Revisiting the era of Joseph Stalin

There is forever a need for one to revisit history. In an era where the Soviet Union does not anymore exist, where Vladimir Putin's Russia is busy trying to reclaim the old glory of a country lost through Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, it makes sense to walk back, even if a few steps, into the past.

Josef Stalin continues to exercise a hold on history so many decades after his death in March 1953. Indeed, as biographers across the years have consistently noted, Stalin's shadow on the Soviet Union and on the lesser leaders around him was consequential. There was cruelty in him, an insensitivity rare in leaders in modern times. With a flick of his little finger he could dispatch his enemies, real as well as imagined, to the grave. And all this even as he engaged himself in the task of not only confronting the evil that was Nazism but also ensuring that the Soviet Union rose to the heights as a superpower. Stalin, to a large extent, reshaped the post-war world.

Surprisingly, though, there is that other aspect of his personality the world has by and large not had time to delve into. We speak of his sense of aesthetics, a reality the writer Simon Sebag Montefiore shone light on in his work on Lenin's successor quite some years ago. For one with a humble, indeed inconsequential background, Joseph Stalin was an intellectually accomplished man. His library was exhaustive and so was his reading. Not for him a mere exploration and propagation of Marxist philosophy. Not for him a rejection of foreign culture as a means of bourgeois exploitation of the masses. He read Shakespeare, went into a deep study of Western poetry and easily passed on what he had learnt to his comrades in the Kremlin. At the height of his power over the Soviet Union, he read other people's articles, edited them and made them printable.

That is part of the truth about Stalin. And yet there is the other part, a necessarily disturbing one. In the 1930s, as he embarked on a long, ambitious plan to consolidate his authority as Lenin's successor, he was driven by the thought that plots were being hatched all around him, that the fellow communist magnates who were regularly at dinner with him were men he could not trust. It was thus that the seeds of the Terror, which would effectively begin in 1937 and go on to the early 1940s, sprouted in his mind. 

Swiftly and without remorse, he would order the arrest and murder of such powerful Kremlin personalities as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Kirov, Bukharin and a whole line of others. As his hold over the country grew, Stalin not only provided leadership to the Terror; he came to symbolise the Terror. He had his henchmen invent seditious and scandalous stories about his colleagues. Once that was done, these colleagues were picked up in the night, subjected to days and weeks of torture until they 'confessed' and then dispatched, with generally a shot to the head. 

The Terror was not merely the end of his trusted comrades. It was expanded to include farmers who did not produce crops to Stalinist specifications; it covered Jews (the anti-Semitic was as much a factor with Stalin as it was with Hitler); it cast its shadows on Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Lithuanians, indeed everyone that the Soviet leader gazed on. Millions were displaced and deported to regions as inhospitable as anyone could imagine; tens of thousands were done to death, the murders being part of a programme to be implemented by regional leaders. 

Nikita Khrushchev, the man who would improbably denounce Stalin at the 1956 party congress, heartily went into the job of carrying out the leader's wishes. Men like Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, all of whom would reveal their cannibalistic nature through eventually going after one another, cheerfully fulfilled their quota of murdering the 'spies' and 'imperialist agents' Stalin thought were endangering the Soviet state. It did not matter that Kalinin was officially president of the Soviet Union. His wife was carted off to prison, charged with spying. Even the oleaginous Molotov could do little when his wife was arrested and subjected to torture by Beria on Stalin's orders. 

Bizarre were the times when Stalin ruled. The poet Anna Akhmatova suffered at the dictator's hands. So did Osip Mandelstam. Stalin's children lived in terror of their father. His son Yakov died gallantly in the war against the Nazis; another son, Vasily, rose to a senior position in the air force but nevertheless saw his life dissipate through unbridled drinking. Svetlana married a number of times and often it was Stalin who decreed who she should be marrying. He was a doting father but was never willing to demonstrate his affections in public. 

Between the suicide of his wife Nadya and his own death in 1953, Stalin scrupulously avoided getting into romantic relationships with other women. There were the contradictions in him. He could eat a hearty meal even as he knew someone or the other of his comrades was being brutally tortured in prison. Morality did not matter. And yet he ordered moviemakers to abjure passionate love scenes in their films. Passion demonstrated on the screen was morally repugnant to him. 

In Stalin there was an unbridled need to be a world figure, a statesman. He felt happy in Franklin Roosevelt's company, but detested Winston Churchill. Yet when the need arose, he could forget his dislike of the British leader and go on to flatter him in unabashed fashion. He was dismissive of Harry Truman and did not get along well with Charles de Gaulle. For Hitler, he had little love. But in the times before the German Fuhrer turned on the Soviet Union, Stalin demonstrated a desperation in his attempts to keep Hitler in good humour. Ribbentrop and Molotov went through a deal, which of course was not to last. 

Those of Stalin's colleagues who survived the Terror lived in dread of him. Anastas Mikoyan kept turning up at his dinners despite Stalin's message, conveyed through his minions, that he was not welcome any more. Bulganin never said anything that Stalin did not want to hear. Malenkov was content to be the sycophant he had always been; and Molotov knew he had to be around the Vozhd, as the Soviet leader was known to his acolytes. 

Montefiore, who has in his career focused on reminding people of history's personalities --- think of his works on Catherine the Great and the Romanovs --- convinces us that Joseph Stalin was the Red Tsar. His courtiers did not merely kowtow before him; they knew their lives depended on his pleasure. As Stalin lay dying in March 1953, they restrained their impulse to go for a formal succession. What if he recovered? And, recovering, inaugurate a new phase of the old Terror that could claim the lives of those who secretly hoped the life would go out of him? 

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