Why stalin? A national debate

Abstract

F or a long time Communists were reluctant to use the term Stalinism, and some shun it even now. "Marx-ism" and later "Leninism" entered the Russian vocabulary as well as the global political dictionary, and "Trotskyism" became a generally accepted term. But the use of "Stalinism" was forbidden in the Soviet Union (Stalin opposed it) and was frowned upon by most Russian party leaders even under glasnost. About a year after he had come to power, Gorbachev said in an interview that the term had been "coined by our enemies," which was incorrect. 1 The crucial question concerned not the authorship but the essence: Had Stalin not established in many respects a political system sui generis and therefore worthy of a name of its own? The answer to this question seems obvious, but the coyness in the ranks of the Soviet leadership persisted. Undeterred by their continuing silence, aheated debate on the causes, origins, and essence of Stalinism came under way during glasnost among Soviet playwrights, philosophers, psychologists, historians, sociologists, and the public at large. Although certain aspects of Stalinism can be understood only with reference to the personality oftheleader (which is also true with regard to Hitler and Mussolini), it is even more obvious that the system did not develop in a vacuum. It had historical and ideological roots; conditions existed that made the rise and victory of Stalinism possible in the first place. It is unlikely (to put it cautiously) that an outlandish system, which was alien to Russian mentality and tradition and totally opposed to the Bolshevik doctrine and practice, would have generated so much enthusiasm, lasted for so long, and would have found supporters even decades after the demise of its founder. Before tuming to the debate that engulfed the Soviet Union under glasnost, we ought to briefly review the Western discussions on Stalinism that preceded by decades those in the East. Generations of Westem students of the Soviet Union had pondered issues such as the relationship between Lenin and Stalin. Had Stalin deviated or was his system merely the continuation of Lenin's work, "full-blown Bolshevism"? There was no agreement on these issues, but a great deal of spadework had been done studying the historical sources and considering their implications. Many of the ideas expressed by Soviet authors under glasnost were quite familiar to Western and Soviet 6migr6 students, such as the Mensheviks who had discussed them from the 1930s onward. For the leftwing Russian 6migrts, the most reprehensible feature of Bolshevism was its ant idemocrat ic character . This bel ief predated Stalinism, it predated even 1917; Trotsky in 1904 and Rosa Luxemburg in 1918 had expressed fears that Lenin's concept of the vanguard party would lead to a more or less permanent dictatorship, with power passing from the party to the Central Committee and ultimately to one ruler. Russian Social Democrats saw these fears confirmed with a vengeance over the years. The great majority of nonsocialist 6migrts were baffled by Stalin's system. Some still believed that Stalin was only pretending to be Abdul Hamid (the most murderous of Turkey's last sultans) that, in reality, he was a closet Trotskyite waiting to export his revolution. 2 Others believed that Stalinism was simply a specific Russian form of fascism or, to be precise, a halfway house on the road to fascism. Nikolai Berdiaev, the philosopher who was exiled from the Soviet Union and became posthumously popular in Moscow under glasnost, wrote in 1937: