture. Meanwhile unpublicized arrests [of Jews], especially of writers in Yiddish, continued, and there was a general growth of public anti-Jewish pressure. Among those arrested at the end of 1948 was Polina Molotov.” Her husband made no comment or protest to Stalin as his wife was carried off into the Siberian gulag.   

 

                     In what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil,” Stalin was not a madman, nor an especially notable person. Lenin and other old Bolsheviks considered him ordinary, plodding and lazy. Trotsky said that Stalin was a mediocrity but not a nonentity. Lev Kamenev, another colleague and like Trotsky an eventual victim of Stalin, said that Stalin was “no more than a small town politician.” But Stalin was underestimated by his peers and this fault of judgment was fatal to most of them. For Stalin’s hunger for power was insatiable and his ruthlessness in using all possible means, no matter how horrific, to obtain and maintain power remains his most startling and definitive trait. None of the Bolsheviks were moral or decent people, but Stalin’s cruel excesses shocked them all. Hitler, who also knew something about the exercise of power and applying ruthless cruelty to others, admired Stalin for this inhuman facet of his character. In 1942, in the midst of the titanic struggle between these two supermen of evil, Hitler said of Stalin: “He is a beast, but he is a beast on a grand scale.” He also said of Stalin: “Stalin, too, must command our unconditional respect. In his own way, he is a hell of a fellow.” Hitler was most correct in using the word hell in association with Josef Stalin. 

 

                  Conquest’s assessment of Stalin runs as follows: “Stalin was a rootless, or uprooted man, to whom his origins meant little, who was neither an intellectual nor a worker (the two accepted classes of Bolshevik revolutionaries BW), whose [life] record did not satisfy his wishes and had to be heavily rewritten. For he was also afflicted with a marked insecurity. It is perhaps in this context that we should look at the way he tried, not only for effect but clearly as a real desire, to become among his intimates something like a backslapping man of the people, at home in an atmosphere of coarse jollity. Yet he was also highly sensitive to affronts to his dignity, and concerned to project the image of one far above ordinary humanity. The two attitudes conflict; but both carry a feeling of uncertainty, even unreality. Overall Stalin thus gives the impression of a large and crude clay-like figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled. It is in this sense that we might broadly sum him up, in Churchill’s phrase as an ‘unnatural man.’”

 

                     This ‘unnatural man’ created an unnatural society. Soviet children were taught to worship Stalin as their father and god. Thus, as Conquest notes, a forced imposition of a systemized falsehood was ingrained in the minds of an entire generation. All references to Stalin in the Soviet Union were accompanied by praise of the leader to the point of ridiculousness. A sample of one speech made in the Soviet Union in 1938 by a servile local secretary of the Communist Party described Stalin as: “Leader of Genius of the Proletarian Revolution, Inspirer and Organizer of the Victory of Socialism, Supreme Genius of Humanity, Experienced Proletarian Commander, Theoretician of Genius and Organizer of Collective Farm Construction, Leader of Genius of the Toilers of the Whole World.” Conquest quotes Roy Medved, the dissident Soviet historian, as remarking “that all of this [praise] was accompanied [in the minds of the masses] by illusions, autosuggestion, the inability to think clearly, intolerance towards dissidents, and fanaticism.” People said and wrote that they had fainted or gone into ecstasy on seeing or hearing Stalin. Conquest reports: “At a provincial meeting there was an ovation when Stalin’s name was mentioned, and no one dared to be the first to sit down. When, finally, an old man who could stand no longer, took his seat, his name was duly noted and he was arrested the next day. When one speech of Stalin’s was published on gramophone records, the eighth side was devoted entirely to applause.”
 

                        The amazing thing about all of this is the fact that so many in the non-Soviet world thought well of Stalin. Franklin Roosevelt, unlike Winston Churchill, was taken in by Stalin and confidently asserted that “I can do business with Uncle Joe.” The Jewish Communists in Israel and America were loyal to Stalin, even after his death and some still remained so even after Khruschev’s revelations about the excesses of the “cult of the personality.”  Jews are by nature believers. Those who believe in faith and tradition are matched by those who believe in revolution and utopia. For many Jews, Lenin and Stalin are to be seen as additional names to be added to the list of false messiahs who have so affected Jewish history. True believers are hard to discourage, no matter what the facts. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bankruptcy of the Communist theory and system, and the emerging revelations about the true “workers’ paradise” of Stalin have certainly cured almost all Jews of any admiration for Stalin, his system and his place in history. If there is any positive lesson that can be learned from the horrors of this past century, it is the necessity for the retention of a healthy dose of skepticism regarding all quick fixes, charismatic super-leaders and utopian schemes of social reengineering. The depressing memory of the monster Stalin should hover all of us before we ever embark on such ideologically based and ruthlessly executed schemes ever again.