Isaac Deutscher - Russia after Stalin

When Stalin died the whole world, wittingly or unwittingly, paid homage to the dead man and to the legend which hovered over his coffin. In the eyes of his followers he loomed even larger than Moses in the eyes of the Biblical Jews, for of Stalin his followers believed that he had actually led his people into the Promised Land. Most of his enemies, who saw in him Evil Incarnate, also in their way paid a tribute to Stalin by describing his departure as a momentous historical event, fraught with incalculable consequences. Of how many public figures could this be said with much conviction on the day of their death?

Involuntarily one is reminded of Shelley's lines On Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon:

How! is not his death-knell knolled?

And livest thou still Mother Earth?

Thou wert warming thy fingers old

Oer the embers covered and cold

Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled

What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead?

Indeed, very few historical characters have had a comparable hold on the life and the imagination of their contemporaries. In an unsettled world, in an epoch of the most violent conflict and upheaval, in which so many dictators, rulers, regimes, governments, and parties one after another rose and in no time toppled to their ruin, Stalin alone ruled a vast country during nearly thirty years. He could well boast that his was the most stable government in the world, and he the best-established ruler of his time.

Yet, throughout most of his rule the oracles almast constantly predicted his imminent downfall. Not all of these were fools there were among them sagacious and even great men. Stalin had in fact established his throne, as it were, on a volcano periodically shaken by deep convulsions on the hot lava, and amid the fre and the smoke of the Russian revolution. At every rumbling of an explosion, onlookers expected that after the smoke had dispersed not a trace would be seen of Stalin. But each time Stalin was still there, in his old place, unscathed, and in a position more commanding and more awe inspiring than before; and at his feet lay the mangled bodies of his enemies and friends. He seemed to be the demi-god in command of the volcano.

A whole Russian generation basked in his glory and trembled in his shadow. In the last fifteen years of his life, not only Russia but the whole world did the same. Popular imagination saw him holding the destiny of mankind in his hands.

How the son of a poor Georgian cobbler, a starving pupil of the Theological Seminary of Tiflis, a man outwardly so grey and inconspicuous, speaking in dry, scholastic formulae, rose to this almost mythical grandeur will for ever fascinate the student of human affairs.

No wonder that after his death men should ask how large, for good or evil, is the gap Stalin has left, and how, if at all, it will be filled.

There are still those and this writer is one of them who do not subscribe to Carlyle's view of history and do not believe in mythical heroes and demigods. Without any desire to belittle the peculiar greatness of the man, it is still possible to think that much of the grandeur which surrounded him was one of those all too numerous optical illusions which circumstance and the human craving for illusion have combined to create and to fix into durable historical images. It may be held that at best Stalin's grandeur reflected the magnitude of the issues and the vastness of the social processes underlying his career.

Those who take this view will prefer to approach the demigod soberly, to scrutinize his real features, to strip him of his Olympian garments, and to establish his genuine stature.

It is not intended here to follow Stalin through his life this has been done by the writer elsewhere. But it may be appropriate to draw now, if only tentatively, the balance of his life's work. It is surely in such a balance that an answer to the questions posed by Stalin's departure should be sought.

There can be and there will be no change in the Soviet Union and in the Communist movement at large, the Stalinist now asserts, confident that Stalin's work will be carried on by his successors. Stalin is dead long live Stalinism! was the cry which resounded from Moscow over Stalin's open coffin.

Having for so long tried to persuade us that Stalin was the greatest genius in history, the Marx and the Lenin of his time, the Stalinist now suddenly, although discreetly, advances the classical Marxist argument that individuals do not matter in history, because they are only the agents and representatives of broader forces, of the social classes which are history's real moving forces. The peoples of the Soviet Union, we are told, have already found their new representative, mouthpiece, and leader, who will speak with Stalin's voice as Stalin had spoken with the voice of Lenin.